Ep. 829: Who Will Save the Columbia River’s Salmon?

00:00:08
Speaker 1: This is the Meat Eater Podcast coming at you shirtless, severely, bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listening podcast. You can’t predict anything brought to you by first Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds, no compromise, gear that keeps me in the field longer, no shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at first light dot com. That’s f I R S T L I T E dot com.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: All right, welcome to the me Eater Podcast.

00:00:45
Speaker 1: They we’re gonna dig into something of great importance that we touched on a bunch of times in the past. Is what in the world happened to and what is going on with the Columbia River and the same runs. I mean, this is a story that’s played out over centuries historically the Columbia.

00:01:06
Speaker 2: I pulled this from your guys website. The guests. I’m going to introduce a minute.

00:01:10
Speaker 1: I had always read that the historically the Columbia had runs annual runs of ten to twelve million salmon. I was reena today it could have been some years as high as sixteen million salmon ran the Columbia. Our good old body’s Lewis and Clark, who come up every time you’re trying to describe something from the old timey days, describe salmon in the Columbia as being inconceivable the numbers they had fish, salmon species running from March to October, steelhead in there all winter. And then, as we’ll get into, just a never ending series of mistakes, intentional actions, accidental action have led it to be where it is just small fractions of that small fractions of those numbers running up and down the river. And we’re going to talk with a couple of guests today who have been involved in sam and recovery on the Columbia River from an intertribal perspective. So the Columbia River flowed through, how can you guys, I’m leading up to my intro here of you guys, but can you remind me how many miles of river are in the Columbia basin. I think I was reading about to say, I can’t remember the number.

00:02:41
Speaker 3: Well, the Columbia River itself, like where it’s coming from Canada is about seven hundred and fifty miles from the ocean, but half of the Columbia’s north of Canada. And then you’ve got all of the major tribs, you know, from the Yakama, the Wenatchee, the Snake, the Wyamat, you know, just all up and down the river. So you’re looking at even now in the high water years, half a million cfs have flowed down by Bonnonville Dam.

00:03:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, so half a million cubic feet per second YEP of water flowing through there. And the folks we’re gonna talk today about tribal efforts to recover fish. The tribes acknowledging that the states just aren’t doing it at the speed they would like and with the vision that they would like them to have. The Feds aren’t doing it at the speed they would like, and they’re not pursuing the vision they would like them to pursue. So increasingly the tribes Native American tribes have been getting involved in this.

00:03:45
Speaker 2: And we’re going to.

00:03:45
Speaker 1: Speak today with Doug Hatch, who’s the deputy manager of the Fishery Science Department of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, and also Donella Donnella. Donella Miller is the Fishery Science manager. And real quick, before we dig in too much, can you can you tell people what tribes are in inner tribal organization.

00:04:13
Speaker 4: Yeah, we’re a consortia. We represent we’re a technical arm of of course the Yackamanation, which I’m a tribal member of, and also the Confederated Tribes and bands of the Yu Matilla Indian Reservation, which my grandmother was from, so I’m also part of Matilla as well, but also the Warm Springs Tribe and Oregon and the nez Pers in Idaho, Okay. So yeah, we work with those four tribes on Columbia basin issues and all four you know treaty tribes. We signed treaties with the government in eighteen fifty five to retain our you know, hunting, fishing, and gathering rights throughout our our usual and accustomed areas. And that’s really key because you know, we seated land to the to the government in exchange for the set boundaries of the reservation and also to hunt, fish and gather in perpetuity throughout our you know, our natural areas.

00:05:16
Speaker 1: And that and then that right is infringed by the fact that then the people you signed the treaty with went ahead and destroyed the fishery.

00:05:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that’s really key. The work that we do is, you know, those rights mean nothing if there’s no fish to catch. The right isn’t just to dip our nets in empty waters. It’s actual catch fish. And there’s language in the treaty that talks about our ability to maintain a modest living and people can support themselves on it anymore. Our people unfortunately live in poverty up and down the Columbia River at treaty access sites that aren’t meant to be lived in. It’s more or less boat ramps, and you know, they don’t have water power, just a bathroom. But it’s not definitely not what we signed up for.

00:06:11
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, So we’re gonna tell that story first. I gotta I want to do what day? When did the thing drop that we made in Texas?

00:06:20
Speaker 2: When is it? Because I explained this all big time.

00:06:22
Speaker 5: In text already dropped, but we’re trying to hit it multiple times.

00:06:27
Speaker 1: Just being cognizant of the fact that So we record a showdown in Texas talk about taint and meat, skunks, nutsign a cat in that we explained that there’s if you subscribe to the show, you’re gonna see If you subscribe to the podcast.

00:06:45
Speaker 2: You’re gonna see some changes coming up.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: In March nine, So starting is it March nine, that’s what that’s gonna happen. Yeah, starting in March nine, you’re gonna start seeing every week you’re gonna see two Meat Eater podcasts drops. The regular Monday thing that you subscribe to you now stays the same, and that’s like the interview show. So that would be like what we’re doing right here, right now, we’re sitting around with tribal fisheries managers having an interview with them about their area of expertise.

00:07:13
Speaker 2: That’s like the.

00:07:13
Speaker 1: Interview portion of the show, and that will always drop at the same time. In addition to that, there’s gonna be a weekly news show, news and commentary drop. As I explained, it’s like Spencer’s concept. We cover our news, your news, and the news on the news show. Okay, three kinds of news that will drop sometime during the week. It’ll vary to when it comes out. The folks you know and love, and the kind of material you know and love from Radio Live, that stuff will move on to this news show. Radio Live won’t be like a set There won’t be a live thing anymore, and it won’t occur at a set time anymore. There’ll be the news and commentary show which comes out. When it comes out, stay tuned for all that there’ll be some new art work. You’ll know what happened because there’ll be a new artwork. That’ll be the best way you’ll know that that happens. You’ll be like, oh, a new artwork? Must this thing happening?

00:08:06
Speaker 5: Please subscribe on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts.

00:08:10
Speaker 4: That helps a lot.

00:08:11
Speaker 1: Uh, you know what word I learned today from you guys website. I’m gonna do a trivia test. Don’t don’t don’t you know you guys notice we don’t tell anybody. I’m gonna trivia test these guys. So I was on the Columbia River Inner Tribal Fish Commission site today.

00:08:27
Speaker 2: What is the word?

00:08:30
Speaker 1: I’m like Spenser here, what is the word for a fish that spawns once and dies? It’s in the same vein of like anadromous catagromus. It’s like that flavor of a word. But it’s me you spawn once and die.

00:08:47
Speaker 5: I’ve heard it like a scientific name like die.

00:08:58
Speaker 1: Yeah, you’re being clever like diet.

00:09:02
Speaker 2: I thought he’s being clever too.

00:09:03
Speaker 1: I didn’t think at first. I didn’t think he’s being clever than I thought he’s being clever. It’s like, it’s that flavor.

00:09:09
Speaker 2: What is that Latin? I don’t know. Is it Latin? Diadronous, catatrouts Oh.

00:09:15
Speaker 6: No, I should look that up.

00:09:16
Speaker 7: Monogamous, No, no, I know I’ve heard it before, but I don’t I.

00:09:25
Speaker 1: Know there was a word you ready, None of you guys got it. I’ve never even heard the damn word.

00:09:31
Speaker 5: Catatromist comes from Greek roots.

00:09:33
Speaker 2: Oh it’s Greek. This is probably Greek sel paris.

00:09:38
Speaker 8: So it’s not like those words really at all.

00:09:42
Speaker 1: When flavor, I mean like a foreign language sounding deal. You know, I guarantee it’s greed. I never heard that word in my note You know, you got like a notes function on your phone. I keep words that I need to incorporate into my vocabulary on a little list like.

00:09:58
Speaker 8: So those but those are only the fish that after they sponsor, not atlantic head, not ocean run.

00:10:04
Speaker 5: Cuts, semil paris. I should know this because I took Latin. It does have Latin roots. It combines semol meaning once or a single time, and pario meaning to give birth or produce.

00:10:17
Speaker 2: Another thing. I learned.

00:10:19
Speaker 1: We’re gonna go way back deep before you get to this. Nothing I learned on your site. The kind blew my mind is those dams, the dams on the Columbia system.

00:10:27
Speaker 2: Did a way to think about it.

00:10:28
Speaker 1: When baby salmon, when Smoltz are coming back down the river, it’s basically you lose seven to fifteen percent of them die at each dam. Wow, just an incredible way to think about it.

00:10:43
Speaker 8: Yeah, can you and how many are there?

00:10:45
Speaker 2: How many dams are no? Idea? Well, there’s four they can stay up to close your mic.

00:10:50
Speaker 4: Oh, there’s four on the the lower part of the Mainstem Columbia, and then you have the four in the lower Snake River. And then there’s also privately owned dams that are owned by the Mid Columbia Public Utility districts. So there’s four four right in the mid Sea. So there’s eight on the main Stem Columbia before you get to Roosevelt, right or well the Grand Cooley.

00:11:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, Chief Joseph is impassable and then Grand Cooley is upstream of that. But yeah, if you’re going to the headwaters of the of the Columbia, which would be the Matau River, if you’re up there, you’re going to go over nine dams on the main stem. More, if you go on up the tributaries, if you go up the Snake, you’re going over eight dams before you ever get to the Salmon River, the Naha or any of those big rivers in the Snake.

00:11:43
Speaker 2: Eight times fifteen, that’s a big number.

00:11:45
Speaker 3: It’s big.

00:11:48
Speaker 6: Let’s say.

00:11:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then there’s mortality coming upstream too, you know, not just every adult just because there’s a fish ladder. You got to find that fish ladder and you got to negotiate it, you got to get over it, you got to avoid the predators. You’ve got lots of stuff.

00:12:04
Speaker 2: Can can you guys lay out a little bit, like.

00:12:10
Speaker 1: What did the system look like before the first major impact, before the first major negative impact came to, which I guess was the canary fish canaries? Like what did like just try to help people visualize, Like nowadays people think about salmon runs and it’s like Alaska, right, when you think about salmon runs, it’s Bristol Bay, right. This was a bigger salmon run than those, The biggest salmon run, the biggest salmon run in the country, the biggest salmon run in.

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Speaker 2: The world was the Columbia. Yeah, you wouldn’t have been that you had to get.

00:12:49
Speaker 1: You wouldn’t go to Alaska to see big salmon runs, like the Columbia was the big salmon run? Like what did that look like? Like what fish were there? You know, to what quantity? Is it even possible? No one scientifically measured it, but like what did it look like?

00:13:06
Speaker 3: It was?

00:13:06
Speaker 4: Well, that’s why Solilo falls, right, that’s historically that was the major trading hub of the Pacific Northwest. You know that people came from you know, the the Midwest to trade Buffalo and the ocean area to trade salt for salmon.

00:13:23
Speaker 2: We had.

00:13:24
Speaker 4: It was even obsidian and tool making and things like that. It was inconceivable. And that’s why the over exploitation happened because you know, like you said, you read the old timey descriptions and they thought it was an inexhaustible resource, that there was so much that people were able to gather what they needed. And that’s that’s what sustained life in our region for millennia. And it was just you know, the the trading and the tribal people living amongst the land is you know, in physically a part of nature, and you know, it’s just a it was a completely different way of thinking of you know, like exploitation and things like that, but that I don’t know that That’s why it seems so that thought process was different from the way that we lived, as you know, taking and being a part of the system versus coming in Like how you said, the first major negative impact would have been the fish wheels and the and even the sainting and things like that, and so those types of things happened. And you know, when you look at different everything is always viewed as a resource and how can that benefit man? And you know, you hear about the salmon, but even further down the road, the salmon kind of became a problem to development in the of the Columbia River system when they were looking at the placement of the hydro system, because then they would have to incorporate fish ladders and deal with the salmon. It would have been easier if they did away from with all these natural runs and we could retain salmon, but you retain it in the lower river below the dams, so they didn’t have to do all these extra steps to maintain the stocks. That’s why you see a lot of those hatcheries are below Bonnaville Dam, and it’s unnatural, you know, spring Chinook and Koho and things like that, and those hatteries still operate, but the tribes have been working to try to restore and bring them back into their natal areas throughout and even to me, I think those numbers that you read are actually kind of low, the.

00:15:38
Speaker 2: Ten to sixteen million.

00:15:39
Speaker 4: Airess, because even today you could get you know, there’s been a lot of work in the Okanagan Basin and Lake Okanagan in Canada where they’ve we’ve seen ski returns up to eight hundred thousand adult sakai returning past Bonneville. And just to think that’s just one lake and there’s all these other block areas and the tributaries and if today we could get back almost a million of just one stock, that and a lot of that work was done. It was exhaustive estimate, and they looked at a lot of the cannery records and what they were able to process, but I think there was more waste than there were fish actual process. You see those old pictures where you know you have salmon four feet deep and they’re just working those cannory lines, Well, when that obviously went bad, every day they just shove it out and bring in more. So there was because you yeah, yeah, that’s the way it was viewed. And just kind of going back to what you what we were talking about the fifteen percent at every project. That’s only the impact of what that dam itself causes, like fish going through the turbines or you know, like in the spill way they get disoriented and things like that. But that’s not adding in all of the other factors that those dams create, the reservoirs and the slack water water quality and the predation and all those types of things. So the impacts are huge, and you’re right, you add it up, there shouldn’t be any more fish left. It’s just amazing that that we still have fish coming back.

00:17:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, I’s clarifying that percentage.

00:17:14
Speaker 1: I was making a joke about fifteen times eight, but the estimate is seven to fifteen percent, so it’s not all.

00:17:19
Speaker 2: You know, fifteen percent is the high end of what the estimated loss.

00:17:22
Speaker 3: Is just direct dam mortality, but that doesn’t take into account the slack water it creates, the habitat that creates for pacivorous predators to eat the fish. They get disoriented when they go through the dam, birds pick them off. So all of that predation part isn’t part of that damn mortality. That’s just the direct mortality from the dam and kind of quickly, I guess historically by the numbers, it was right now, you’ve got a spring chinook run, right, that’s like eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand fish, and then it drops way off for the summers down to ten or twenty thousand. And then in the fall that’s the big run now, and it’s gonna run a couple hundred thousand fish, you know, you know, a really good years half million or something. And historically it was it was a big curve, it was a big mountain. That summer chinook run. That’s so low that was the peak. Oh so Harvard, all of these impacts have split it into these three different groups of chinook. And so you’ve got the fall chinook, which seems like which is the biggest now, But historically that was the tail. You know, it was those summer run and so and and that’s what they were going after the early canneries and stuff was the most abundant, you know, group, and so they they made those big impacts on that, and that was the June hogs. That included all of the really big fish that went up, you know, into the Lower Snake River up in the Upper Columbia. You know, the fish that were one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty pounds.

00:18:56
Speaker 2: Man, jeez, that’s a big fish.

00:18:59
Speaker 8: It’s like, yeah, yeah, we catch those like eight ten pounders in southeast.

