The Hood Canal Bridge is again in the news, but not for the usual traffic or buffeting by weather headlines. Recognized as a significant impediment to migrating young steelhead, attempts are now being made to mitigate the impasse it makes for critical migrations of young steelhead heading out to sea.
Read MoreSteelhead anglers are taking advantage of the highly anticipated steelhead fishing season, where portions of the Skagit and its major tributary, the Sauk, were opened for a directed recreational steelhead fishery beginning on March 25 under catch and release regulations.
However, this means the 2023 fishing season extends deep into the peak spawning time for steelhead compared to previous closures in mid-April, established specifically to protect spawning fish in the Skagit and Sauk mainstems.
Read MoreIt's a Monday evening and I've signed in to Zoom to listen to the third-and-final Virtual Town Hall on the 2023 Coastal Steelhead season hosted by Washington's Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW). The previous two events have been open forums where the WDFW has both shared their ideas and solicited new ones for managing an already-scarce resource. Tonight, is the big reveal where the regulations will be announced.
Read MoreWe steelhead anglers naturally focus on those magnificent bright chrome and crimson summer and winter run adult steelhead just emerging from their time at sea. The source of our passion regarding issues that determine steelhead fate is focused on this particular part of their life history. Such devotion is understandable, given the charismatic nature of this beloved, powerful sea run fish and the gratifying moment of connecting with one streamside after all those casts. This obsession on spawning-run steelhead is reinforced by savvy marketing by guides, lodges, and equipment dealers, not to mention all those management conventions such as “escapement” and “redd counts” or even the feeder-lot designation of “brood stock.” We at the Wild Steelhead Coalition also employed spectacular images to advance the cause of conservation.
But this narrow focus may overlook a fuller understanding of the complex life history of steelhead.
Read MoreNational Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) received a request from the tribal and state co-managers in the Skagit River Basin of the Puget Sound to review a steelhead fishery resource management plan (RMP) under NMFS' Endangered Species Act for salmon and steelhead. This RMP would replace the previous expired plan and guide tribal ceremonial, subsistence, and commercial fisheries and state recreational fisheries in the Skagit River terminal area that impact steelhead, including direct and incidental fishery impacts.
NMFS has reviewed the plan and prepared a preliminary evaluation and pending determination (PEPD). NMFS has made this PEPD and a draft supplemental Environmental Assessment (EA) available for public review and comment.
Read WSC Science Advisor Guy Fleischer’s review of the documents.
Read MoreThis year the WSC is honored to announce that Nick Chambers will be the recipient of a $5,000.00 scholarship. This scholarship is given on an annual basis to a graduate student focused on Wild Steelhead science. Nick’s work stood out this year, and we are pleased to support his project. Nick is a graduate student at the University of Washington School of Aquatic and Fishery Science. The research being funded is investigating how the dispersal of fry and distribution of redds interact to shape density dependence in the Skagit River Winter Steelhead.
Read MorePublic comments responding to the draft of Senator Patty Murray and Governor Jay Inslee's report on the benefits and costs of removing the four Lower Snake River Dams - while replacing the energy, irrigation, and transportation services they provide - are due by 5:00pm on Monday, July 11. All of us should take a few minutes to tell Senator Murray and Governor Inslee that wild steelhead and salmon, and the communities that depend on healthy fish runs, need these four destructive dams removed before it is finally too late.
Read MoreFollowing the lowest wild steelhead return on record, the WSC was invited to publish an essay on the status of the Columbia and Snake Basin’s wild steelhead in Fly Fisherman Magazine.
Anglers should take time to read it, pass it along to fellow steelheaders, and let it inspire them to tell managers and elected leaders that these fish need solutions now. This historic moment should be met with an equally historic response to safeguard and rebuild the basin’s wild steelhead populations.
Read MoreToday, wild steelhead face a wide variety of interlocking challenges and their numbers are dangerously low throughout much of their native range. Some systems, like the Columbia Basin and the mighty Skeena, saw their worst returns on record in 2021. Anglers and others grappling with wild steelhead conservation must keep in mind that a complex set of factors has caused, and continues to contribute to, these declining populations.
Wild steelhead are highly-adapted creatures living in a complex ecological network, so protecting and rebuilding decimated runs will require attendance to not just one, but all the pieces of the puzzle. Some pieces of the puzzle are more in our immediate control than others and every watershed faces different combinations of impacts.
Read MoreLast week, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) hosted a two-hour webinar on the status of Columbia Basin steelhead, the results of their recent angler survey, and new potential frameworks to regulate fishing seasons according to escapement targets and in-season numbers at Bonneville Dam during key touchstones throughout the season.
The numbers speak for themselves. We are experiencing unprecedented low numbers of wild steelhead in the Columbia Basin. Our managing agencies - State and Federal - should be responding with equally unprecedented efforts to address every factor possible.
Read MoreOn Wednesday April 13th, Holy Mountain Brewing is hosting a beer release party for Winter’s Run, a new hoppy pale ale brewed to support the Wild Steelhead Coalition and WA Wild’s Brewshed® Alliance.
The new beer is delicious and was brewed with Salmon-safe malt and hops grown in the region. The label features custom artwork from Ryan Williams and Jake Keeler. The party will bring regional steelhead and watershed advocates together for a great evening to trade notes and talk with friends, anglers, and conservationists about the urgency of this work.
