by Langdon Cook
Returning adult salmon, though larger and stronger, aren’t safe either. Sea lions have learned how to exploit the bottleneck at Bonneville Dam. Once nearly wiped out by the fur trade, the California sea lion is at an all-time population high thanks to vigorous protection, and it needs food. Salmon waiting to enter the fish ladder are easy prey for the big pinnipeds. Federal officials have plugged them with rubber bullets, detonated “seal bombs” underwater, and even deployed a fake orca in an effort to scare the predators away. When these efforts failed, they captured a few of the repeat offenders and trucked them down the coast. But the sea lions came back, sometimes swimming hundreds of miles. Now the feds and tribes want to use more deadly methods, much to the outrage of animal-rights groups, which consider the mammals scapegoats for larger, man-made quandaries. If sea lions don’t get returning adults, they argue, a tepid river will. The Snake River dams in particular are blamed for raising the Columbia’s summertime temperature to levels fatal to salmon.
Rene wasn’t worried. The lower Snake dams were going down, he was sure of it, and likely sooner than everyone thought. Science and common sense would prevail. As the sun set over the windblown desert, he imagined an alternative future for the Snake, which involved kayakers, rafters, hikers, hunters, anglers, bird-watchers, lollygaggers, and just about anyone else who appreciates a free-flowing river in a beautifully rawboned landscape. “Let’s move forward,” he said, upbeat as ever. “Let’s come into a new balance in which we’re part of the system, not fighting it. But first we have to change our relationship to place or we’re just continuing the invasive-species experience, which is essentially what colonialism is.”
With darkness falling across tawny hillsides outside Lewiston, we followed a pretty branch of the Tucannon River, another tributary to the Snake. The riparian corridor here looked pretty good: tall cottonwoods shaded the creek’s many braided channels with stable banks, the gravel bars giving way to willows and forest margins. “Looks fishy,” Rene said with approval. And then, just like that, we popped out of this green oasis. A farmer had cultivated his fields right to the edge of the banks, eliminating all the streamside vegetation and shade. Here the creek was deeply undercut with erosion and unfit for anadromous fish. The surrounding landscape turned instantly brown and dusty. “The whole point of these high-desert creeks is that they green up with a gift from the sea,” Rene said. Salmon and steelhead infuse these otherwise sterile places with ocean isotopes—nutrients from the cradle of existence—allowing life to thrive in a hard environment. The loss of these nutrients is bad for the fish and, ultimately, bad for the farmer.
Making connections between desert creeks and the wide blue ocean might seem like a stretch, but lately scientists have made another, similar connection: between the salmon of the Snake River Basin and endangered killer whales. It turns out that the decline in Puget Sound orcas can be plotted in tandem with the decline of Snake River chinook, their favorite prey. Once numbering more than three hundred whales, the Puget Sound population now hovers around eighty. Some of them are visibly malnourished. High in the watershed, Snake River tributaries, with their cool, clear flows and extensive gravel beds, historically sent millions of salmon to sea every spring. Even the Owyhee River in northern Nevada contributed a run of hardy chinook. The Snake system produced nearly half of all the chinook in the Columbia Basin before it was reengineered; many of these were the desirable springers that were so essential to both the river people and orcas because of their high fat content. Steelhead too once populated streams across the Idaho high country, until impoundments blocked much of the best habitat. Sockeye spawned in such numbers in the high mountain lakes of Oregon and Idaho that there was an inland commercial fishery for them. In the late 1800s, thousands of the long-distance migrants were caught, dressed, and salted for sale to mining camps, before dams shut them out. The Snake River sockeye’s last redoubt is a chain of subalpine lakes in the Sawtooth Range near the ranching town of Stanley, Idaho, where they reach an elevation of seven thousand feet, some of the highest-elevation salmon-spawning habitat in the world. Today all these fish—Snake River spring and fall chinook, steelhead, and sockeye—are on the endangered species list. The coho weren’t so fortunate. They went extinct.