00:19:05
Speaker 2: Like, yeah, they gotta be twenty eight where we fish, they gotta be twenty eight inches. Your eyes like, sweet, he’s twenty.

00:19:10
Speaker 1: And like you go into the bars, you know, you go into old bars, you know, and you know, I see these kings you know from whatever, yep, half century ago, and you’re like, dude, are they you know, are they there anymore?

00:19:24
Speaker 2: These one hundred plus pound fish? But just like there’s not, and there’s fewer and viewer and viewer and viewer fewer and fewer.

00:19:32
Speaker 3: We do we do sampling up Bonneville, damn. So we we sample all of the fish runs coming through Bonneville, and we’ll get a text from from from the texts that are sampling. It’s like, here’s a really big one. And a big one now is you know, sixty seventy pounders? Ok? Yeah, those are pretty rare and it used to not be even you know, a mere thirty five years ago. When I started, it was we’d get a lot more of those than we do now. So definitely the size of mature or the size of the adult fish has gone down.

00:20:06
Speaker 4: The largest I’ve caught was sixty three pounds, and that seemed like a monster that Gilnetting, yeah, and our fall fishery, but I had it, really had an aha moment back when so I think I was eighteen as a technician working in the Metaw River. We’re doing spring chinook spawning ground surveys and it was getting later in the season, and so there was this portion of the mainstem that would float on the on the Mettaw River and there’s it runs into a wall, there’s a big pool, and we floated our raft down and it was just there was a group of probably about thirty big june hogs summerschanook. They were huge. Of course you get the magnification of the water, but they were still huge. And we just floated around in there and watched them. They were just holding up, waiting to head up to spawn. But it’s just so amazing to see those things. And you were talking about how many miles inland. Also, when I worked up in the Metal, where I think I looked at it. I looked on the map to see it was like eight hundred and forty miles or something.

00:21:09
Speaker 2: Well, they had come that far in this.

00:21:11
Speaker 4: Little bitty tributary to the Metal where we were doing a spawning ground survey, and I was like, just like, because we had to hike in and then walk down the creek, is like, how did this fish even make it back here? It’s amazing. And then we were walking down another section and there’s portions that get dewatered in the fall, and we found a couple of springs nook in this pocket by this boulder, and so my coworker he takes off one side of his hip waiter and then we fill it with water and put that fish in there, and we just ran it like a couple. He was stranded.

00:21:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was pulling off because irrigation draw.

00:21:47
Speaker 4: Yeah, So we ran it back to so he could reconnect with the river. It’s like, you can’t make it this far.

00:21:53
Speaker 6: And not live, O man.

00:21:55
Speaker 2: Really.

00:21:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the things you run into being out there, it’s just that that’s what really helps people’s connection to understand, and you know, just thinking and realizing how much they’ve gone through to get back.

00:22:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, can you a little bit explain the process, I guess just the evolved thinking that that led to the creation of a tribal organization that would get involved in fisheries management. I know, like in some notes Krint had from pre interviews, she talked about that there was a growing frustration that the States and the Feds weren’t moving the way, weren’t moving this the way you wanted to move, and that the goal was set in a way that that the tribes weren’t comfortable with the goal like say, like basically the goal being let’s save the fish from genetic extinction. Yeah, and that wasn’t that that doesn’t satisfy native peoples on the river.

00:23:03
Speaker 4: No, Unfortunately, a lot of the fish are managed on ESA levels, right, that’s holding things on the brink of extinction. And that’s one of the issues with the ESA itself. Well, for one, it’s not proactive, and two they have protections when things get really bad to save them from extinction. But there’s nothing in the act that’s binding its recommendations towards recovery. There’s no requirements to recover species so it’s just the minimal amount possible that you could do to keep this from this species from going extinct. And you know that’s not acceptable, you know as society, not just with tribes, of allowing species to go extinct or you know, we don’t want museum relics that in the river that we look at. You know, we want to be able to enjoy the bounty and continue our way alife, you know, kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties. And that’s where the really you know, sustainable, healthy and sustainable populations that were able to harvest because you know, we’ve talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest, but that’s a shared right that we have with you know, with the public right the treaties. There’s been two big court cases that kind of led to the formation of our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking a leading role. First was usb Oregon, and that was really the tribes being established as a co manager of the resource because it was a treaty right, so it’s our you know, we have the obligation to ensure that it persists for future generations. And then several years later we had usv. Washington that made the determination that the tribes were entitled to fifty percent of the harvestable run, not just fifty percent of the total, the fifty percent of the harvestable run. And so we have the you know that unfortunately, you know, I’ve heard others. You know, what I’ve learned is unfortunately we operate operate in gavel the gavel fish management because you talk about gravel, the gravel like right, you’re inclusive of the entire life cycle. But unfortunately we work in gavel the gavel because it’s the real Yeah, and that’s I saw that. You have a show out that talks about the recent litigation on the hydro operations of the on the Snake River dam, and that’s kind of been pulled in really kind of unfortunately became just a breach campaign. But it’s to us, it’s a lot more than that. Because with our with our culture, everything the importance, everything has a purpose, a place and a purpose. And so we really have that holistic management aspect, and you know, we don’t really have the silos that a lot of the state and federal agencies work under. That’s why you know, we have people that want to work for tribes that really care about, you know, the resource and things like that, because everything that we do is so broad, and you know, like I’m wearing the sturgeon hat, and you know, like all species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon, lam prey, even you know, trout and bridge lip suckers and all of those things that are a part of nature. But you know, we hold all of those things sacred as our first foods. And so that’s the way we what we bring to the table in our management aspect, because you know, we’re not about esa level. We don’t want museum real li likes. We went healthy and sustainable, and we would love more than to have work ourselves out of a job. That’s what I’ve heard one of my other bosses say. But just you know, the tools that we have to work with along the way, like you know, hatch reproduction. I know there’s a big a lot of issues between hatchy versus wild and the tribes do do a lot of supplementation hatter reproduction, but we try to bring in non conventional methods. It’s not just fitch factories pumping out numbers. We’re you know, using we have a genetics lab, a state of the art genetics lab that we have in cooperation with the University of Idaho that’s located in southern Idaho and Hagerman. So we’re kind of leading the way on the genetics side. And then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not just releasing them all directly from the hatchery, but taking them out to acclamation sites so they could return to areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that. And as Doug mentioned, we do all the monitoring at Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through. We’re able to take that information and which also aids in harvest management, and just our work is so broad and diverse.

00:28:09
Speaker 2: We have.

00:28:11
Speaker 4: Ocean you know, estuary program that we’ve acquired about five years ago now, so we’re really looking, you know, like I said, gravel to gravel and bringing in all aspects, and you know the tribes have I’d say we’re a lot less risk averse, I think because we take that approach to be careful to do things. It’s like we don’t want to study things to death. You know, things get wrapped up in ten ten plus year studies before you could actually even do anything. It’s like, and you know, myself, being the fish science manager, that was kind of I kind of thought twice about taking this job. It’s like, I don’t want to be just a research scientist. But the approach that the tribes have been taking is like applied research. You’re taking actionable measures and measuring the success of those actions, and you know, you use what’s working and advance that. And yeah, I think that’s the biggest thing. And you know, we’ve really grown a lot. Like I mentioned those two court cases usv. Washington, usv. Oregon where you know, the tribes sued the states over harvest and you know, co management and things like that. But we’ve came a lot a long ways, and even just recently during that litigation on the Snake River, the hydro Operations litigation and form the six Sovereigns that’s with our four tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon and come together, and that’s how we entered into a stay in litigation. It was meant to be a ten year stay with a set of commitments over the first five years. Then there was a check in and then it could have rolled over to another five years and we were just getting started rolling in that and it was bringing commitments to the basin and also giving us a voice to look for appropriations. It’s not like we weren’t trying to upend energy prices or anything like that. It’s just like, Okay, can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity that you’re benefiting from? And it’s not really grandma’s electricity or the common person, it’s corporate, right. It’s industrial customers that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power in the region. And that’s why we’re talking about fish in the Columbia Basin, but really a global global thing, right, because of all of the industry that our region attracts because of the cheap power. Like back in the eighties and whatnot, we had the all of the big aluminum smelters where we have none of the natural resources to make aluminum, but they were all there because it was so cheap to process because of that cheap power. And then now we’re seeing the new onslaught of that is data centers. We have data centers a.

00:31:12
Speaker 2: Lot all that electricity.

00:31:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, and water. That’s the bad thing is like there’s always extraction and then we’re already like operating in a deficit, but yet we’re planning for a future that we don’t even have the resources for. And that’s why the tribes really bring that to the table of like who’s looking out for the resource and what’s best for the environment. And that’s why we talk about salmon being a keystone species because it’s it’s good for everyone. What’s good for the salmon is good for the environment and for the people and us looking out for that in that holistic manner.

00:31:51
Speaker 1: I got three observations I want to hit you with. One is you don’t need to take the sound. But you know, like people like to look at sort of singular things that had global impacts. And there’s this argument that the reason we won World War two is because the dams on the Columbia system, because we could out we could produce aircraft, we had enough power to smelt enough aluminum and we out aircraft the Germans. And so you know, whether that’s true or not, it always like sticks in my head, like thinking about what a mistake those ultimately, what a mistake those dams were, And I think about that question and always like it’s just a complication in there. We had on second observations we had on RFK Junior when he was running for president, and he went and took over Health and Human Services under the Trump administration.

00:32:47
Speaker 2: But when he was he.

00:32:48
Speaker 1: Was on he’s talking about his career and litigate environmental litigation, and he said, when you look at these big, these big corporations, and they think there are these like free enterprise organizations, he says, they never ever pay the cost. They don’t acknowledge that they don’t pay the cost. But in producing that electricity or producing those metals, they never had to account to the American people of what they took from you to make those things. Like, no one’s ever build them for the cost of an annual run of twelve million salmon. No one’s paid that, you know. He’s like, they don’t admit it, but they’re subsidized. They’re subsidized by what they take from everybody in terms of fish or in terms of anything clean water, Like, has anyone ever.

00:33:47
Speaker 2: Build them for do you know what I mean? Does anyone build them for what the clean water should be worth? They’ll never pay that shit.

00:33:55
Speaker 4: Yeah, we have mitigation goals of the impacts of the hydrosystem that have never been met. Fifty sixty years and they’ve never met them. By millions. I think we’re barely even at half of what we should have been getting sixty years ago. Imagine how much that would add up to what the tab is. The way that gets wipe clean is they’re working toward interim goals. Fifty years later, we’re still just working towards interim goals. And even today, the interim goals that we’re working towards towards restoration that we actually have the teeth to push on is five to eight million, and that was determined by the Northwest Power and Planning Council. Of that is the direct impacts of this hydrosystem is the five to eight million, and then that’s when then the other the other losses are due to irrigation and the tributaries and other types of urbanization and things like that. So we’re we’ll never get fully get back what we had, but you know, I know we could do better because and a lot of that too is just people’s resistance to change, and you know that that’s the way we’ve always done things, and the status quo continues and until they I don’t know, it’s hard, and like you said, you will never get back. We don’t pay the truth cost for power, and a lot of this stuff is for export foreign companies that come in and exploit our resources. And you still have communities that you know, they were promised jobs, but that’s only during the construction and what’s ongoing is minimal. Like even with Google and the City of the Dallas. You know, they came in and updated their their waste waste treatment plant, but then they built a data center and then two more data centers, and now they’re overwhelming that infrastructure that they promised, and they were taking groundwater and so they have communities just south of town that are coming up with dry wells and things like that. And now they want to buy land in the National Forest to be able to create a reservoir to extract more water.

00:36:13
Speaker 1: And then, like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, they’ll never they’ll you know, he’ll emerge as the world’s first trillionaire and there will never be a reckoning. There will never be a reckoning for the cost of what they did.

00:36:25
Speaker 2: Never.

00:36:26
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was funny. We applied for a grant from Google because they have this they want to be green by twenty thirty or something, and then we have a delta project where the Clicktet River comes into the Columbia that needs some major work. It’s never had any maintenance, Like you could practically walk halfway across the Columbia because that sandbar is so big because you don’t have the freshets that that flush it out. And that’s one of our big issues that we’ll work on. It’s predation, hot spots and warm water and things like that. But we applied for that Google grant. It’s just downstream, just across the river. We didn’t even make it past the pre proposal phase. And when we asked why, like why wouldn’t this qualify it has good merit and everything, they gave us AI response, Yeah.

00:37:19
Speaker 2: So you paid for your own response.

00:37:23
Speaker 1: I want to get in like one of the things that I want to talk about, what we want to talk about. I was like, what can like what are things that can be done?

00:37:32
Speaker 2: You know?

00:37:32
Speaker 1: And I want to get into that, like like sea lions and all that. But there’s a thing I want to there’s a third thing I wanted to bring up. And I’m almost I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but all these guys here can vouch me on this.

00:37:42
Speaker 2: It’s like.

00:37:44
Speaker 1: I was raised in the Great Lakes, Okay, and I was raised to know that like the real villains in fisheries management, it’s always the natives.

00:37:57
Speaker 2: Because people can’t reconcile. They’re like, they’re like, how could it be that.

00:38:01
Speaker 1: They’re conducting commercial fishing, you know, so they run Like in the Great Lakes, natals will run fish traps for whitefish, which white people don’t. I mean, like generally speaking, white people don’t fish whitefish. Generally some do, but it’s not like a top tier fish. People don’t travel like to go there to fish whitefish. People want the non native shut or they like large miles of native fish all the salmon.

00:38:26
Speaker 2: Introduce salmon.

00:38:27
Speaker 1: But you’ll go and be like, the reason you didn’t catch anything today is because of natives, right, And you’ll hear it so much from guys in the Pacific Northwest, where they’ll be, like you mentioned earlier, having a gillnet. They’ll be like, that’s the problem with the fishery, and it’s like, but that’s what you’re raised to believe that because it’s always like a blame game and you look at but bahom it, they fished here for twenty thousand, ten thousand, sixteen, like thousands of years supported to people on the fishery. Then European culture, like euro American culture, came in and destroyed the fishery. The things we did destroy the fishery. But now you look and there’s some native people catching some fishing and that, and that’s who’s like, that’s who’s the blame. It’s pervas I don’t even know if you realize how pervasive that thinking is, because it’s like they it can’t click, like how could they be commercial fishing when I can only keep one fish or I can’t keep any fish, but they can commercial fish. That’s who killed all the fish. It’s out there, like that perspective is just out there.

00:39:36
Speaker 4: Yeah, and I’ve lived it, you know, like growing up fishing on the Columbia, you do get a lot of a lot of hate. People come out and yell at you and and things like that. And we’ve been shot at at night in the dark. We were out and I called the cops. The cops didn’t even show up. You could see the muzzle flash. It sounded like a twenty two and we were like, what the he We’re a good thing. We were a ways from shore in that kind of like a bay area in the nine to one to one operator, well, can you see what they’re wearing? And I’m like, no, it’s dark. I see a muzzle flash and can you let us know? And it’s like we got down and had to drive out of there. And another time I always remember there was an older gentleman. He followed us because you know, we’re tied off of the bank. It was two and a half hours. He stood on the shore and yelled and cussed at us, like I called the cops, like I think he might need to.

