[6] Steelhead Numbers Keep On Climbing

Summer steelhead counts at Bonneville Dam are finally tapering off after a huge run in August. More than 547,000 of the fish have passed the dam since July 1, peaking on Aug. 13, when 34,000 were counted.

In a single week, more than 100,000 went by, on the move again after being bottled up below the dam by the scorching weather in late July.

In any case, the numbers are likely to end up among the top three or four in the last 70 years of record-keeping. Returns in 1940, 1952, 1986 and 2002 all topped 400,000.

In 2001, during the second-lowest water year on record, more than 630,000 made it past the dam.

Last year, 358,000 were counted. Managers originally expected this year's return to be close to that, which would have put it at 18 percent above the 10-year average.

In late August, they bumped up their estimate of the Group A component to 425,000, from a preseason prediction of about 279,000 fish. Group A fish spend only one year in the ocean.

On Sept. 9, they bumped it up again, to 565,000.

Group B steelhead spend two years in the ocean, and most are heading for Idaho. Not enough have yet been counted to update that part of the run, but the Group B stock (hatchery plus wild) forecast of 57,000 is 21 percent above the 10-year average.

However, the ESA-listed wild component of the "B" steelhead run was predicted to be only about half the size of last year's 18,500-fish return, which was the largest wild return since 2002, when 32,000 wild B steelhead returned to Idaho.

Throughout the 1990s, the wild Idaho steelies returned in extremely poor numbers, barely topping 5,000 fish in 1994. In 1995, fewer than 2,000 returned. More than 22,000 have been already counted passing Lower Granite Dam this year, along with more than 50,000 hatchery fish.

Last week, the managers said the B run may actually come in a little shy of their preseason forecast.

During the blockbuster year of 2001, when more than 600,000 steelhead were counted at Bonneville Dam, only about 12,000 were wild and heading for Idaho. -B. R.

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