People all over the world identify with species of large mammals, especially with the whales, which, like us, can communicate with one another from miles away and are doting parents. While watching orcas once at Lime Kiln State Park on San Juan Island, I met a woman who had traveled from St. Louis just to see these impressive animals. She was near tears at the sight of two calves surfacing alongside their mothers, their black dorsal fins rising and falling in synchronized succession. Like human beings, the orcas have opinions about what makes for a good salmon dinner. They want fat-laden chinook. Meanwhile, a parade of pink salmon splashed by, millions of them headed for the Fraser River. The schools of pinks jumped and cavorted near the surface of Haro Strait, and the orcas paid them no heed. When a large male with a dorsal as tall as me sounded and disappeared for minutes at a time, one of the knowledgeable whale watchers explained to the rest of us that he was probably going deep, hunting chinook.
In a warming climate, the high-country streams of central Idaho represent some of the last best spawning grounds. I was reminded of a happy-hour conversation I’d had with Joseph Bogaard, the director of Save Our Wild Salmon. He referred to this mostly undeveloped region as Noah’s ark for salmon. “We don’t have to do anything to the habitat,” Bogaard stressed. “The habitat is there. We just need to make it accessible, and that means taking out the dams.” We call biodiversity the web of life. Everything is interconnected. Whale watchers are now demanding the breaching of the lower Snake River dams to bring back the once-prolific runs of Snake River salmon. Rene Henery considers these fish the red blood cells in the landscape’s vascular system.
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IN 1992, A SINGLE sockeye salmon returned to Idaho’s Redfish Lake in the Sawtooths. Just one fish, a male. He was dubbed Lonesome Larry, and his plight helped galvanize a restoration program begun the year before, when Snake River sockeye were officially listed by the Endangered Species Act. Redfish Lake sockeye swim nine hundred miles to their spawning grounds, averaging about twenty miles a day. Nine hundred miles. It can make you tired just thinking about it. And Lonesome Larry had to surmount eight hydroelectric dams along the way. For his survival against the odds, Larry was knocked over the head and relieved of all his semen (called milt), which was cryogenically preserved so that Larry’s rare genes could be used over and over again until spent. Through the entire decade of the 1990s, only sixteen wild sockeye returned to Redfish Lake. Nevertheless, each one of these survivors contributed fundamental genetics to the restoration effort, so that today biologists can say that 95 percent of the historical DNA is still in the pool. Jump ahead nearly two and half decades from Lonesome Larry’s requiem, and more than a thousand sockeye salmon have made it home to Redfish Lake. The story of how these fish narrowly avoided extinction turns out to be a complex tale, one that weaves together salmon biology and human intervention, and one not easily untangled, as I would soon learn.
After a quick meal in Lewiston, Rene and I got back in the car and continued our pilgrimage to Redfish Lake, the terminus of the longest salmon migration in the contiguous United States, where we hoped to meet face-to-face the descendants of Lonesome Larry. We were right on schedule. Perhaps at that very moment a small school of Snake River sockeye, driven by an innate urge we call—for lack of a better word—instinct, was making its own way up the Snake. The river was out of sight now, its upstream progress moving south toward the mostly roadless wilderness of Hells Canyon. The drive to Redfish Lake would take us away from the river and through some of the country’s most dramatic territory. But first we had a slight detour to make.
TRAVIS BROWN, FAMOUS AROUND these parts as the bearded masturbator of fish, didn’t exactly look like a threat to polite society. For one thing, he was clean-shaven on th
is day, and while I couldn’t read his mind, his intentions seemed pure, even if they involved surprising procedures with nearby tanks full of live sockeye salmon. “Keep!” Brown called out from his standing position behind a computer monitor, his voice echoing through the garagelike building where Idaho Fish and Game carries out its experiments. On this command, I marched my dip net over to tank number six, a hot tub–sized enclosure directly behind Brown, and dumped a squirming five-pound male sockeye into the “keep tank.” The newest conscript darted to the far side and quickly fell in among a group of twenty or more salmon that moved as one, like a flock of shorebirds, circling the parameters of their captivity. Dip net in hand, I got back in line behind Rene and the staff, waiting for my next turn to deliver another sockeye to its fate. Millions of years of change and adaptation had brought these Snake River sockeye to this point in their evolution—and now I was a crucial step in the life cycle.