00:40:30
Speaker 2: I don’t want this.

00:40:31
Speaker 4: Guy to have a heart attack. Yeah, that’s how it worked up. He was and you know, like chucking rocks at us and things like that.

00:40:37
Speaker 1: Because people can’t picture the long history. They like they looked through the dam. They looked through the dam or past the dam, and they see you. And that’s the problem, do you know what I mean? They’re like they can’t picture.

00:40:53
Speaker 2: What happened.

00:40:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, yeah, I guess we’re so visible. Right. There’s there’s there’s plenty of non native gillnet fisheries that are happening in the Lower River and a lot in the ocean. But it’s just we’re visible.

00:41:08
Speaker 1: And that’s like, if it wasn’t for that little handful of fish, everything can be better. It’s like, no, dude, it wouldn’t be better if you’re not talking about the problem.

00:41:17
Speaker 2: You don’t want to talk about the real problem. Yeah, you don’t want to talk about the real problem.

00:41:22
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:41:22
Speaker 4: The glass half full thing is I think it’s awesome that people are starting to realize, like, you know, the work that we do, it benefits everybody, not just the tribes. It’s everybody. And so like I’ve been at places like like a trade show or whatever, and then you know, somebody will come up look at my tag, like I want to shake your hand. You know, they’re you know, part of the they’re a fishing guide or something like that, and they’ll say, we wouldn’t have salmon if it weren’t for the Indians, And you.

00:41:51
Speaker 2: Know, people see that connection.

00:41:54
Speaker 4: Yeah, a little bit of that. So there, you know, we’re starting to realize and and you know, just the outreach and the partnerships that we have and that the benefits that we bring is for all and not just us.

00:42:06
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:42:06
Speaker 3: So it’s crazy. I mean we have commissioners that had spent time in federal prison for fishing, exercising their right to their treaty reserved right to fish and they were arrested, sentenced, spent time in prison for fishing. So it’s it’s a crazy deal. I’m from Idaho. I saw this the same thing you’re talking about, Steve with the salmon what happened in the salmon fisheries in the Columbia. But you know that led to those court decisions and then that formed, you know, out of that the tribal co management that formed the Columbia River Inner Tribal Fish Commission in nineteen seventy seven, and so this the tribe started building staff from then and now we’re like at one hundred and fifty to one hundred and seventy people at Critic in Portland. Each of the four member tribes, the the the Yakama, Warm Springs, You, Matila, and Nesperse combined, we have like seven hundred and fifty people working on fish recovery.

00:43:15
Speaker 2: And I think that’s.

00:43:16
Speaker 3: Where we get our the tribes get their power is that they’re co managers and they got a singular focus on it’s the fish Commission, right, It’s not the it’s not the fish and Irrigation Commission. It’s not we don’t have the things that the states are. You know, they’ve got to look after all these other interests and this is singularly focused on fish recovery. So we’re not what we want to do. We’ll provide more fish to our constituents. Are you know the tribal fishermen that are out there exercising their treaty right and they’re entitled to half of that harvestable fish, and however they take them. They they decide how they’re going to take them, and states decide how much they’re going to split their fifty percent into sport fishing versus commercial fishing, however they want to divide it, and the tribes don’t you know, they’re party to that, but they don’t tell the states how they’re going to allocate their fisheries. And you know, kind of should go the same way for the tribes. This is this is a big conservation effort and they run hatcheries about ten hatches that are run by the tribes to get the money for it. And they don’t catch all those fish. I mean, those fish are going out to the public. Everybody’s catching them from here to the Gulf of Alaska.

00:44:37
Speaker 4: Well, we’re kind of end users on some of that. There’s some stocks of fish like the klick Atat, the majority of those are caught in Alaska and by you know, the other ocean fisheries along the West coast, and you know, we have a pie chart and then it shows all of the take and the tribal harvest is just this little bitty sliver.

00:45:00
Speaker 2: That’s the people putting them in and doing all the.

00:45:02
Speaker 4: Work to the habitat restoration, because the work that we do goes beyond just fish and that’s what you know, like being in management now of like getting people to understand like the things that we do, like you know, energy production is fish issues because of the hydrosystem, and habitat restoration and even roads like we have our habitat staff that they’ve worked with the DOT to like move a highway and and you know, putting in better fish passage and just you know, reconnecting rivers which helps you know, floods and flood management, flood risk and then also especially in the face of climate change and how things are changing, like you were just talking about the weather here, you know, we’re seeing that we’re you know potentially in our three years of drought and this year isn’t isn’t looking much better, and so we had definitely have our work cut out for And it goes a long ways, and like Doug was saying about how the tribes choose to allocate the other thing that our jobs are so great to me, and why it means so much is on the cultural side. You know how much that that these things are natural resources and salmon we refer to ourselves as salmon people, you know, and it’s cultural preservation and that that’s really what because I grew up in a traditional home with you know, like my mother and my grandparents and practicing our you know, hunting, fishing, gathering, and you know, our tribal religion and all of the things that go along with that. All of our ceremonies are centered around our natural resources, around the salmon and things like that, and you know, sadly we’re losing that. And then that’s how you know, people get led astray. You know, you have you know the effects of drugs and alcohol and stuff. But if we really had those things that for us to be able to continue, I think would be better off. And well I know we would because you know, living in those communities and it’s like we’re lost. We’re still lost because we were displaced by the construction of the dams on the river. We weren’t relocated or subsidized or anything. It’s just they came and spray painted on the on the houses like at Slilo Falls, took an inventory and that was it. We’ve never we’ve never received our Columbia River housing. And you know, for the villages that were flooded, it’s just like your house is gone, you have.

00:47:41
Speaker 2: They’ve painted the ones that were going to be underwater.

00:47:44
Speaker 4: Yeah, just took an inventory and then people had no choice but to move to the reservation or drown.

00:47:50
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:47:51
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah. And it’s funny even me realizing that now, Like you know, I was born on the reservation and Topish and I lived at my grandparents house. But I was even as just as an adult a couple of years ago, I realized, like that wasn’t my grandpa’s home. My grandpa was born, born and raised in at Salilo and he went to the war. It’s so funny. Like my grandpa’s older sister, she used to tell us this story, and even as an older lady, she would cry about it. It still gets to me. She was born with cataracts, so she was legally blind and so she couldn’t help do all the work. So she took care of my grandpa. And she said, one day, Salilo, the government, the military, police, everything, they just pulled in with cattle trucks and they took the children by force and took them to a boarding school. And she said people were beaten, arrested, And she said that she held on to him and was dragged across the ground, crying, no, don’t take him as just a baby, and she cried as an adult that she said, if I could have just held them a little longer, maybe they would have gave up.

00:49:09
Speaker 2: Then he went on to fight in the war.

00:49:12
Speaker 4: Yeah, he was four years old, taken to the boarding school in Warm Springs, Oregon. He didn’t get to come home for two years, and that was only because they were moving them to the boarding school at Fort Simcoe, which is on the Yakama Reservation. And then he was there through like elementary school, and then he got shipped to Chamaua, which is in Oregon. That’s a high school, you know, boarding school, high school. He graduated from there when he was seventeen and then he enlisted in the Navy and fought in World War Two.

00:49:47
Speaker 2: You kidding me? Yeah, and his home now sits underwater.

00:49:51
Speaker 4: That’s the home that he came back to from the war.

00:49:55
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know what I was talking about, the con inflicks between like white dudes at fish and the perspective that native people’s are taking fish. It’s like everybody’s fighting over crumbs. In some regions, everybody’s fighting over crumbs and they don’t even know what happened. Like if it’s bread crumbs, they don’t know what happened.

00:50:17
Speaker 2: To the loaf of bread.

00:50:18
Speaker 1: There’s you know what I mean, it’s just gone and now they’re going to like fight for crumbs. And one of the ways that that like fighting for crumbs and it’s it’s I guess it’s important because if once those crumbs are gone, everything’s gone. You know, to think about like in terms of fish, right they if we lose the fish, if you lose all the memory of the fish and all the runs and all the historic areas, it’s less that you can build up someday when you get it back together. But what turned me on to even wanting to talk to you guys is this idea and Heather, my friend Heather Duville sent me some links about it was was like the sea lion issue, and I want to talk about that for a minute, or have you guys explained the sea line issue for a minute just to sort of demonstrate this idea of that to fix the problem is like impossible, seemingly impossible damn removal.

00:51:10
Speaker 2: It’s so hard, and so you.

00:51:13
Speaker 1: Got to look like, well, that’s what would really like there’s these huge things that would occur and you could slowly rebuild the whole thing, but in the meantime you got to like fight for crumbs. And it’s even gotten what we’re fighting for crumbs with sea lions. Can you talk about that issue a bit, like how sea lions play into this thing?

00:51:33
Speaker 3: Yeah? Sure, So sea lions were heavily managed in the late eighteen hundreds and then from like nineteen fifteen or so to nineteen seventy into Columbia. There’s a bounty on sea lions bounty and a sea lion hunter. So the Oregon Fish Commission hired a guy that would shoot sea lions and cut their ears off and then get paid by how many sea lions he took care of.

00:52:01
Speaker 6: And that was specifically to protect the salmon room.

00:52:04
Speaker 3: Protect the salmon exactly. So that was the management that went on. And in that era of the early seventies when all of the environmental laws got passed, you know, you had the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act is passed in seventy two, and marine mammals were in terrible shape. I mean it was really necessary. California sea lions were around twenty twenty five thousand coastwide, so it’s managed as a single stock. It ranges from Baja California up to Lower BC. So that stock was twenty or twenty five thousand animals. Now there’s close to three hundred thousand animals and it’s at caring capacity. So the Marine Mammal Protection Act protected marine mammals. If you were a marine mammals.

00:52:56
Speaker 2: That can’t protect effectively man.

00:52:57
Speaker 3: Yeah, and super successful, right, But what wasn’t part of the all in and you know you had uh, sea otters, whales, all kinds of polar bears, all kinds of things that are super depressed, and there wasn’t any thought put into management. You know, it’s like we’re going to lose them. We need to protect them. And it worked really really well on some populations like California sea lions. I mean they’re way past recovered. They’re at carrying capacity. It’s the classic S curve. It’s plateaued. We’re at at carraning capacity for sea lions coast wide.

00:53:37
Speaker 2: Is there is there any talk a dlisting?

00:53:39
Speaker 3: Oh, they’re not well. See, it’s different exactly. So if you’re a marine, mamma, you’re protected. Period.

00:53:48
Speaker 2: We’ve talked. We’ve talked about there’s no management.

00:53:51
Speaker 3: There’s no management provision at all.

00:53:53
Speaker 1: We’ve talked about this a bunch of times in different management things. We’re talking about the other day. I can’t remember what and what context, but ways in which something gets so bad you can’t picture it getting better, and then you draft regulation like that like the wild hoor always point out the Wildhorse and Borrow Protection Act. Things get so bad you draft regulation because you can’t picture the future ramifications, and then you wind up laying and you’re like, damn man, we should have thought of that.

00:54:23
Speaker 8: Yeah. It’s like it’s like the sea otters up on Pow you know that have exploded.

00:54:28
Speaker 1: People like, well, they’ll never be abundant, why even make a provision for abundance.

00:54:33
Speaker 3: Yeah, and I mean it’s just hard to see over the horizon, right, I mean you see what’s there and it’s like it couldn’t happen. It gives you hope though for salmon, Right, maybe maybe we can do this.

00:54:43
Speaker 2: But then, what’s a good point. Man? With the Ballard locks up.

00:54:47
Speaker 3: You know, the the inlet or the outlet of Lake Washington in the in the eighties, all of a sudden, sea lions started showing up at the Ballard locks there in Herschel if you remember that, there’s these particular California sea lions started praying on the steel Head run going into the Ballard locks.

00:55:07
Speaker 2: But they figured it out.

00:55:08
Speaker 3: They figured it out. Yeah, and you’ve got this growing population. They’re expanding right to different places where they where they really haven’t been in years and years because there’s no management, and they they’re decimating the winter steel Heead run in Lake Washington.

00:55:26
Speaker 2: Well, that triggered legislation.

00:55:28
Speaker 3: Then to finally amend the Marine Mental Protection Act, and they finally got that done in ninety four and it was Section one twenty that they put into the act. So this was management it’s only on sea lions, and it’s that they have to be individually identifiable and they have to be shown to have a significant negative impact on listed salmon populations. And if you can meet that criteria and you have a permit, you can remove that sea lion.

00:55:58
Speaker 8: So it was like, we know this one’s a bad egg.

00:56:01
Speaker 3: We got to get rid of him, right, and how do you know, how do you know what that sea line is? Well, you got to catch him, and you got to put a brand on him, and you’ve got to have an observer there that sees him eating a fish. Then you got to get then you got to trap him again and euthanize him, you know. And so it’s very tough. And that was the one was not successful. At the Ballard Locks. The still a population when extinct before really before the legislation was passed extinct, Yeah they’re gone. So then Bonneville Dams could put yeah, yeah it’s gone. And now there’s actually a current problem another problem which is soak run in Lake Washington and it’s going down that same that same round, and the only thing to manage there is this section one twenty. So they would have to to get you know, uh, they’d have to submit an application to to National Marine Fishery Service to get a permit through this one twenty.

00:57:04
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that’s all to do with the ballard locks. That’s best, not even the Columbia.

00:57:07
Speaker 3: That’s not the Columbia.

00:57:08
Speaker 1: Because in the Columbia system, I don’t know this is true. I was reading the sea lions take more fish than humans. Yeah, where are they doing that? Because I mean they’re not getting past dams, right.

00:57:23
Speaker 3: So what happened in about two thousand, Uh, we started seeing sea lions at Bonnville Dam, at the tail race of Bonville Dam, and it was just a few how far up the river is that? One hundred and forty five miles?

00:57:36
Speaker 2: Wow, those suns of bitches swim that far the ocean.

00:57:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I’ve got all kinds of stories. We’ve trapped, we’ve radio tracked them, and they will they’ll go back to Astoria and back upstream two or three times in a year. It takes them just a couple of days.

00:57:52
Speaker 2: Are you serious?

00:57:53
Speaker 3: There they are?

00:57:54
Speaker 2: They’re they’re pretty remarkable animals. One hundred and forty miles up the river. Yeah, dude, anymal lick of salt?

00:58:01
Speaker 3: Yeah?

00:58:01
Speaker 2: No, no, Well then this problem. Once these animals.

00:58:05
Speaker 3: Saw, hey, this is this is the buffet, right, Because you’ve got this concentration of fish at the tail race. They’re trying to find the sea ladder or the fish ladder entrances, and so they’re congregating. You get a collection of fish, and the sea lions find that and it’s like this is great. They come back every year, they bring their buddies. They become habituated with it, and they start taking out a whole bunch of fish. So then the corp of engineers who runs.

