Got them ol' punch card blues

April can be  the cruelest month. It's when we are forced to turn in our income tax and turn in our punch card.
The first punch cards were to record an anglers' catch of salmon and steelhead.
They were free. We knew that was too good to last.
Before long, they started charging for punch cards and making us punch other stuff like crab, halibut and sturgeon.
Today's punch card is a complex legal document that has grown so large you must roll it up like a medieval scroll to carry it around.
The law says you must record immediately, in ink, the date, catch location and, in the case of salmon and steelhead, identity of the fish as hatchery-bred or wild.
For a steelhead fisherman, this can be a real challenge.
Imagine standing over the top of your boots in a freezing river in a blizzard. It's is your lucky day. You caught a steelhead.
Now you must waddle to shore and begin the complex legal process of recording your catch.
First, it might be handy to have an ink pen that functioned on wet paper in the snow.
But before you can write the location of your catch on the punch card, you must figure out where that is.
You can't just write the name of the river, no. You must find the secret identification code of each river located somewhere in the fishing law book.
Inevitably, you give up trying to find the secret code. You try to write the name of the river in the space provided.
Your fingers are frozen. You scribble something that looks like an ink blob.
Punch cards are a real hassle for crabbers.
Imagine standing over the top of your boots out on the tide flats. It's your lucky day.
You scoop up a crab. You unroll your punch card document and invariably drop it in the water.
Again, you fill out your punch card with something that looks like an ink blob.
Filling out a punch card for salmon or halibut is no picnic, either.
Imagine bobbing around in an ocean swell trying to hold down a greasy breakfast while breathing a heady mixture of salt air, rotting herring and outboard motor exhaust.
It's your lucky day. You catch a salmon or halibut but you don't care. You only want to be put on shore or put out of your misery.
You fill out your punch card with another ink blob.
For years, we have been told that the state bean-counters could look at these ink blobs to come up with catch numbers with a method known only to professional fortunetellers.
Nowadays, they have a brave new way to count the catch: computer models.
No one bothered to look at the punch cards before they cut this year's halibut season to just 13 days.
How could they? The punch cards that show last year's catch haven't been sent in yet.
Instead of actually counting the catch, the state used a computer model to cut our halibut season -- which begs the question:
Why bother with punch cards if the state is just going to dream up bogus harvest numbers for fish and crab with computer models anyway?
The answer is simple.
Money from punch card sales goes to support the advanced, state-of-the-art computer systems that are required to administer punch card sales.
Someday punch cards might also provide vital funding for more scientific research that could allow the dreamers in the Department of Fisheries to someday design a punch card that anglers can figure out.

Dipping into the old fishing laws

Thank you for reading this.
Sometimes I think if you didn't read this, no one would.
But you do. I get mail from faraway places — like Oregon — asking:
"If you dislike the birds so much, why do you watch them?"
All I have ever tried to do as a weekly wilderness gossip columnist was to share my love of the silence of nature.
Silence may be the rarest thing on Earth.
Often instead of basking in the reverie of the silence of the wilderness, I am forced to endure the mating and nest making rigmarole of some river pest, like the dipper.
It's a drab little river bird that never stops bouncing.
It could give you a nervous twitch if you watched it very long.
But I never knew it ate salmon.
A keen-eyed Alaskan reader set me straight on that one.
Apparently a pair of dippers ate an estimated 2,000 baby chum salmon a month at the spillway of the Neets Bay fish hatchery near Craig in the 49th state.
We'll have to add the dipper to the list of hundreds of species flora and fauna that are salmon-dependent.
Even the trees of the rain forest were, until recent times, fertilized with the carcasses of salmon that were spread through the woods by bears and high water.
Eliminating the salmon runs has led to a collapse of ecosystems.
The dipper could be an indicator species like the canary in the coal mine.
If the canary dies, you know the air is bad. If the dippers go away, it means the river is dead.
We like to study the problem.
A disturbed reader from Montana asked: "Won't electro-shocking, shaving and netting the marmots endanger them?"
It sure will, but that's no excuse to not study them. These same survey methods have been used for years on fish.
Electro-shocking is an evil practice of running an electric current into the water to immobilize fish so you can count them.
My fancy friends at the Dungeness Hatchery used electro-shocking to gather a captive brood stock to restore the spring chinook back in the '90s -- until they found out 40 percent of the chinook smolts captured in this manner developed spinal abnormalities.
Electro-shocking larger fish is even worse, since they receive more current.
Electro-shocking fish has been outlawed in civilized countries like Montana.
It is still legal here.
There was even a picture of this brutal technique in action on Page 13 of this year's Washington fishing law booklet.
Still, electro-shocking only kills, maims and injures fish and their eggs buried in the gravel.
Another survey weapon in the biologist's arsenal, the smolt trap, can choke off an entire stream.
Smolt traps catch young salmon migrating downstream out to sea.
It can be a valid scientific method for gathering survival data, but not if it blocks the whole stream.
Blocking a salmon stream is illegal.
It was the very first fishing law ever put on the books, more than 800 years ago by Richard the Lionheart.
His reign was described as an "orgy of medieval savagery," but he didn't block a salmon stream.
In the spring, the steelhead migrate upriver.
They like to spawn in the small side steams, running as far up as they can at night.
The sea-run cutthroat swim with the steelhead, as far as they can in the high water, to spend the summer deep in the rain forest.
Not if the creek is blocked by a smolt trap.
Meanwhile, the poor smolts caught in the traps are in danger of floods, predators and rough handling.
Somewhere Richard the Lionheart is rolling over in his grave.