As co-manager of the Eagle Fish Hatchery in Boise, Idaho, Brown probably felt he had to keep a straight face during all this, but there was still some stifled laughter among the staff as they went about their jobs. They had all seen their boss’s sexed-up debut in a recent issue of Men’s Journal. The article described Brown jackknifing a salmon over his thigh and running his fingers up its belly to the vent, until the fish squirted a stream of milky sperm. It took a fair bit of creative license to lend a shade of eroticism to the messy process of extracting milt from a salmon. “You just give the males a good squeeze under the belly,” Brown explained a little sheepishly.
“And a kiss afterward,” someone said.
With his wrestler’s build and ruddy face, Travis Brown looked as if he should be breaking horses or building a cabin. But he grew up angling for steelhead in Idaho’s mountain streams and would happily tell you the name of his favorite fly—the B-run Slayer—though you’d need to buy him more than one draft at the tavern to get the tying recipe. Working for Idaho’s Department of Fish and Game was hardly a job. He was doing what he loved, for a paycheck. Milking salmon was just one part of it—and, anyway, the dirty business of fertilizing fish eggs wouldn’t be conducted here today. Today the employees of the Eagle Fish Hatchery were busy segregating endangered Snake River sockeye, about seven hundred total, which had been collected at a weir just below Redfish Lake, a few hours away by car. These tenacious migrants had spent several weeks swimming upstream from the mouth of the Columbia River to the Snake River to Idaho’s Salmon River and finally into log-choked Redfish Creek—only to be detained a few hundred yards shy of their destination at Redfish Lake and brought to this hatchery, where they were DNA-sampled and checked for disease. Some of them would be trucked back to the lake to complete their spawning run, while others would be kept at the hatchery and stripped of eggs and milt to replenish the hatchery’s captive brood-stock supply—the very unsexy work that had so excited a Men’s Journal reporter.
Sex appeal is in the eye of the beholder, of course, and there are still a few citizens in the republic turned on by the prospect of saving an endangered species. Travis Brown and his colleagues are keeping the sockeye salmon that spawn in the Snake River basin, once numbering in the many tens of thousands and now reduced to a trickle, on life support. A purist (or a penny-pincher) might say forget the Endangered Species Act; let them go extinct. After all, these fish occupy that uncomfortable niche with other charismatic fauna brought to extinction’s doorstep only to hover over the threshold in a human embrace—the Sumatran rhino, California condor, and Mexican wolf, to name but a few—all of them still on the planet due to our costly ongoing intervention. Chamber of Commerce types like to trot out the numbers, talking about how many thousands of dollars each salmon costs taxpayers. Even more galling to letter-to-the-editor writers is when one of those gold-plated fish ends up in an Indian net.
What would Riley Starks make of these sockeye, I wondered. The ones he caught in his reef nets—those headed for the Fraser River in Canada—were wild and untutored in the byzantine ways of the ESA bureaucracy. Naïve, even, one might say. Most years they were fairly plentiful. Not so these American sockeye with their life cycle pestered by fish ladders, tanker trucks, hypodermics, and hatchery complexes. When it was my turn again, I approached the holding pen in my borrowed rubber Carhartt bibs and handed my net to Ken Felty, the hatchery’s fish culturist. Felty stood in the middle of the pool, in brown neoprene waders with water up to his waist, as salmon swam around his feet and bunched up in the corners. He caught a female and handed the net back to me. I carried her over to a yellow arch-shaped scanner the size of a computer modem as she thrashed and threw off a spray of water. A red light blinked on, indicating that my fish’s implanted chip had been successfully read. The chip, a sort of bar code sewn into the fish’s abdomen, is called a passive integrated transponder, or PIT tag. There was a pause. Brown waited for the fish’s ID number to appear on his laptop, then quickly searched his database. “Release,” he said a moment later. I took the fish over to a different tank and freed it. All the sockeye in the holding pen were being divided into two camps: keep fish and release fish. The designations were meant to maximize genetic variation. Release fish would be trucked back to Redfish Lake and allowed to spawn in the wild. Keep fish would stay at the hatchery, ensuring a supply of brood-stock genetics in the event of calamity.