00:58:35
Speaker 2: The dam, I gotta I gotta back up on that. This is an unanswerable question.

00:58:42
Speaker 1: A sea lion, like a sea lion, goes way to hel up the river, like a pioneer sea lion, because way up the river he’s like, holy smokes, this is the promised land, right, and he goes back down at some point.

00:58:57
Speaker 2: No one will know.

00:58:57
Speaker 1: No one can answer this. How how is it conveyed? Like how does it convey to another sea lion?

00:59:07
Speaker 2: You know what I mean? Where Billy was. Honey bees have that deal. Honey bees have that deal. When they come back and they have they have like a thing they do. People call it a dance and they don’t, you know, they don’t perceive it as a dance. I’m sure, but.

00:59:20
Speaker 1: Honey bees come back and they have a movement pattern that says, I’m into it, heavy duty piling that way.

00:59:29
Speaker 8: Couldn’t it just be like a generation Like it’s like generational learning, like.

00:59:34
Speaker 2: Your kids offspring, Yeah, you bring offspring.

00:59:36
Speaker 6: Yeah, you bring your mate. Yeah, then you bring your offspring.

00:59:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, because your mate’s like, what are they doing?

00:59:42
Speaker 1: I a film follow them just like it’s so hard to like imagine by the mechanism by which you come back and then there’s more. But yeah, like you just bring your offspring than some generations down the road. Everybody knows what’s the honey pot.

00:59:56
Speaker 3: These these sea lions that go to Bonneville Dam are like the big sea lions that have been recorded, so a California sea lione. And it’s only males. So the biology really is the female state. They stay down in the rookeries that are mainly in the in the Channel islands in California, so the off Santa Barbara. So that’s where the females stay and they don’t venture out of there. They stay very close to those islands.

01:00:25
Speaker 1: The males that are going one hundred and forty miles up the Columbia are breeding with females in the Channel Islands.

01:00:31
Speaker 2: Amazing.

01:00:31
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, wow, yeah, So what it is.

01:00:35
Speaker 8: It’s like me telling I found this really good hunting spot. You want to come and check it out with me?

01:00:40
Speaker 2: You can’t, but you can’t talk though, but.

01:00:42
Speaker 8: Obviously they talk.

01:00:45
Speaker 3: So there’s photos of them at the rookeries, like on sam Miguill Island where there’s a male sea lion, male sea lion, and then all of a sudden there’s this gigantic male sea lion. Oh the brand on him. He was a monoville. Really. Oh yeah, we have animals that we had captured, branded and then recaptured two months I think it was two months later, a month and a half later, and it gained four hundred pounds.

01:01:10
Speaker 7: Whoa, that’s a lot of salmon.

01:01:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s a lot of fish, and they do have So this is the spring of the year. California sea lions arrive at Bonneville early April, and then by the end of May they leave and they go because then it’s it’s time to go to the breeding grounds. So they leave the system and the stellar sea lions that are there now, which is a newer story. They also leave the system by the end of May, and then the California sea lions show up back up the next the next April.

01:01:40
Speaker 2: Okay, what are they feeding on specifically when they get there that time of year.

01:01:43
Speaker 3: At Bonneville Spring Chinook? Yeah, spring Chinook is the big that’s the big one, and a little bit of There’s probably some steel head around as well, but it’s primarily primarily spring Chinook. They also eat sturgeon that lower the Columbia River. The lower Columbia sturgeon population has really gone down and a lot of those would come up in a big congregating area would be the tail race of Bonneville, and they just got decimated by sea lions.

01:02:13
Speaker 8: So they don’t No, this is like a two part question. Those sea lions don’t have any impact on like non native game fish that are in there now, like walleye and small mouth And then what kind of impact are the walleye and small mouth bass having on salmon as well?

01:02:31
Speaker 2: Yeah, so.

01:02:34
Speaker 3: They’re opportunistic feeders, right, So whatever is the most about it, that’s what they’re gonna eat. And a sea lion that’s at the ocean is going to have a really diverse diet, and then the further up river they go, the more salmon centric their diet is. And when they get to Bonneville, it’s they’re eating depending on time, they’re eating salmon, steelhead primarily, they’re eating sturgeon now and then, and then they’re eating some lamprey as well. And that’s really it. We we see a few other things. You’ll see sucker, maybe an occasional walleye or whatever.

01:03:06
Speaker 8: But do you that you guys view that like walleye and smallmouth as a big problem for salmon or is.

01:03:13
Speaker 9: It more like larger predators like sea lions, way and smallmouth or a problem for sure, and it’s probably a bigger problem upstream of Bonneville.

01:03:23
Speaker 4: Cut in the reservoirs.

01:03:25
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:03:26
Speaker 1: The thing with the sea lion issue that I hadn’t really put the thought of before, But I mean, that’s almost that’s almost a dam problem, Like the dam is creating the fishery for the sea lions, yep, because it’s creating a holding pen form where they can’t get.

01:03:42
Speaker 3: Past right right. And and like you brought up Lewis and Clark when they went through Salilo they they talk about seeing foca. Well they’d never seen a sea lion, so they thought it was a seal. That was what they called seals. Oh, so they were okay, they ran into the way up the hell so they ran into them there and they were in October, right late September, early October at Soalilo.

01:04:04
Speaker 2: And.

01:04:06
Speaker 3: They shot one but they were but they weren’t able to collect it. So they were trying to document it and stuff.

01:04:13
Speaker 2: But so they had historically used the resource.

01:04:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, so our tribal members are certain that they came up there in the fishery. They took care of the of the problem. The sea lions didn’t stay long as a competitor there.

01:04:29
Speaker 2: Through the archaeological stuff.

01:04:30
Speaker 3: That they’ve done, they do find sea lion bones, but not in huge numbers. So they probably had hunts that would go down to get sea lions occasionally or trade or something. But there isn’t It isn’t like salmon bones that you just see everywhere.

01:04:47
Speaker 2: So it wasn’t a.

01:04:50
Speaker 3: Nowhere near as important as like salmon or something.

01:04:52
Speaker 8: Like the competition factor when you’ve got fifteen million salmon, like there’s room for the sea lions to take exactly yeah, you know, yeah.

01:05:01
Speaker 2: You say the stellars are coming up there too, They’re coming from the north. Yeah.

01:05:05
Speaker 3: So, so as the plot thickens and the story goes on, by the states of Oregon and Washington put in for this one to twenty permit to remove animals at Bonneville.

01:05:15
Speaker 2: About the animal rights people love that shit.

01:05:18
Speaker 3: It was it was a challenge, yeah, and they got it. They got to permit in eight and that was after documenting the presence of these animals for a long time, and they’re how many animals are there, how many fish are they eating, how many days are they staying there, all of that stuff. All that information was necessary to get the permit. As soon as they got the permit, then Stellar seed so they got to permit to remove California Sea lions. And then two years later Stellar sea lions are in bigger numbers at Bonneville than California Sea lions. And what had happened. Stellars are gigantic, Stellar male and again it’s males only, and they’ll go they’ll go a ton.

01:06:00
Speaker 8: Can you for people who don’t know the difference, can you explain, like where the stellars are coming from and versus the California.

01:06:06
Speaker 5: Want.

01:06:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, So California sea lions range from British Columbia to southern part of Baja and the rookeries are primarily in Baja and along California. And then you got a couple of little places at California or along Oregon coast, but that’s it. Stellar sea lions are more northern, so they will range down into California, but they’ll go up into British Columbia, probably up into Alaska. And you have them, and you haven’t broke into two stocks. This is the Eastern stock, which is like the one hundred and forty fourth latitude. Anything that’s east of the one hundred and forty fourth degree latitude is the Eastern stock is stellar sea lions. Those are the ones that we’re getting at Bonneville. To the west of that are the ones that are.

01:06:52
Speaker 2: Up in.

01:06:55
Speaker 3: Southeast Alaska off the Illusions and then further up.

01:06:58
Speaker 2: So those dudes aren’t calling all the way down to the Columbia.

01:07:01
Speaker 3: No, they’re not, and they’re not in very good shape. They’re they’re listed at they’re a listed species. Those Western stock the Eastern rock that the Eastern stock, I’ll just think of that rock the Eastern stock was listed as threatened and then we’re delisted by twenty thirteen, twenty twelve thirteen. So that was why they You couldn’t even if even if they’d have been showing up at Bonneville, that would have been on the permit. We never states never would have got a permit to remove them because they were listed. Now they’re now they’re unlisted and they are part of the removal program.

01:07:39
Speaker 2: Now, oh, I want to get to that program.

01:07:41
Speaker 1: I got one that little technical question you mentioned earlier, catching them and branding them yep, he explaining that catching them how and branding them how?

01:07:49
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the way we catch them is a trap. That’s a dock. It’s like a sixteen by sixteen square foot dock with chain link fence around it, a big chain link fan, and then like a gate that’s on a guillotine type thing and you can hold it up with an electronic device to trigger so we can remotely drop that gate. You wait for sea lions to get on that track. No, so they just haul out, so they want a place to rest, and so you’re looking for places for them to haul out, and so that’s the that’s part of the trap. Is you gotta you gotta set these traps where they’ve been hauling out where you think you can get them to use, and then they get accustomed to it and they’ll haul out and then you’ll drop the drop the trap, and then we have a barge with these transfer cages. You go up against it, against that trap, open the doors, run them into that transfer cage.

01:08:45
Speaker 2: He probably, Yeah, how do they react when you walk up to him?

01:08:49
Speaker 5: So?

01:08:49
Speaker 3: Stellar sea lions can be pretty ornery. They don’t, Yeah, they don’t take to it real well. California sea lions are pretty pretty docile. They will, they’ll move around. You could get in there with a piece of plywood in front and you could kind of hurt them, but nobody would do that with a Stellar sea lion right there. They’re big. I mean, it’s a two thousand pound animal that’s pissed. In fact, we’re taught now we put these arrays. So we take these sixteen by sixteen traps and we put three of them together. A couple of times we had single traps and you’d get three or four or five Stellar sea lions in there, and then they’d start doing the WWF and they’d roll the trap over so, yeah, they’re they’re big.

01:09:36
Speaker 2: And then you branded them with a cattle brand. Yeah what’s the brand?

01:09:41
Speaker 3: Uh so a ladder up there at c and then a number different locations. There’s branding programs at different places. And the states used the state of Oregon used to brand at Astoria. So there’s there’s animals from there, there’s you know, all these different places where studies have been done. They have kind of a coding system. Where do you hit them on the hip, right on the back, across the back? How long do they live?

01:10:07
Speaker 8: Like are you seeing the same ones.

01:10:08
Speaker 3: Year after year after year after right? So adult these are these are mature adults that we see primarily. We do see occasionally a few smaller sea lions now, but they’ll live. They can live, you know, like in captivity they might live to be in their twenties, but they’ll probably in the wild maybe fifteen.

01:10:29
Speaker 1: And how many like at peak spring Chinook run, how many are in that dam or at the foot of that dam?

01:10:37
Speaker 2: How many sea lions?

01:10:38
Speaker 3: So from the observation program that the corp of Engineers does, the highest observed consumption was ten thousand fish that they saw that they documented being eaten.

01:10:50
Speaker 2: There in a tail race, and what does that mean over how much time.

01:10:54
Speaker 3: That’s over the spring, So that’s April through mid.

01:10:58
Speaker 2: Mid May to little they’ll see ten thousand.

01:11:01
Speaker 3: And that’s cherry pick and that’s the top that’s the top number. But that were represented almost five percent of the spring chinook run that was going over the dam.

01:11:10
Speaker 2: Okay, so you’re losing five percent to sea lions.

01:11:12
Speaker 3: Yeah, well that’s within this quarter of a mile that you can see from the face of the dam and do the observations.

01:11:20
Speaker 5: UH.

01:11:20
Speaker 3: National Marine Fishery Service has done studies in the Lower River where they put pit tags in them, so that’s you know, that’s the way we track salmon in the Columbia and it’s basically the same things that you getting your dog UH to track them. And there’s a huge program in the Columbia where they these pit tags go over antennas. It activates the antenna and records the numbers, so they’re all individually numbered, so we know any any salmon that we’ve put a tag and we know by by individual and at all of the dam ladders, like at Bonneville, we get have pit tag detectors, so when they crossed the dam, we we know it. So they captured these by gilmetting in the lower river down by Astoria. National Maune Fishery Service would capture these fish, put pit tags in them this is spring chinook, and then release those fish and also took genetic samples and with the genetic samples, we could figure out what their origin was, so you could subtract off any fish that were going to lower river tributaries. Also, harvest is highly regulated and we know what the harvest estimates are for each week, so subtract off harvest, and then you have the number of fish that you tag that should go over Bonneville. And in the biggest year, which was twenty fifteen, the biggest loss, fifty percent of the spring chinook run was lost between Astoria and Bonneville. And that’s peer reviewed publication. Fifty percent attributed to sea lions. And so we had a two hundred thousand fish were eaten by sea lions. Two hundred thousand fish cross Bona. That’s the largest springs nook run we’ve seen in decades.

01:13:05
Speaker 8: Going back to what Steve said, how many sea lions are consuming two hundred thousand salmon?

01:13:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, it’s crazy. It’s ballpark it’s not that many, right, you know that are at Bonneville. It’s like I think a couple of years we’ve maybe seen two hundred a little over two hundred individuals, so it isn’t huge. And the animals that have been from this group of branded animals, there’s a big haul outside at Astoria called the East Morning Basin and will cite animals there, and then the ones that you’ll see at Bonneville or at Wi Land at Falls another place where they congregate similar situation with sea lions. It’s only about seven percent of that branded population go that far up, but that seven come back every year just like you’re talking.

01:14:00
Speaker 2: But they habituate. There’s faithful as the salmon man.

01:14:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, well, once they’ve locked into it, they come back and we’ll see them multiple years, three, four or five years.

01:14:10
Speaker 7: But so the tribal rights, because it seems like sometimes they can trump other laws and rules and rags. But I’m guessing that doesn’t work in this case, to trump the Marine Protect Mammal Protection Act.

01:14:25
Speaker 4: Yeah, because of the Act. And that’s what I’ve been talking about, is all.

01:14:29
Speaker 2: You guys don’t have harvest rights on sea lions.

01:14:31
Speaker 4: No, because historically they didn’t come back in those those numbers, and they’re not coming above Well, we have a few that come above Bonneville Dam that where our gilnet fisheries are only above Bonneville Dam in the Zone six fishing area, and so we don’t we don’t harvest them. Like the big numbers are the Lower River and how you said the sea lions are a down problem, Well it goes beyond just the problem when they’re using that entire stretch of the Lower River from Astoria. One year at Astoria, what he was talking about that east mooring basin, I think there were was it ten thousand, eight thousand, It was a.

01:15:13
Speaker 3: Right around four thousand, Yeah, at the East Morning Basin. In the East Morning Basin, it’s not very big, you know, it went from the early two thousands. There would be a couple of hundred a year and they do counts every day on these and they’d haul out on the docks. The East Morning Basin is not used anymore. Used to be commercial vessels there as well as recreational, and it was taken over by sea lions basically.