Read MoreRecent news of improving ocean conditions along the West Coast is a positive signal for wild steelhead and was met with widespread celebration. The early onset of strong upwelling during the most recent spring transition, in addition to other ocean indicators, signals a shift to cooler, more productive conditions associated with better survival of outmigrating juvenile steelhead and salmon.
Guy Fleischer, WSC’s Science Advisor, offers insights on how this is definitely encouraging news, but cautions that we are far from being totally out of the woods. Fleischer draws a connection to recent research examining how pervasive poor ocean survival can trigger reduced freshwater productivity and how this has implications for our expectations of how quickly depleted wild steelhead populations can recover.
Read MoreIn a recent issue of Chasing Silver Magazine, young anglers Braden and Kyle Simms talk about how their passion for fishing and wild steelhead motivates them to speak up for their home waters.
Advocacy and conservation are powerful themes in their family: their father Rich Simms is a co-founder of the Wild Steelhead Coalition and a tireless advocate. The apple didn’t fall far from the tree and it is no surprise these young anglers see their time on the water as inseparable from the work to protect and restore the steelhead and salmon rivers of the Pacific Northwest.
Read MoreInternational Conservation Groups Call For Long Overdue Protections of Interior Fraser River Wild Steelhead As Populations Face Extinction
This week, an international coalition of fishery conservation groups are once again calling for the Canadian government to protect Interior Fraser River Steelhead under Canada’s Species at Risk Act (SARA). The Wild Steelhead Coalition is proud to be a co-signer of this letter and is calling for anglers and conservationists to add their name the petition demanding SARA protections for Interior Fraser River Steelhead.
Read MoreFishery Conservation Groups Join Forces to Provide Crucial Tools to WDFW Law Enforcement.
Encouraged by the impact of our previous equipment donation, the Wild Steelhead Coalition reached out to our colleagues at the Wild Salmon Center and Wild Steelheaders United of Trout Unlimited and our friends at Simms, Outcast Boats, and Sawyer Paddles & Oars to expand the scope of the original donation with a larger, additional gift of trail cameras, rafts, oars, and a drone in 2021.
Read MoreThe artist, angler, and conservationist Richard Harrington is generously donating a print from his new woodcut “Our Rivers Are Paved” to help raise funds supporting the Wild Steelhead Coalition’s work. Every one of our supporters who make a $50 (or more) donation during the month of December will have a chance to win this incredible print of a life-size “June Hog” Spring Chinook.
Read MoreWild Steelhead Coalition Science Advisor, Guy Fleischer, has thoughts on how some level of uncertainty is unavoidable and a natural characteristic of fisheries modeling, and what is needed to better understand steelhead run forecasts. If you are ready to take the plunge with Fleischer and wade deep into what affects forecast model performance, keep this in mind: without reliable forecasts and the underlying data needed to construct and explain them, policy makers are more challenged to defend responsible fisheries management.
Read MoreAfter years of planning, fundraising and engineering, last summer the bulldozers and excavators finally arrived at the site of a former dairy farm along a half mile stretch of South Prairie Creek, a tributary of Washington’s Puyallup River watershed in South Puget Sound. Over the course of eight months, the crews would remove nine buildings and their foundations, install a new bridge over a spring creek tributary, move nearly 20,000 cubic yards of earth, dig a 2600 foot long side channel, install 118 engineered log structures built using over 4600 pieces of wood, add tons of gravel and rock to the logjams, and plant thousands of native saplings and plants in the restored riparian zone along the creek.
Read MoreAt their October 15 meeting, the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission will hear a presentation from Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW) staff on their updated Rogue - South Coast Multi-Species Conservation and Management Plan (RSP).
The fact is, the RSP is an inadequate plan to recover wild steelhead and should be sent back to the drawing board by Oregon’s Fish and Wildlife Commission. It proposes to continue harvesting wild steelhead even though ODFW doesn’t know how many adult fish are returning each year, if those populations are truly stable, or even how many are being killed or impacted by anglers. Harvesting wild steelhead requires a very, very high bar to ensure it is sustainable and not contributing to population declines and excessive losses of diversity. This plan fails to meet that reasonable standard.
Read MoreA lot of attention has fallen on the dismal return of wild steelhead this year in the Columbia/Snake River Basin. Rightfully so. As of now, it is shaping up to be the worst steelhead run on record since counting at Bonneville Dam began 83 years ago.
It’s difficult to get your head around what the steelhead run was like on the Columbia prior to the canneries cranking up, timber splash dam operations scoured spawning beds in the tributaries, hydropower dam construction, and doubling down on hatcheries all combined to seal the current fate of this extraordinary river. And now a warm North Pacific Ocean filled with ridiculous numbers of hatchery pink salmon is diminishing steelhead survival. The Columbia/Snake had the largest return of wild steelhead on the planet and its B-run summer steelhead were the largest around in terms of size, even making the legendary Skeena fish pale in comparison. Today we are fishing over the last remnants of this greatness and most of the watershed is impounded into a series of lakes or blocked completely. Many of the wild steelhead in the basin have been listed as Threatened on the Endangered Species List.
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