Moratorium mumbo jumbo

It was another tough week in the news. 

Fisheries managers announced plans for a fishing moratorium on the Elwha River and all of its tributaries starting next fall. The proposal is part of the Elwha Dam removal project that is scheduled for completion in 2014. 

The Elwha dams removal is the largest such project in U.S. history. It is a grand experiment that will attempt to restore all five species of Pacific salmon along with steelhead, bull trout and sea run cutthroat by removing the dams and allowing the fish access to 70 miles of pristine spawning and rearing habitat within Olympic National Park. 

It has been estimated that the Elwha River once supported a historic population of 400,000 fish. It is thought that the Elwha now supports only 3000 salmon. 

The proposed fishing moratorium is an attempt to rebuild runs of fish that have been blocked from the upper Elwha and its tributaries for 100 years.

Of all the tributaries of the Elwha, Indian Creek could have been the most important small stream in the watershed. In prehistoric times there was a S'Klallam village located at the mouth of Indian Creek at its confluence with the Elwha. Indian Creek was noted for its runs of steelhead, a sea-run rainbow trout and blue backs. That is a popular name for the sockeye salmon. 

The sockeye have always been valued for their beauty and the quality of their blood-red flesh. Sockeye generally run up rivers that have a lake where the adults can spawn and the juveniles can spend the first year of their lives. As the sockeye run upstream to their spawning grounds their appearance changes from the blue backs and silver bellies of an ocean fish to a spawner with a red body, a green head and a hooked nose.  

John Sutherland, a Hudson's Bay trapper who was the first European to discover the lake he named for himself, observed red salmon spawning in November. We can assume these were sockeye. 

Once the Elwha dams were built the Indian Creek sockeye, steelhead and village disappeared. 

With the removal of the dams, it is hoped that the steelhead and sockeye will return to Lake Sutherland.  That's the motive for the proposed sport fishing moratorium in the lake. 

To observe the effects of a sport-fishing moratorium on salmon restoration we have only to look at the Elwha's nearest neighbor the Dungeness River to see what we are in for. 

Like the Elwha, the Dungeness is a river that once supported hundreds of thousands of the five species of salmon. 

Unlike the Elwha, the Dungeness has no dam to blame for making the fish threatened or endangered. 

Back in the '90s the Dungeness River was closed to sport fishing for most of the year as a conservation measure. Who could argue with that? We had the assurance that once the runs were rebuilt we could fish again. 

Ten years after, instead of rebuilding the runs of fish on Dungeness, the government has invested their millions buying waterfront real estate, while allowing a commercial gillnet fishery to continue at the mouth of the river.  Meanwhile, homes along the Dungeness River have been declared bull trout habitat. 

They are routinely purchased from willing sellers, razed and replaced with native vegetation without one fish to show for it.  

The sport-fishing moratorium on the Dungeness is a failed experiment.  Normally, conducting a failed experiment while expecting different results fits Einstein’s' definition of insanity. Here on the Olympic Peninsula we call it salmon restoration. 

Those who ignore history probably don't fish.

A sad salmon situation

It was daylight on the water. A pair of lines cut through the surface of the Strait of Juan de Fuca near where a Spanish explorer bought some salmon “of a hundred pounds weight” from the Indians back in 1790.

People have been coming to the North Olympic Peninsula to catch salmon ever since. While the rest of the country is sweltering through a hot summer, people fishing in the Straits these days have no problem staying cool in the fog and wind of the salt chuck.

King salmon tend to bite at daylight so these murky mornings where dawn seems delayed are ideal for fishing. It is however, an activity that is not for everyone.

The breaking waves make sitting in a boat like riding a mechanical bull while holding a fishing pole. A grease fried breakfast sits in your gut like a bucket of bubbling lead.

You breathe a heady mixture of outboard exhaust, rotting herring and seaweed while shivering in foul weather gear you might usually wear in November. After a few minutes or a few hours, time does not matter in this misery you forget what possessed you to ever want to catch a king salmon in the first place.  

Mutinous eyes search the empty horizon. You want to suggest turning back before you miss your soap opera. You remember all of the things you should be doing today like going to the job you took a day off from, while you still have one.

Then you get a bite. Do you set the hook immediately? And risk pulling the hooks out or let the fish munch awhile and let go. This is an age old question that there is no time to answer.

The fish is headed to Canada with what’s left of your line. You chase the fish and reel in as fast as you can. Before you know it the fish is at the boat. You want to net the prize but this is where things get crazy.

The law says that “wild” fish caught with hook and line have to be released. In theory you are supposed to be able to tell a “wild” fish from one of hatchery origin by the presence of an adipose fin.

Unfortunately, many hatcheries still don’t clip the fins of the fish they release. After 100 years of fish hatcheries where billions of salmon have been released in almost every body of water in Washington, the line between hatchery and wild fish has been blurred beyond recognition. Is a salmon with an adipose fin a wild fish, an unclipped hatchery fish or the offspring of naturally spawning hatchery fish? There is no way to be sure.

It’s just your luck that the king salmon you reeled in has an adipose fin. It is hooked deeply. A cloud of blood issues from the ruptured gills. The fish sinks tired and sick beneath the surface. You sit and watch in the funk of failure.

There is a splash. A sea lion rolls near the boat. She just ate your salmon.

You stop at the store on the way home thinking if you bought a fish for the going rate of $15 a pound or so, people might think you caught it.

Unfortunately the fish at the store have adipose fins. While you are required to release your so-called “wild” fish, the non-selective commercial fisheries are allowed to kill and sell the “wild” fish legally.

You get so upset over the wasteful and corrupt management of our fisheries that you forget the salmon and buy a package of hot dogs instead.