01:15:37
Speaker 1: Well, but I think what Yanni’s asking is like picture that, Like, for instance, I have more familiarity with regulatory structure in Alaska. But there are cases where you have NOAH administered species. You have like US and Fish Wildlife Service administered species, whatever you have like tribal harvest rights where like you know they can harvest, they can harvest walrus, they can harvest whale species.

01:16:12
Speaker 5: Right.

01:16:13
Speaker 2: The things that would be off often is everybody else.

01:16:16
Speaker 1: If if you’re if the inner tribal group on the Columbia, like if you wanted to, you wouldn’t have the authority of just saying we’re going to do sea lion control on our own because we’re not beholden to we’re not beholden to EESA, or we’re not behold in the marine mammal Protection actly, you don’t have that ability that you don’t have that legal ability just to take it into your own hands.

01:16:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, we actually have. You know, Yakma has written their own resolution right, which is a tribal law that the taking of sea lions to protect life and property. And it was funny I actually ended up in that situation where I fish by the city of the Dalls. There was an animal. There was a boat basin right where people have houseboats and whatnot. Well, there was one that was actually living on a dock in there and those people were feeding it. It was there for a couple of years, right, it wouldn’t leave, and it was I’d be running my nets and it would be swimming back and forth right next to me. And you know, they had passed that resolution and my supervisor at the time was like, you could shoot it, and I was like, yeah, that would be real good optics yacumanation fish biologists, and I don’t want to end up in court for the next ten years. I didn’t want to be the test case on it. But in hindsight, maybe I should have. Yeah, I could have. But those types of things are happening. But like I said, the animals aren’t up where we gillnet. They’re down below, so it would be hard for us to and we still have those laws in place. But you know, and a lot of it is just being good co managers. Right, we don’t want to you know, we want to.

01:17:53
Speaker 2: Work together with you don’t want to, yeah, on that kind of thing.

01:17:56
Speaker 4: Yeah, because there’s so many other issues, like we talked about death by a thou and cuts. Right, this predation the sea lion is a huge impact, but there’s tons of other things that we work together on. Yeah, so just pushing it.

01:18:09
Speaker 1: If you make too much smoke around the sea lion issue and you create like a bad optic situation, it could impact you addressing.

01:18:16
Speaker 2: All of the other issues that are making the problem.

01:18:19
Speaker 4: In funding as well. Just because you get the permit doesn’t mean that you’re getting any funding that comes from appropriations and things like that. Is so this the program that we have, like how Doug’s explaining the trapping and it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian and things like that, So it’s really inefficient, like because there’s that’s in the act right that it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian. Like it would be so much easier if you had it and you could just shoot it. You know, that’s humane as well, like rather than dragging them through all of that, yeah, like torture before leading them to their death. And you know, it’s really inefficient the laws that are put upon us to be able to do this work, Like we could be doing a lot more like darting. You could dart to euthanize, but then you have to be able to recover the animal as well. So it’s like you have no choice put to trap. And you know, like you said, you see the same animals and as I was mentioning too, like it’s not just a dawn problem anymore. That’s why I brought up how many come to the mouth astoria. There are thousands there, but they’re learning traits, like when we have smelt runs returning, when we have sizeable smelt runs coming up, and you know, historically they were in the lower tributaries and a lot come back to the Cowlitz River. Well, the sea lions follow the smelt up to the Cowlitz River, and they’ll be hundreds, like five hundred plus sea lions at the mouth of the Cowlitz beating on the smell, which are also threatened as well.

01:20:04
Speaker 2: And there is a zilt narrow down on something that’s small.

01:20:08
Speaker 4: I don’t know that, and so they follow up the smell. They hang around there. When the smelt run trickles off, then they can move upstream, like to the Lewis River and eat you know, juvenile celmonids leaving the system. And then by then it’s time to head up to Bonneville because you have spring schnook coming, so they’re exploiting that whole stretch of the Lower River and the removal program starts at the I two five bridge up to McNary Dam, so it’s really site specific. We don’t have the ability or the flexibility to address to these changing needs. For one, we don’t have funding. It’s largely underfunded. There’s so much red tape and how you do things it’s inefficient, and we don’t have the ability to react and take action where it’s necessary. Like Doug said about that that still had population and ballard locks going extinct. You know, the same thing could happen with their sake, same thing could happen with ours, and there’s no hierarchy. There’s no act amongst the Act about how the MMPA plays into the ESA. And another whole can of worms is the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Right, you have huge avian impacts of goals and things like that that are eating like up to seventy percent of juveniles still had leaving the system.

01:21:29
Speaker 3: Are goals yeah, yeah, goals, cormorants yeah.

01:21:35
Speaker 4: And then now we have pelicans too that are feeding on adult sake. Like I mentioned that year that we had the eight hundred thousand returning past Bonneville, the majority going to like Okanagant. Half of them died because that year there was also a heat dome, warm lethal temperatures. There were swimming zombies and pelicans just eating them like crazy. We have pelicans that are resident in the Columbia there, it’s like a couple thousand breeding pairs. Right, It’s it’s a ton. They don’t leave the system anymore, and you.

01:22:12
Speaker 1: Can’t just go out and start doing control measures. I know, I guess cormorants are delisted at least some times.

01:22:18
Speaker 3: They’re all protected.

01:22:18
Speaker 4: They’re all protected under the microprograt.

01:22:22
Speaker 2: But there’s places where there are form rant like there’s squished your nasts and shit.

01:22:26
Speaker 4: You know, yeah, it takes so much to get that to that, Like you wouldn’t even think the seagulls you see everywhere at dumps and at places eating French fries, right, how protected they are. There’s rocks like by Island in the mid Columbia, right, it’s called Miller Island, and it’s just the outcropping of rocks where there’s this goal colony that I think it was like they were attributed to eating Mid Columbia Steelhead thirty one percent of the juveniles out migrating from that one colony. And we are still working in that process, Like you have to do so much effort of non lethal hazing where we’re using like boom cannons and the next year we used the falcon and then finally we were able to do some lethal take and able to oil like some eggs and things like that. But when you do those things, you’re just playing whackable. You’re just moving, yeah, somewhere else. So there’s really are no ability to manage even on that.

01:23:28
Speaker 2: And so yeah, that river would flow with blood. Man if you just needed to get rid of everything there was eating, but everything that was eating sane.

01:23:36
Speaker 8: Well’s the thing is fish always kind of get the short straw when like you can’t be shooting birds that people like to watch or sea lions that people liked, you know.

01:23:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, so that’s the the biggest thing. There’s no act amongst the acts. There’s no hierarchy. How do we we have these species, these fish that are on the brink of extinction and these sea lions that are exceeding carrying capacity. That’s why they’re moving to find other food sources and like looking at the future with sea level rise and change and everything. That was what Doug’s been working on with Noah National Marine Fishery Service as well, looking at impacts to the juvenile out migration. That’s what he says. They eat a lot more French fries than we ever imagined.

01:24:24
Speaker 2: Hm. So are you guys involved in the my I have an older brother, he’s in his early eighties.

01:24:35
Speaker 1: He’s been turning in. He fishes the Columbia every day in the summer. He’s been turning in. You know, he’s been doing a lot of boy hunting on northern on the Pike mentals. Right, what’s the story with that? Are you guys involved in that?

01:24:50
Speaker 3: We’re We’re not peripherally, but I mean Washington State of Washington is the one that runs that program.

01:24:58
Speaker 1: Is that Is that like productive that just like Tidley winks like, is that you think it’s just pissing in the wind or.

01:25:06
Speaker 4: Yeah, because when you have a bounty like that, you have people exploiting it, right, And I think there was somebody that was growing some you.

01:25:14
Speaker 1: Know, and some dudes you’re clearing one hundred thousand bucks a year. He’s not he was telling me he recently had a check for seventy.

01:25:22
Speaker 3: Some dollars.

01:25:26
Speaker 8: Covered his gas.

01:25:28
Speaker 2: It’s just primarily a small mouth fisherman, but he likes to make a little side. Yeah, Northern Pikes.

01:25:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, and with that being an actual native species, just the you know, the change in the reservoir system. But I think we’re getting a lot bigger issue on the predation from the warm water fish, the bass and walleye.

01:25:48
Speaker 2: Oh, like there’s more that’s doing more damage in northern Pike mentals.

01:25:52
Speaker 3: Probably.

01:25:52
Speaker 1: And then I got buddies, like, God bless them. I got buddies that like to fish. Those like to fish. Small mom out there.

01:26:00
Speaker 2: They’re all up in arms about people pointing the finger at small mouth.

01:26:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s because it’s like the crumb fight, dude. The crumb fight is a complex crumb fight.

01:26:09
Speaker 8: Why would you want to get rid of this beautiful game?

01:26:12
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.

01:26:12
Speaker 3: And then you have these gigantic walleye that they’re catching up there around you Matilla area, right, And so it’s attracting people to come there to catch these big walleye. Well, a big walleye eats a lot of smolts.

01:26:25
Speaker 1: Yeah, there’s probably some group like walleye fishermen in the Columbia know it’s like fighting to like preserve the walleye or.

01:26:31
Speaker 4: Whatever, you know, up and down it is and that’s a big issue. Like and then you have the fishing guides, right they say, well, that’s our that’s our off season from salmon. Is like restore the salmon. Then you’d have a lot more salmon openings. Like they show those big walleye and they cut them open and there’s like tons of smolts in them, and multiply that this guy.

01:26:53
Speaker 2: Your big walleye got, you can have them get. You know what shows that mind frame is like totally different water system, but you’re familiar here. We have the Yellowstone Park. You know, Yellowstone Lake had a.

01:27:09
Speaker 1: At some point in time they put lake trout in there, which real detrimental to the cutthroats.

01:27:16
Speaker 3: And so.

01:27:18
Speaker 1: At one point they like made it that I think it was mandatory retention. You know, if you caught it, you had to kill it. I had a buddy he lived here in town years ago. He would love that go up there and fish, and I remember I was asking about it and he’s like, yeah, I like to hit it, but I’m always conscious to not damage the resource of the lake trout because like people just get that’s just how people’s minds work, you know, And you go out and you catch some big old small mouth and then it’s just.

01:27:48
Speaker 2: You know, there’s like a certain human adaptability. I guess man like people, maybe you.

01:27:53
Speaker 1: Get where you get where you get fatalistic or pessimistic or something, and you get where, we’re not gonna the salmon. Things not going to get fixed. And I love the fish and they’re not going to fix that. So I’m here for small mouth. I’m here for walleye and that’ll have to That’ll do. That’ll do for me.

01:28:16
Speaker 6: I much try to see the one hundred pounds chinooks I’m saying.

01:28:20
Speaker 1: I’m just trying to get into the like you know what I mean, Like that’s probably without thinking about it, that’s where people ride.

01:28:26
Speaker 8: Plus you’re like you’ve created a recreational fishery that never existed before, so people jump on it.

01:28:32
Speaker 7: You know, you do we know how and stop me if I’m going to jump ahead too much. But I gotta get this question.

01:28:39
Speaker 2: You can ask, why can’t we just get rid of all the damnsus?

01:28:42
Speaker 7: No, it is damn related, But do we know how now with all of our knowledge to do hydro electric power and salmon simultaneously.

01:28:53
Speaker 6: Oh, it is there.

01:28:55
Speaker 7: It’s technologically yeah, has someone figured out how to do it, but we just don’t have the funds to do it. Like, is there a way to make these things not be part of the central you know system of the river where like the nature could still do its thing, but offset from that you’d have hydroelectric power.

01:29:13
Speaker 3: We keep it.

01:29:14
Speaker 4: It’s ever changing goalposts, right, there’s no limit or there’s no oversight of carrying capacity. It’s always more like we could be we could have there’s room for salmon and the Northwest, you know, in the environment with this amount of electricity and that spill, right, having spill keeping the river or river and not just you know, the way they want to operate it for the grid stability is to turn it off and on like a like a battery like a light switch, and which is unnatural. You know, like you have you know, your peak loading and things like that for to support industry and and things like that, so that that’s what’s really damaging. You don’t have the spill to flush out the the juvenile salmon because that’s.

01:30:02
Speaker 2: Just when spring runoff.

01:30:04
Speaker 4: Ok and then even in the even in the summertime, right like late spring when when fish are moving out, like the journey that used to take two weeks now takes two months and they’ve expended so many of their resources before they even get to the ocean that survival decreases. And the same thing when adults are returning. You have you know, the temperature the Columbia is warming earlier and earlier every year, so that you know you have it’s reaching sixty eight degrees like days earlier. We have a chart that I could share with you over time of when you’re reaching these lethal temperatures. And that’s why we have dying sokki now. Before we used to be seeing those getting up to the lethal temperatures in the fall, but then you’d get fall rains that would cool it back down. But you’re not seeing that anymore. So it’s just a lot. That’s why the litigation has been there for so many years is because it’s hydro operations is the huge factor in survival.

01:31:05
Speaker 1: But is there a like however, you measure the amount of electricity Okay, like take any particular dam and you measure how much what are they measured as what is a dam measured as it puts off blank megawatts?

01:31:19
Speaker 2: Okay?

01:31:21
Speaker 1: To Tiani’s point, be like, if you take a dam and it produces one hundred megawatts, I don’t know what tell one hundred megawatts?

01:31:28
Speaker 2: Would you know?

01:31:29
Speaker 1: Would an engineer now look and go like, oh man, nowadays I could give you one hundred megawatts without all that, or I could give you one hundred megawatts with a much better fish passage system were we to start from scratch, you, I mean, like, is there ways of which there’s an engineering solution? And I always saying like that that were they’re constantly asking for more and more and more megawatts. But if there weren’t, just theoretically, if they weren’t asking for more megawatts, could you get it all in a way that wasn’t so damaging to the fish?

01:32:03
Speaker 2: Now that we have.

01:32:06
Speaker 1: All these technological advancements that have occurred since nineteen fifty.

01:32:10
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, that’s tough to do so and all of them are different, right. Wells Dam, which is one of the the highest passable dam on the Columbia, has what they call a hydro combined so the spillway it sits and then underneath it is the pin stocks for the powerhouse, Well, they’re the attraction flow for the pins is all in one place and you can kind of direct your fish up into the spillway and get them over other places. You’ve got the spillway a quarter of a mile away from where the powerhouse is. Some of them are built at and Eld, you know, I mean they’re every one of them is a different place because they had to be to put them in those locations. And so I think it would be like the complete tear down and rebuild. So the infrastructure cost would be huge. And unless unless Nerve starts making turbines, there isn’t really a way to do it, you know.

01:33:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, So there’s not like retro fitting and things. It’s just they build them and that’s what they are.

01:33:10
Speaker 3: They’re better and better, they’re updating.