All these salmon, whether bound for the wild or not, looked small to me, certainly compared to those I’d seen hauled up by the reef netters in Puget Sound. They were just four or five pounds, and thin. You would be too, someone said, if you’d just taken a nine-hundred-mile swim upstream without a meal. Along the way, they had burned as much as 60 percent of their body mass.
Outside, the hatchery’s grounds were green with irrigation and carefully tended. The complex of buildings and lawns resembled a college campus. A slow-moving creek bordered the property, with overfed rainbow trout the size of Wonderbread loaves finning languidly beneath a glassy surface. In another large building—really more of a glorified carport—additional tanks held adult Snake River sockeye salmon artificially hatched and raised on the premises using brood stock from the wild fish trapped at Redfish Lake. Many of them showed the red and green coloration of ripe salmon ready to spawn, a byproduct of hatchery life that the staff here was trying to discourage. An easy food supply and lack of predators allowed the pampered fish to mature faster than their wild kin, a trait that would not serve them well in a natural setting. Nevertheless, in an effort to diversify the population’s genetics as much as possible, some of these hatchery-raised fish would win a lottery ticket to join their wild cousins at Redfish Lake. Pausing before the scanner with a handsome male sockeye in his net, Rene reflected on the schizophrenic life cycle of a fish reared in the hatchery, only to be released to the wild because a guy with a laptop says so. “What a deal. They keep you penned up most of your life in a cage, and then one day you’re hauled away in a fish limo and set loose into the dating scene. You go to the club to score and then you croak.”
Viewed in a certain light, the life of a salmon can seem patently unfair. Only a handful from a given redd survive to spawn, even in the best conditions. Most never reach adulthood. As fry, they nourish countless predators in the river, from other fish to birds to snapping turtles. Even a dragonfly larva is a threat to a newly hatched baby salmon. At sea they fare a little better, but not much. The original pool gets culled and culled until only a few hardy (and maybe lucky) survivors feel the pull of their home river and begin the journey back to the place of their birth. For Redfish Lake sockeye, the campaign is even more perilous: they have to contend with eight hydroelectric dams along the way. Long-term survival is a numbers game. Among the twenty-five hundred or so eggs originally deposited by a female sockeye, amazingly it takes only three or four returning adults to spawn for reproductive success. It’s a heroic journey, made all the more dangerous in recent decades by the human hurdle.
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IF RENE WAS SURPRISED to find himself helping out at a
hatchery facility, he didn’t say so. It’s true that his first allegiance is to wild fish, but to work with salmon in California is to court ambiguity every day. Natural processes have been so thoroughly manipulated by human beings, from mountains to coast, that it’s hard to tell where the human-engineered landscape ends and the wild—if it still exists—begins. Ditto the so-called wildlife. Herds of elk, once nearly exterminated, now roam campgrounds. Most Golden State salmon begin their lives in a temperature-controlled egg tray.
For Rene, this trip to Idaho was a mission of sorts—to learn from his colleagues and see for himself some of the most state-of-the-art techniques for recovering populations of endangered salmon. The idea of a captive brood-stock hatchery—suspect in the Pacific Northwest, where populations of wild salmon are still holding on, if barely—seemed like a luxury to Rene, certainly a much better option than relying on stray “lost fish.” “In California the plan is to make new fish for the San Joaquin because the spring run is extirpated,” he explained to the hatchery staff. “There aren’t any wild fish. The plan is to let them loose—let them engage with nature, adapt—and hope they can survive.” This sort of meddling doesn’t sit right with everyone.
To be clear, the Eagle Fish Hatchery is not a mitigation hatchery, like the majority of hatcheries on the Columbia system and elsewhere. Rather than mass-producing fish to be caught in a net or on a hook, its mandate is to keep the genetics of the Redfish Lake sockeye alive, with as much variation and diversity as possible. Yet the very word hatchery remains blasphemous for many wild fish supporters. It stands for greed, hubris, and a misplaced trust in technology all at once. Put a new label on it—conservation hatchery or captive brood-stock hatchery—and you’re still left with a hatchery, a man-made environment that can never reproduce the myriad life histories of wild salmon.