Bull trout bull

A sharp eyed reader suggested a correction to my column about the Dungeness Valley Creamery. It’s one of two remaining dairies in the Sequim Dungeness Valley.

The future operation of the dairy is being threatened by Clallam County’s plan to move the flood control dikes from along the Dungeness River to restore the habitat of the endangered bull trout.

Oops, I did it again, called the bull trout endangered. The fact is the bull trout is not endangered. 
It has been federally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. “Threatened,” according to the government definition means the species is likely to become “endangered.” An “endangered” species means it’s likely to become extinct.

Please excuse my confusion. I only know what I read in the fishing laws, where it says it is illegal to lift a bull trout out of the water. 
Forget about eating a bull trout for dinner. You could lose your fishing license for that.

Not that anyone ever bragged about eating a bull trout in the old days. They can be soft and mushy with bland white-meat. 
Who wouldn’t rather catch a fat, red-meated steelhead or a salmon than a bull trout? They were seen as scavengers that ate the eggs and spawn of the salmon and steelhead.

Nobody really ever cared about catching a bull trout, until there weren’t any salmon or steelhead and there was nothing but bull trout left.

The idea that anyone would call the bull trout threatened or endangered is a joke to anyone who has ever fished the Dungeness, where on any given day you could catch four bull trout for every rainbow.  

That was until the Dungeness, a river with two fish hatcheries on it, was closed to fishing for most of the year.  This seemed to confirm the old saying, when fishing is outlawed, only outlaws will fish. There were so many poachers on the Dungeness last summer they did not get an adequate return of spring Chinook back to the hatchery.

The Dungeness spring chinook is a run of salmon worth saving. These are the “first salmon” of the Northwest.

That means they run up the river in early spring when the salmonberry blossoms. These fish don’t spawn until August. The spring chinook don’t feed in the river, they survive and develop into spawners on their body fat. This makes the spring chinook the richest of the salmon.

There used to be an awesome chinook fishery right out in Dungeness Bay every spring when the dogwoods bloomed. Many of these fish were produced at the Dungeness Fish hatchery.

Hatchery fish have been getting a bad rap for failing in recent years. Runs of hatchery fish always fail after you lay off the hatchery workers and stop feeding the fish.

Sping chinook are the key to restoring the Dungeness-Greywolf ecosystem. Their migration up into the mountains was an exchange of nutrients from the ocean to the land that endured since the last Ice Age.

Everything from the trees to the bugs fed on the carcasses of spawned out salmon.

The fact that we have interrupted this cycle is an intolerable ecological disaster. Our salmon are overharvest throughout the extent of their range. There is just too much nylon fishing gear in the water. We need a responsible hatchery program to mitigate this nylon pollution.

So you can take out all the dikes on the lower Dungeness and it won’t matter to the fish. There have never been any dikes on the upper Dungeness and the fish up there are just as endangered.

Oops, I mean threatened. 

  

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.

Endangered species roulette

All I have ever tried to do as a wilderness gossip columnist was to remove the dirty linen from the seamy underbelly of our local endangered species for an intimate view of nature in the raw.

For example, the bull trout is not an endangered species. It is not even a species.

Sure it may be genetically different than a Dolly Varden but you and I are genetically different too. This does not make us different species. We are both tax payers.

The Dolly Varden and the bull trout are both char.

If the Bull trout is endangered, I have often pondered in my career as a professional fishing guide, how come on some days on some rivers, that is all we catch?

If the bull trout are endangered, why are they subjected to a commercial gillnet fishery? If the bull trout are endangered, why does the National Park buy them from the gill net fishery just so the biologists can study the bull trout ear bones?

Don’t get me wrong. I would love to be a biologist. I would work for free if they would just pay for my ammunition and gasoline.

It must be fun to play God with an ecosystem by increasing endangered predators that endanger still more species until the entire system crashes.

The bull trout was aptly named. It has spawned a vast bureaucracy that administers the control of land, water and “public education.”  This “education” does not tell you that the Bull trout have been protected for so long, they are endangering other species.

Last year, more than 100,000 endangered spring chinook smolts were released into the Dungeness River.  Only about 2,700 survived the journey to salt water.

The bull trout along with the other varmints got the rest. Protection of the predatory bull trout limits the reproduction of other species and keeps the Dungeness spring chinook and steelhead in an endangered status limbo of endless studies and no action.

The recent release of the weasel-like fisher is yet another example of this management philosophy. Unfortunately, nobody bothered to ask the locals if they had seen any fishers before they started transplanting more fishers in from British Columbia.

It opened the floodgate of fisher feuds across the North Olympic Peninsula.

A fisher ate a man’s cat on the Lyre River. A fisher got into a chicken house on the Bogachiel.

On the Pysht River a fisher stole a steelhead that some poor guy caught and left on the beach. Other fishers have become endangered species speed bumps while trying to cross U.S. Highway 101.

Inquiring minds want to know, what they should do if they see a fisher in the wilderness. I would advise you not to panic. Stand your ground. Make a large profile. Get out your checkbook.

Each one of these large weasels took more than $8,000 to get here! Your donations are gladly accepted. It’s when you see a fisher near your home that you should panic.

Congratulations, your home is now fisher habitat. You may have an opportunity to become a willing seller like the people who were removed from along the Dungeness once their homes were declared bull trout habitat.

Like the Bull trout, the fisher will be dining on other endangered species, namely the marbled murrelet and the spotted owl. These birds are creatures whose numbers continue to decline despite our best efforts to preserve them.

To paraphrase another fairy tale, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, might not bring back our endangered species again.