01:33:14
Speaker 4: We just visited. I toured John Day Dam recently, which is I think the lere third largest power producer. They have Grand Cooley, Bonnaville and then John Day. And the size of the turbans are huge. Like you go in there, like the dam doesn’t look that big when you’re driving, but the width of it those turbans in there, I think they’re like sixty or ninety foot diameter, Like that’s how big, and they’re like thirty feet tall. Like there’s one that’s needed repairs. They had it lifted, you could see it. They’ve been doing repairs on it for ten years. And they were saying that that one’s the next one schedule to be updated with this newer turbine that they have at Bonneville, and that’s supposed to be you know, more fish safe and.

01:34:00
Speaker 2: Fish cause these are literally killed. They’re they’re literally hitting fish and killing them.

01:34:04
Speaker 4: Yeah, what but that but just going on the scale is like I had to physically see it to understand, Like my god, these things are massive in the amount of money. Like there sed that project schedules to start in I think he said twenty thirty cost several billion dollars and take twenty years to complete.

01:34:28
Speaker 2: So that’s fixing existing stuff.

01:34:31
Speaker 6: M hmm.

01:34:34
Speaker 8: There’s like has to be These power companies are like have to be under some pressure to at least on the face of things, show that they’re doing things to help these runs. Like what kind of partners are they.

01:34:48
Speaker 3: To work with?

01:34:48
Speaker 8: Like is it just like do you feel like it’s just lip service or is there like like a bona fide effort to help out or like what’s the what’s the relationship with these power companies.

01:35:01
Speaker 4: Well, the hardest thing is because it’s not a power company, it’s the federal government. Right, so they could more or less do what they want on the timescale that they want and how things get done with you know, ten years of studies and appropriations five years out and it’s not even sufficient for today’s dollar, let alone in five years.

01:35:23
Speaker 8: So the dams are managed by the federal government.

01:35:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, they’re operating corp of engineers and the business end, the marketing end of the power is Boneville Power Administration, And that’s one hundred percent of business focused on money, not looking at mitigation. They have the Fish and Wildlife program, Like there’s been years of like unanticipated revenues, Like they’ve made like millions and millions more than they anticipated. Okay, so the Fish and Wildlife program is X amount. They have all this unanticipated revenue, there’s a cap on how much goes to the fish and Wildlife program. The rest of it they go back to pay down their debt with the Feds, and they also give breaks. They give money back to their industrial users, like what what company.

01:36:20
Speaker 8: Do they just kind of view you guys as like a fly buzzing in their ear.

01:36:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, sadly.

01:36:25
Speaker 3: Yeah. The solutions are aren’t new. I mean basically it’s running a river more like a natural river. The more you could do that, the better it is for fish.

01:36:35
Speaker 2: But I mean it’s like.

01:36:36
Speaker 1: Even with the dams. Yeah, they’re like even with the dams in place. I guess that’s kind of like I guess I’ll jump to what would be sort of version of my last My last question would be years ago, we had Mike Simpson on and and Idaho representative House Representatives. He came on and he was at the time, I don’t think it went anywhere. He was pitching a plan on a damn removal plan which had so many facets around agricultural production, shipping and all that, and it.

01:37:10
Speaker 2: Came with this.

01:37:11
Speaker 1: It came with this stipulation that were they to do this this removal project, all the litigants, all the environmental groups imagine tribes would agree to sort of this this like cease. They would they would stop lawsuits for some period of time on on fisheries that dam is still standing, right, So like a sort of like broad ultimate question would be what are the odds that dams come out? Like if you had the crystal ball a century into the future, do we have fewer dams then? And then the offshoot of the question is if is if no, the dams will never It’s not really the major dams will never go away. Then it’s it’s what could be done differently? And you’re kind of getting at I guess like you could the dams could still be there, but there are other things that are plausible that could help.

01:38:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, you got to run it as close to a natural river as you can. It’s priorities, right, if you prioritize fish passage higher than you do now, it’s prioritized for dam or for power production, right, and so it’s maximize or optimized power production. And then whatever’s left it’s the crumbs. Whatever’s left. We could do what we can around the edges for fish, but if you raise that and made the fish more important, you know, you can look at papers from the fifties, they knew some of the solutions. These aren’t new, but it’s it’s always been that the money is from the dams and the power production, and that’s that’s run the whole system. And it’s all it all operates and revolves around that.

01:38:55
Speaker 2: Did they when they were conceptualizing those dams?

01:38:59
Speaker 1: I’ve has a lot of pep this question. I’ve ever got a great answer to it. But like when they were pitching the dams, the engineers, right, everybody’s getting together on these dams. Did was did they realize? Do you think they knew? Do you think their discussions included conversations about how catastrophic this would be for fish?

01:39:22
Speaker 5: Like?

01:39:22
Speaker 2: Did they they knew?

01:39:24
Speaker 4: There was actually the the memos were discovered by opb Oregan Public broadcasting. Recently, you did a Tony Chick did a series Salmon War’s podcast. But yeah, he had the memos that talked about the kind of the cost benefit of analysis. Like I said, the salmon became a problem because then they’d have to put in fish passage, and they also labeled it as an Indian problem. We get rid of the salmon, we don’t have to deal with the Indian problem on on the Mansteam River anymore. So that was in all of it was a choice, even on the upper it because they looked at building Bonneville without passage with or without and thankfully with and but you know, you look up in Hill’s Canyon, Hills Canyon down there’s no passage, but there could be. They could bore through the the mountain too for their their turbines, you know, to make the turbines more efficient, but they couldn’t provide passage. So all of those things you visit them, it’s it’s it was a choice and all based on cost and also looking at long term maintenance. And he talked about like will these be here forever? No, because there’s there’s lack of maintenance. Like Doug said, like okay, every all the all the the money and the emphasis is put on power production and things get fixed really fast. But when there’s an issue with the passage thing or especially monitoring, that’s the first thing to get sliced off of the budget. And and you were talking about, you know, litigation. We had that stay in litigation which was going good. We were just getting started, but in June of twenty five it was canceled terminated by the current administration. So we lost all of that headway that we had made over those those couple of years with the Biden administration. So we’re back to we still have the six sovereigns working together pushing to advance those efforts and looking for appropriations. But we don’t have the commitments from the agencies of the federal government, the Bureau Reclamation, Army Corps, and everything like that to address these problems. And you know, when we started our advocacy, we were talking about the billion dollar backlog, the billion dollar backlog in needs in the Columbia Basin. Well, once we started writing it down on paper, it actually came out to be like two billion dollars, Like a billion dollars in passage at the dams, and then like another billion and hatchery maintenance because they built these hatcheries, they’re so outdated and never reach full production. They have failing intakes, crumbling raceways, they’re not efficient. And so the things that we advocate for isn’t just for us, it’s actually, can you appropriate the money for you to fund yourself to do the things that you should be doing. And then even you know, looking at habitat restoration and you know, the roads and culverts and irrigation intakes and everything. We’re just like out there looking for everybody to do the right thing of what we all should be doing for our environment. And you know, it’s like a shared responsibility from all of us, and like the accumination. We were involved with a damn removal project that didn’t get as much media attention as like Elwa dam but it’s actually it was actually a bigger project, and it took like nineteen years for that damn removal and the only reason that got done it was because it was with the private company. It was Pacific Core, And then it came down to the license for them to update the license, they had to either provide passage or take it down, and then they drug that out for five years. The tribes, Yakima and Cryptic actually pitched in money together to fund the study, the cost benefit analysis that showed that removal would be cheaper, and then Pacific Corps finally breached it. But it’s like we have to hold their hand and walk them through everything and keep pushing all the time. It’s just more like pushing and paying to hold them accountable of things that they should be doing and funding things appropriately. We could have these acts and permits and everything, but unless we have the resources to enact them, it’s meaningless.

01:43:55
Speaker 2: So I’m going to go out on a limb on this one.

01:43:57
Speaker 1: But I mean the way the Trump administration’s playing out with their life conservation record, I can’t imagine there have any help on salmon issues.

01:44:05
Speaker 2: It’s got to be low priority to them.

01:44:08
Speaker 4: It was actually the Trump administration that signed the permit for the the removal h really yeah. But the thing that we get from congressionals and actually our our supervisor, our executive director actually just testified in Congress last month on this pinniped issue. And we’re a Republican witness because and.

01:44:35
Speaker 5: We have our.

01:44:37
Speaker 1: I was saying that being like an interesting trade off is what the administration is going to give you is probably greater latitude because like like of a like of a general suspicion of some of these acts that were passed, greater latitude for some things like removal of species, but sort of just like generally less sympathy about river flows and things.

01:44:59
Speaker 3: I would imagine, Yeah, that’s what we’re after is that you know, there’s no management provision in a Marie Mental Protection Act. We’d like an amendment to add management provisions and so a way that you could analyze the problem. And if it’s river otters somewhere, if it’s California sea lions or sellars, or whatever the problem is, there would be a process you could go through to get some management in place and be able to do that. The I guess I get quickly back to the sea lion thing. What we talked about earlier was the one to twenty removals, and then there was an amendment that was passed in twenty eighteen. It was signed by Trump and his first administration that did recognize the co management of the tribes, so tribes, our four treaty tribes were able to be party two permits along with the states, and then our tribes could delegate to critfic to do that and we’ve been doing that since. But it’s you know, red tape is a killer. Because that was passed in December of twenty eighteen, we immediately applied for a permit and our joint permit was finally issued in August of twenty so two years, two years, and then we start implementing it. And then that provision and it’s one twenty f it allows area management.

01:46:16
Speaker 2: So that was the above the two five bridge.

01:46:19
Speaker 3: If an animal’s up there, he’s individually identifiable and he’s having a significant negative impact. So if you can collect that animal, you can euthanize it, but it’s very restrictive. You can’t go out and specifically you can’t shoot them. You have to trap chemically euthanize. So there’s still some burden to it, but it isn’t the level that we used to do when it was individual sea lion management. So it’s a little better, but it only applies to the Columbia.

01:46:45
Speaker 1: So yeah, on the question about the different administrations, I don’t want to put you in a rough spot. Maybe maybe my assumption is wrong, but like I smember years ago, I can’t remember, it was the first time Trump was running. He was kind of he was in California. He was like RIDI and the delta smelt, you know, like, why would you ever sacrifice anything for some little fish? And I think there’s just in that way, like sort of a dismissiveness about some fisheries issues. But have you guys found that, like, have you gotten more done in during the Trump administrations than you do during the Bien administrations?

01:47:19
Speaker 2: Or is it not that simple?

01:47:21
Speaker 4: No, it’s not that simple. A lot has to do with funding that’s coming into the federal agencies. The federal agencies now that we work with have been gutted, right, So there’s less less people to do the same amount of work and with less money, which which is.

01:47:38
Speaker 1: A problem in so you felt the impact some of the cuts of land management agencies, Yeah, and that and like but like also a red tape reduction, so less money and less red tape.

01:47:51
Speaker 4: No, it’s still there, it’s just the processes just take longer now, you know, or you don’t have somebody there to you don’t have that human there to process us. This permit which we ran into last year on a tagging project, like we couldn’t access that area because there was no the person was Doze that did wrote that permit for us, and just things like that. I think the around this predation thing is like the one crumb that we could actually get done during this time. And because like I said, we were a Republican witness and resistance to change and we’re mindful of you know, egg and transportation and things like that, but we’re looking for responsible ways to do things. There’s beyond the status quo. And you know, there’s a lot of interest in just protecting the dams. So they’re quick to point at sea lions. They are a huge impact, but that’s not the only impact. But if that’s the only thing we could get right now, then we need to maximize our effort and jump on that and get these things done now while we have the chance while the focus is.

01:48:59
Speaker 2: On on that.

01:49:01
Speaker 1: That’s a conservation gamble that just in the conservation movement at large. That is a gamble that causes for people that like things simple. That’s a gamble people have to live in that makes people uncomfortable, especially people that want things to be very cut and dried, good.

01:49:21
Speaker 2: Guy, bad guy, really simple. But that an organization yourselves, or any number of conservation organizations with a new administration comes in and you’re like, here’s all the things we’re not going to get, but there’s this, you know, and we can be friendly and try to get this one thing, or we can dig in our heels and spend four years with nothing, you know.

01:49:45
Speaker 1: I mean, and a lot of people want you just to dig in your heels and get nothing rather than look like you’re cooperating, you know, And then it flips.

01:49:53
Speaker 2: Then four years later it flips the other way around.

01:49:56
Speaker 1: You’re like, you know, killing sea lines is out, yeah, right, but we might get some sympathy on this other issue.

01:50:03
Speaker 4: You know, it was really hard. We’re kind of a perfect storm we ran into. Was right.

01:50:10
Speaker 3: We had that.

01:50:12
Speaker 4: We’ve had this accords agreement since two thousand and eight. It’s the Bonneville Fish Accords, where it was a ten year agreement twenty and eight to twenty eighteen where there was a set program We said we won’t sue you, and you fund these programs. And the benefit in that is we weren’t having to justify and fight every year for funding to do this or that. We’re really micromanaged. Even now today, we’re still really micromanaged as Phish managers, the expert micromanaged by the funding agencies of course, because they control the purse strings, and that’s still a frustration for us. But the accords gave us the ability to do non eesa work and work on things like sturgeon and lamprey and things like that kind of ban what we were doing, and we made a lot of progress and since then we never signed another long term agreement. We went through two three year extensions in eighteen and so we were just starting to negotiate that a new long term agreement. Bonneville rolled the dice on the election and they won. We didn’t get another agreement, and they gave us another extension. But in that and I mentioned the litigation on the hydro operations Arounda, the EESA litigation, And so we were in that stay. We were living good, looking forward to a new another you know, favorable administration, and it flipped the opposite way. We lost that agreement. It was terminated. And then this Bonneville piece, they have no the accords ended, they have no written, legal binding commitment to accept this really hard, long process of you know, the Power Council, the Northwest Power Act, their commitments to the fish and wildlife program, their responsibilities that it’s really tough. The so the accords ending, and then there was money left over from that that was tied up in their years of red tape to build facilities or do certain projects. Well, when the tribes signed to take the litigation back into court, the state was ended, Okay, let’s reinitiate this litigation. Bonneville viewed that as a negative action towards them, and they said, we don’t owe you that money anymore. You violated the Of course, it was fifty million dollars to the tribes. That there’s still our tribes are having to go to DC to lobby to get that money back too. Like, we have projects we’ve been working on for fifteen years and that.

01:53:00
Speaker 1: Would have been fifty million bucks towards salmon. Yeah, not like for people to walk home and put in their bank accounts.

01:53:09
Speaker 4: No, it was all earmarked for projects that we weren’t able to get done on the ground because of their red tape.

01:53:16
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:53:18
Speaker 8: So I got a question about the Klamath, Like the dams aren’t coming down on the Columbia right at least not anytime soon. But you know, a year or two ago when they took out the four dams on the Klamate, it’s like now seen as a success for salmon. Is Like, I know you guys are focused on the Columbia, but is there like opportunities like the Klamath on other rivers besides the Columbia.

01:53:50
Speaker 4: Yeah, that one I mentioned on the on the White Salmon, the one that we did with Pacific Corp. Which is funny that was the same company that owned the Klamath dams that removed them, and it was a lot because of you know, reservoir succession and things were so bad in that system, they had no choice, which we’re seeing in the Columbia every year by a degradation of water quality set them in accumulation and things like that. We’re not keeping up in the Columbia either. And like, like I mentioned that the dam on the Little White Salmon that was removed, but it took nineteen years.

01:54:26
Speaker 3: To do that.

01:54:29
Speaker 8: On the Klamath pretty quick.

01:54:31
Speaker 4: No, they were in the fight for decades as well. You just don’t hear about it until until like things are happening. Yeah, and then always, like I mentioned, the only reason we got that dam removed is because of the licensing process that required fish passage. It was the same thing on the Klamath. They could have done fixes to maintain the dams, but it was cheaper for them to take them out. Like how you were saying, it’s like things get costed out and it’s never it’s not like, yay, we won, they did the right thing. It’s like they did what was cheapest for their pocket. Yeah, that that’s always the trade off.

01:55:11
Speaker 1: So I think, how quickly do you see how quickly when when a dam comes down like that, like in the clam or whatever, how quickly do you see results in.

01:55:18
Speaker 2: Terms of fish passage.

01:55:20
Speaker 4: The next year? It was it was like that in the White Salmon when we removed that dam. Actually, a few years ago I hosted the we had a ten year Returning Salmon celebration there because they thought it would take like several years to rebuild. But those fish have been coming back, like you open the door, they’re they’re gonna.

01:55:39
Speaker 8: Yeah, run past fall I think.

01:55:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, so it was that very next year. Yeah, this was the place my grandma was talking about. But yeah, it’s just when you when you reconnect, you know, have those openings, then they’re going to find the resources and return to those those areas they find their niche m yeah, I see. Doug has some pretty cool pictures of sea lions at Estoria.

01:56:12
Speaker 3: I was.

01:56:13
Speaker 2: Bringing it out.

01:56:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, I want to show you those things. We don’t have a great media for for that.

01:56:19
Speaker 6: But yeah, oh we can share with Phil and he can put them.

01:56:23
Speaker 3: On okay, yeah, yeah, pretty And these were from twenty fifteen when that kind of been the peak of the sea lan issue. But they’re just like all the docks in the East Morning Basin and History are completely covered with sea lions and then patrolling in the water trying to find a spot to get out.

01:56:41
Speaker 2: I keep sort of asking this, and I think Brody asked too. But that’s wy I’ll be clear on it.

01:56:46
Speaker 1: In a century, the big like in one hundred years, the big Columbia dams will still be there.

01:56:58
Speaker 4: It’s hard to say because things are getting so bad now, Like you’re starting to have closures of parks and boat ramps and areas because of toxic algo blooms in the summer because of heat. And I know right there in the Tri Cities there’s been dogs that are dying people. You know, the dogs are running around in the water. And so I think when it starts, it’s gonna start impacting people and those types of resources because of the degradation of water quality.

01:57:32
Speaker 2: And we didn’t do it for sam and might do it for dogs.

01:57:35
Speaker 4: Yeah, but cattle the wrong.

01:57:39
Speaker 2: Suburbanites dog and they’re gonna be like this cannot stand. Yeah.

01:57:44
Speaker 4: And then you know, like when cattle end up in those toxic algo bloom situations, it’s like, well, if you would have just had this buffer from the stream to protect the nutrient loading in your creek, then your cattle wouldn’t have died. But there’s still up in arms of about their cattle dying because of it.

01:58:02
Speaker 2: So it could be like a broader.

01:58:06
Speaker 1: Like a broader litany of environmental degradations could bring up in the future more serious discussions about like doing something really radical.

01:58:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that’s the thing, you know, Like I mentioned the Six Sovereigns and then we had that Resilient Columbia Basin Agreement. But our negotiating piece was the creation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. That’s an initiative that’s created and vetted by the Six Sovereigns. It’s the tribes because our tribes we’ve had with crypt Fik, we’ve had the waikanashmu wa Kishwit, you know for twenty years, you know that set these these recovery plans and recovery goals. Well, this was taking that to the next step and coming together with our co manager. It’s our guiding north star that we’re still working towards. And so that’s what we’re looking at today about you know, habitat restoration in the mid Columbia. And also, like I mentioned, the it’s cold water Refusia, the the through the migration corridor the Columbia where you have the tributary mouths, the deltas that are all full of sediment and you know, have all the predation and water quality issues and things like that. So we’re able to like have this input of cold water to corral so that returning adults they have respite as they travel these hundreds of miles upstream. And that’s something that’s doable today. You know, we just got to break through the red tape and get the funding to actually do it, and that would be a huge benefit for salmon. Like we have all these recovery plans for the basins and you know habitat projects just waiting to be funded and then addressing these things. You know, predation have been this wiki wheel about predation over the past few years, like the pinniped predation, but also the avian predation and the piscine the warm water predators. But there’s also invasives that are heavily impacting our river system and that’s American shad. Those were introduced in the eighteen hundreds and there was a very problematic I saw article from the Seattle Times on the shad issue that they’re just becoming accepted. That was the title, There’s a new top fish in the Columbia and it doesn’t mine the warm water where you have we’ve had years of eight million shad returning road and so that’s totally unnatural. And that’s that that feeds the predators when you know, because their life cycle is opposite. So when these warm water predators there, the salmonids are out there eating juvenile shad, and then you have all the pelicans that are feasting on shad and they’re spawning in the main stem. So it’s a huge nutrient load. And so you have all this aquatic vegetation and algae growth because it’s it’s not meant to be there, right, you have barren tributaries that don’t get those marine nutrients, but they’re all piled in the main stem, and why the main stam’s green now?

02:01:22
Speaker 2: But dude, go ahead one more.

02:01:25
Speaker 8: You hinted at how far the sam will go earlier if those dams weren’t there, Like what would be the terminal point for these these chanook Like how far would they go and where would they end up?

02:01:38
Speaker 4: I know, like distance wise in the Snake basin would be at Twin Falls because you have the falls that was it’s huge. And then they went all the way up into the tributaries and the headwaters. And in Canada, you know that little piece of Montana where the Cootney is and and you know, like you have the win actually the Metau, the Antaia and the Yakama Basin, so all up into the Cascades up into Canada around in Montana. How far it stretches Idaho and even Nevada right too.

02:02:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s incredible, man.

02:02:16
Speaker 3: Yeah, Steell, had they’d go all the way up the Yhi River there in the Nevada, you’d get them up the Salmon River up past Stanley almost a glean of Summit right at the headwaters the Salmon which is like forty miles north of sun Valley, so like twice as far as where you you were seeing them.

02:02:33
Speaker 4: Yeah, and even like the other species, Like I always said, we’re you know, comprehensive and holistic in our salmon recovery efforts, like lamprey, I think, you know, we put you know, their sacred food source to us. And they were also medicinal, you know, like because there’s so oily that that was your skin salve and your ear drops and stuff when you know, before you could go to the drug store. And but the the benefit that they brought to the system and all of the nutrients in the forests and the animals, and you know, like forest habitat, like they’re lacking those marine driven nutrients for the standing forests. And then also like management. I think back to I watched your hunting show Blue Mountain, Blue Mountain Bulls, and it was on fire, right there was forest fire. We’re seeing that more and more. It’s forest management practices. But also you know, like we don’t have the same nutrients coming into the forest to grow, but you know those that’s the other side of the aspects. We will touch all aspects of it, and I think lamprey is a huge part of that. Doug showed me a picture. It’s the Bruno River that flows into Nevada. It’s they do watered this this dam or whatever they’re standing on the cement. There’s like thousands and thousands of lamprey and that’s hundreds of miles from the ocean in this one little tributary. Imagine how many there were all throughout the basin, millions and millions, and all of that’s gone now and there’s an effect. It’s a ripple effect through the entire ecosystem and so us just to try to put all these building blocks back together to create that better tomorrow, because we can’t restore the salmon back to barren streams even looking at you know, benthic organisms and things like that, so you know, working with beavers and all of that stuff. So we’re coming at it from all angles.

02:04:35
Speaker 3: And to bring it back to your simile parous fish. See, these fish died, right, they go up and they die, and they brought all those nutrients from the ocean back to the forest and they get hauled out by bears and otters and everything else and brought in and so it’s the whole thing has been cut off. Those forests have lost all of that nutrient input for one hundred years, in fifty years.

02:05:01
Speaker 1: My brother’s a fisheries biologists in Alaska and they’ve been tracking that by with marine isotopes.

02:05:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you have all these these like traceable elements.

02:05:11
Speaker 3: Yeah, Strontium is one that.

02:05:13
Speaker 2: That you know came from the ocean yep.

02:05:16
Speaker 1: And the way it got from the ocean into the mountains was on a fish, right, And then you look at how that stuff is used by vegetation and animals and it’s like marine just a picture of like that fish are a way of like wheel barrowing in.

02:05:33
Speaker 2: Nutrients into nutrient poor regions.

02:05:36
Speaker 3: Yeah.

02:05:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you pluck that out and it’s like you’re not fertilizing it anymore.

02:05:40
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean you get up like I said, in that upper part of the salmon, it’s just granitic soil. There’s no nutrients to speak of up there. Ultra clear water. It’s gin clear, but the nutrients aren’t coming from what’s running.

02:05:53
Speaker 2: So it used to get millions of pounds of natural fertilized.

02:05:56
Speaker 3: Exactly, you know, exactly.

02:05:58
Speaker 4: And the other thing you were, like you honestly you were asking is there a way to operate the hydrosystem and still have salmon? But like I said, the ever changing goalposts and maybe things that would help would be like you know, bringing on renewables and also battery storage so you’re not depending on the river to be your battery that you turn off and on. But then there’s impacts, there’s trade offs and everything you do. But that’s where the tribes come in and advocate to do things in a responsible manner. Like all of our tribes have their own, you know, utilities. We’re looking at different types of energy production and that was part of the agreement, and the litigation was funding for energy projects, you know, administered by the tribes like the Yakmination. They’re working on a solar over irrigation project and also a dry pump storage project using rail railroad cars that you lift up and down the hill. And they’re working at pump storage at several places. One is a really big issue for our tribes and especially the Acmination is a golden al pump storage project. It’s they want to withdraw withdraw water from the Columbia, build a reservoir up on the hill, and then you know, they just pump it in a loop. You know, they generate power when they need it and then pump it back up off peak when it’s cheap. And then so you have all these For one, they’re boring through the mountain and then they want to tap into the John Day power line system to export that power. And then there’s also a super fun site blow from an abandoned aluminum smelter that’s never been cleaned up, and it’s one of our sacred sites. It’s like a push pump. It’s like the mother of all roots. It’s a place where we still go and gather and they just like, okay, yeah, you move aside, and we’re going to do this here now. And it’s literally drilling a thirty diameter tunnel through the mountain and you’ll see that also all in the surrounding area of the windmills, the wind generation, which like why does it have to be all on our you know, native lands, open lands, Like isn’t there like low value agriculture that they could incorporate, agra, voltaics and things like that. It’s always looking at what’s cheapest and easiest, and that’s like these public lands that they get a thirty year lease from and you know, once they go in and alter it, it’s you know, it’s never the same. And it impacts the withdrawals from the river for these things. And even the solar has huge impacts to the water table because they need water to clean the solar panels, so there’s a huge water usage even with solar production. So what we’re saying is we’re not against all of these things, but like, let’s not be in a rush to do it, and let’s do things right, and we can’t put all of these burdens on the backs of the salmon and all the users who depend on them, the tribal people and the community members, because we’re the ones that these resources are extracted and all the burdens placed on us, and it’s all goes outside. It’s all international companies exporting power to California into these industrial users and data centers and things like that. It’s like again and again the same story. So let’s do things slow down, do things better, Like, yeah we can, we need to do better, find renewables, but let’s do it right. So not just what’s cheapest. What’s cheapest today may not be in the long run because even if they maybe they if they would have put more maintenance into the hydrosystem, now we wouldn’t be we wouldn’t have these billion dollar backlogs and and things like that.

02:09:55
Speaker 2: So yeah, man, you guys aren me. Something’s going to put on a good mood.

02:10:02
Speaker 8: They got some success stories we could go over.

02:10:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, pulls out too.

02:10:08
Speaker 6: There’s like speaking of Boogeyman, Like I feel like we grew up in the lamprey was the devil of all.

02:10:16
Speaker 7: Devil was non native, right, Yeah, I know, but still, you know, like I’ve never heard of a good lamprey.

02:10:22
Speaker 6: And here you guys are trying to like promote it.

02:10:25
Speaker 7: So can we just touch on that a little bit, Yeah, because when we grew up in Michigan, it was like when you went to the hatchery we had, I can’t remember the name of the hit hatchery. Now they’re in Kalama Zoo, but like every year you’d go on a field trip there and like it would just be nothing but placards on the walls about how the lamp wege is killing off everything.

02:10:44
Speaker 1: It’s like a system that a system. It’s like any any invasive species story. It’s a system that hadn’t adapted with it, and then all of a sudden, tada, here’s a bunch of lampreys and like every non native species story, it just explodes at great expense to native fish.

02:11:02
Speaker 2: And so then you hear like, oh, you know where they are from.

02:11:07
Speaker 6: But in your neck of the woods they co exist, Yeah, and.

02:11:10
Speaker 4: They’re they have that relationship. Right. They’re parasitic but not lethal. You could see sometimes you catch salmon it has a little round mark with the teeth.

02:11:21
Speaker 1: Lake trout, yeah, but in the Great Lakes system they were killing Yeah, because again, as a fish that was hadn’t adapted with the.

02:11:27
Speaker 2: Risk, you know, yeah, so they do.

02:11:29
Speaker 4: They are parasitic, they but they don’t kill their hosts like they drop off, and they can swim and migrate and everything. And then the benefit that they serve to the salmon is, you know, they’re spawning in these tributaries as well, and then they’re breaking down all the the detritus and things like that. So they’re the filters and the cleaners of in the tributaries.

02:11:50
Speaker 3: And so yeah, it’s and these are Pacific lamprey that we have. Those are sea lamprey in the Great Lakes, Okay. And you know that’s like you said, that’s an an invasive in the Great Lakes. These are these are native fish.

02:12:04
Speaker 6: And so where is the sea lamprey?

02:12:05
Speaker 3: Originally from East coast and.

02:12:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, and what happened was sea lamp rays couldn’t get past Niagara Falls and so then when they got moved eventually like that was a natural barrier and so the upper systems never had them. And then eventually on ship ballast or whatever, lampreys got moved above a natural barrier and then and just decimated lake trout, you know, and they started all those different programs of poisoning spawning beds and it still goes on. Why, Like you’re talking about like another Doge cut was there was a big dough there was a big Doge cut around like all this work to try to get lampreys under control in the Great Lakes system, and then they were acting the people that run the program, and that was when that.

02:12:51
Speaker 2: Was going on.

02:12:52
Speaker 1: I pointed out, like on the show, I pointed out that there’s a little bit of a like you said, like paying attention to what the ramifications are. We’ve spent millions and millions and millions of dollars getting them under control, and then you and then you go to save a couple of bucks by ditching some dudes, you know, and then all of a sudden, the whole investment goes out the window, you know, because you’re trying to save a couple of dollars. Right, Yeah, but that’s different watershed, different problems.

02:13:18
Speaker 6: Do people ever eat these pacific Yeah?

02:13:22
Speaker 4: Yeah, Actually I meant to bring some today, but I didn’t get to meet up with my with my friend that she had some that she had put away that it was we dried them, you know, you eat them fresh, roast them, and they’re really really rich. I’d say, it’s an acquired taste. I’ll send some to you guys. You can taste it some dried lamprey. But yeah, it’s really oily fish. And you know, like that was highly sought after, right, you need those calories to.

02:13:51
Speaker 1: They’re in a Scofia’s cook But one of the things that when I was doing Scavenger’s Guide to Oat Cuisine, one of the things I bombed out on was getting lamprey. But that was in the Scofias cookbooks like French French Preparation, French Lamprey Preparation, a.

02:14:06
Speaker 6: Bit like ru orl.

02:14:08
Speaker 5: Right.

02:14:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s like, yeah, you head, you think you’re looking at it.

02:14:12
Speaker 3: Eel and they’re crazy. Just the biology of them is pretty crazy. They’re carlaginous fish. They’re an ancient fish.

02:14:20
Speaker 2: Jallis.

02:14:21
Speaker 3: They’re four hundred million years old, I mean, and they were here that long ago. I mean when that was when you know, the continents were all connected, and they’ve been able to figure out how to survive until man put enough dams on the river that we’ve you know, they went down to critically low numbers in the Columbia, probably down to twenty thousand or so. It’s we’ve had lamprey programs going for a while. Now it’s the tribes and it is coming back, and we’ve got lamprey that we’ve got coming back to Idaho and other higher tributaries. They’re really they’re a weak swimmer, so getting over dams is a difficult thing. There’s been a lot of technology stuff to try and figure out how to get a move but it’s getting.

02:15:02
Speaker 1: You go to like the Yukon costco quem Colbac River that’s like an indigenous subsistence fishery still with lampreys.

02:15:09
Speaker 4: Yeah, it was fifty percent at each mainstem project that you’d lose of adult lamprey returning. So that’s why it was the tribes that took the initiative to start the lamprey translocation so collect that Jonnaville dam and then take them up to the tributaries and that’s how we’re starting to see fish returning. So we want to do more of that and also installing passage for lamprey, like a wetted wall, you know, for them to work their way up because they can’t go up the fish ladders because there’s you know, perpendicular surfaces there. Yeah, so they’re trying to swim up. They can’t make it, but they could go all the way up that wetted wall, and so we’re looking at adult passage at the dam’s translocation. Another hard thing is a lot of the juveniles get sucked out into ear because you know, it’s like a little worm in the slats on a screen. You know, they would have to be outrageously small to keep the lamprey out.

02:16:10
Speaker 2: So they wound up going through sprinkler systems.

02:16:12
Speaker 4: End up in all the irrigation canals and whatnot, and we do salvages when they shut down the canal, we’ll go in there and try to salvage as many of the jus.

02:16:23
Speaker 3: And they’re super complicated, so the life history of them and so everything you learned about salmon doesn’t really apply. So it’s trying to relearn all these things. They don’t home like a salmon. If you get it in a particular area, they’re going to come back to that spot to spawn, and lamprey don’t.

02:16:41
Speaker 2: So it’s well, they don’t have like their site fidelity that just go wherever they go.

02:16:45
Speaker 8: They’re just distributed by currents.

02:16:48
Speaker 3: Yeah, so a degree there is some that come back and they do have a pheromone that they give off, and if there’s juveniles there, they’ll come back to that location. But it wasn’t necessary where they were born, so it’s complicated to try and restor them, and really it needs a broader coast wide effort then if you need to improve it in a lot of streams, not just You can’t just do a stream like you do with salmon and expect that that homing is going to help you out and they’ll come back. Isn’t going to happen.

02:17:19
Speaker 2: And they’re anagronous, but not the word I was saying earlier.

02:17:22
Speaker 3: They’re not similar Paris. They’re inter ol Paris. Yeah, they can repeat spawn, although not that much. And we don’t know so much of it. We just don’t know about it because it hasn’t been a sexy fish to study.

02:17:35
Speaker 4: No, right, yeah, well there’s a lot going on with them now. And what’s crazy. It’s funny, but it’s not. We were at the dam right Bonneville down where they have the fish bewing windows and that’s where they count right back in the nineties, the core actually used to have an air blast system. Those damn lamprey getting in the way. They would air blast them off.

02:17:58
Speaker 3: Oh really yeah, yeah, looked like a series of moss, you know. Or they’d be attached to the window and it would obstruct the view to count salm. And so they blast them off every ten or fifteen minutes, and they push him down the ladder.

02:18:11
Speaker 2: Yea.

02:18:11
Speaker 1: My brother Danny is a salmon biologist in Alaska. He works on that stable isotope issues and a bunch of other stuff, a lot of like warm water issues and other things, but impacts warm water. One of his first, I think his first paid fisheries gig was he was in walla wall of Washington and he was paid to sit there looking out that window.

02:18:35
Speaker 2: Count fish. This is one of his first paid gigs. Man. Yeah, living like living in basically living inside the damn counting fish in the window and writing it down.

02:18:44
Speaker 3: Yeah.

02:18:47
Speaker 2: Well, man, I feel like we could go.

02:18:49
Speaker 5: On all day, but we didn’t even hit success stories or more success stories.

02:18:54
Speaker 2: Well yeah, who can conveniently give us some success stories?

02:18:58
Speaker 4: Uh?

02:18:58
Speaker 8: Well, we can just read them off from them, will have them give us the short version. Steel had reconditioning.

02:19:06
Speaker 3: Yeah, so that’s a thing I’ve been working on for twenty five years, along with a really good group of people. But basically so Steell had our ittero Paris. They repeat spawn. There’s they’re rainbow trout, so they can spawn and they can spawn again. They’ll go up to whatever river they’re in and then they spawn and they try to go back downstream and go back to the ocean. And in a totally natural system, the number of repeat spawners that you have in your population will range anywhere from you know, five to six percent up to maybe thirty or forty percent. It’s kind of dependent on how close you are to the ocean. Closer to the ocean, the higher you get of these repeat spawners through the hydrosystem. They don’t don’t make it. I mean, it is definitely not set up for a large fished pass downstream. And a lot of them will go through the bypasses, the juvenile bypass system, and they’re they get screened off and we collect those fish, collect them at lower Granite other places. We take those fish then into a hatchery, put them in tanks. We’ve got specialized fish culture, fish care, and well we’ll feed them to where they survive and then they’ll remature. And this has been concentrated on wild fish, so there’s a fish that successfully spawned. There were no eggs in it when we collected them in that damn they go up. We’ve reconditioned them, release them either that fall or some of them will skip and they won’t spawn again until the following fall. Will hold them for eighteen months, keep feeding them. We let them go downstream of where we had collected them, and then they go back upstream and spawn and.

02:20:46
Speaker 2: They skip their whole return to the ocean.

02:20:48
Speaker 3: Right, So we circumvented that. Yeah, yeah, so.

02:20:53
Speaker 1: You’ve cut out whatever mortality happens out on the open ocean exactly.

02:20:57
Speaker 4: Our communications director he made it a little pamphlet and it shows like the steelhead spa where he’s kicked.

02:21:05
Speaker 1: Bag No kid really yeah, and you’ll say like, we’ll take care of everything, brother, Yeah, and then when you’re ready to go again, we’ll let you go.

02:21:13
Speaker 3: And they home back to the same stream and we have.

02:21:16
Speaker 2: How many fish? Can you actually do that?

02:21:18
Speaker 3: Well, it’s a it’s a it’s a safety net thing, right. I Mean, you got these low number numbers of fish in certain populations and you can target it to those streams by having a weird some way of collecting to that stream, and especially in a place where you’re really worried about them blinking out, or you get bigger collections, more generalized, like Lower Granite has the whole Snake River. We release them though in the fish one hundred maybe or one hundred and fifty, we’ve been concentrated. We’ve been doing it at a research scale. This is now I’m trying to do It’s finally now we’re gearing up to do this as a production scale. It’s in those first tried project at a production scale. But there’s fish that go back to the Imnaha, the upper sand and remember the Grand drawn, the clear water, the sea sash, everywhere this is.

02:22:05
Speaker 1: But it’ll like, it’s great, it’s great wildfish, and I know we’re looking for positives. It’s great, but it’s like that is sort of like definite, you know, the term conservation dependent. That is like like the poster child of conservation dependence, right, you know, I mean we have the fish because we literally handle it and care for it. You know, Yeah, it’s it’s great, but but I mean, you know, I don’t want to be Debbie Downer. It’s great, but it’s like, holy shit, has it come to that?

02:22:38
Speaker 3: Do you know what I mean, that’s the problem is that wild steelhead recovery nothing’s really worked.

02:22:44
Speaker 2: Yeah, you do supplementation.

02:22:45
Speaker 3: Some things that have worked we’ve been able to pull off with Simon hasn’t worked for steel hell. We get hatchery fish, but getting more wild.

02:22:53
Speaker 2: Yeah.

02:22:53
Speaker 1: All this conversation about how do you get these big ass fish out of the ocean to their spawning grounds, and with steelhead, it’s like, Okay, let’s get these big ass fish out of the ocean up to their spawning grounds, back to the ocean, right yep.

02:23:06
Speaker 2: And you’re like, oh, that’s tricky.

02:23:08
Speaker 3: Yep.

02:23:08
Speaker 2: Right, they’re not going back down yep.

02:23:10
Speaker 8: What about like Snake River, fall Chanook and then Sake and Cooho. We’ve got those on the list for your success stories.

02:23:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.

02:23:20
Speaker 3: So in about the early nineties, Snake River fall Chanook were under one hundred fish at Lower Granite and Nesper’s tribe had a patchy program for fall Chinook, and that stock has rebounded to where the peak was about ninety thousand fish in the Snake River. I think it’s hovering now around anywhere from thirty to fifty thousand with.

02:23:44
Speaker 2: Some natural reproduction.

02:23:45
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, yeah, so you get some natural So the idea there is to collect the fish and then out outplant those juveniles so that they’ll return to the So.

02:23:54
Speaker 2: There you’re helping them. You’re helping them get back to the ocean.

02:23:58
Speaker 3: Yeah, kind of that. It’s integrated hatchery program. So you’re taking in wildfish as well as the hatchery fish trained to maintain the genetic you know, your genetic integrity.

02:24:09
Speaker 1: And and those are getting back home on their own fins. I mean they’re going back up to Yeah, they’ll later make it up on their own.

02:24:15
Speaker 3: Now there’s fisheries. Now, there wasn’t a false when I was in college. There wasn’t falseho fisheries in the in the Snake River.

02:24:21
Speaker 6: There are how big as a fall chinook there on that river.

02:24:24
Speaker 3: Twenty five twenty twenty five pounds twenty to thirty Yeah. Yeah, and it’s fisheries all the way down as well as off the coast.

02:24:35
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, dudes are catching those fish, catching them everywhere.

02:24:39
Speaker 8: What about Soke and Coho, It says I you had some reintroductions.

02:24:43
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that was a tribally led effort. Like how I had mentioned a lot of the hatchery production being in the lower River, which was unnatural. You’re just feeding your your sport and commercial harvest and totally excluding the tribes and everybody inland. So it was we started the coho reintroductions back in the nineties and taking juveniles from the lower River and taking them back into their tributaries like in the Metau and the Wenatchee, the Yakma, and that was highly successful and so that was replicated by the Nez Perce tribe and it was actually the state of Idaho has a law against reintroduction programs, and it was by by night that Actually it’s our tribal chairman now, Gerald Lewis, he worked in fisheries for a number of years and it was back when he was in fisheries, he drove the truck in the middle of the night of taking those coho up to the Nez Perce tribe so that they could reintroduce them. It was illegally, yeah, so under thread of arrest by.

02:25:54
Speaker 2: The state.

02:25:56
Speaker 1: And because because they don’t want to then create like new e s a issues for themselves.

02:26:01
Speaker 4: Yeah, we’re responsibilities for maintaining and and all that type of thing.

02:26:05
Speaker 1: So I don’t know, the leveless cynicism unbelievable. Yeah, So like don’t put some there because then will be obligated to like do something to allow them to live.

02:26:20
Speaker 4: So that the cohen reintroductions were highly successful. We brought we started out bringing in juveniles and we’d hold them in acclamation ponds for a month or so and then release them from there. And then as they started returning, then we started building things out into a full supplementation program where we’re getting getting our own brood to spawn and all these generations and and then we’re still incorporating some of the lower river like as needed. But yeah, it’s almost becoming a self sufficient program. And but also you have the the anti hatchery group, but we’re leading on the genetics side where we’re incorporating, you know, trying to have that genetic diversity, and we use stocks that were like similar to this area and distance and things like that. But you know, we’re just being mindful of the work that we do. So there wouldn’t be there wouldn’t be Coho above Bonneville Dam if it wasn’t for the efforts of the tribes. And I always credit our senior most biologist, Tom Scribner with Yakuma, and he hates that I call him out all the time. But that was his life’s work. He did years and years of advocacy and then also fighting with our state co managers because they were against it because there was worries because you know, coho are more voracious eaters and they were worried about them eating the spring chinook. It’s like these things coexisted for millions of years. It’s like we just need to get them back and they’ll work out their areas and where they live and you know, like it took us to mess them up, let’s help them cover. And the same thing with the Sakai reintroduction. You know, we were working with the Okanagan Nation Alliance in Canada collecting fish at Wanapum Dam, which is just upstream of the Snake River because the Snake River Sakai are listed, so that’s what that has all the ESA restrictions and concerns. So we’re collecting above the snake and then so we’re did reintroduction programs into the Yakoma into Lake klee Elam and we just completed a passage project at Lake cole Elam because that was used as an irrigation reservoir. You know, it was checked up and so there was no passage and that’s how that’s how the sakai were extrapated, and the tributaries was from irrigation error reclamation. You know, these dams, these diversions without passage, no fish screens and dewatering events and things like that. So you know, the tribes have really been working together with bo R and the local irrigation districts to be able to get fish, like how can we work together. The Akama Basin Integrated Plan is a great success story of that. They got this like thirty million dollar fish passage structure at Lake Leelam for juveniles to out migrate. They’ll still have to truck the adults over the dam, but they could go up into the tributaries and Spahan, we’re in the lake and have access to get out. So that’s been a huge success story. And we’ve been talking working with the Nez Presh tribe. They want to do reintroductions into Lake Wallawa for skei as all awesome, Yeah, but that’s really complicated because you know, like with the ESA listings and what poor shape the Snake River Sakai are in. So they’re collecting at Bonnaville Dam and they actually utilize our genetic technology they collect at Bonnaville Dam and then they screen out and you know, they could.

02:30:02
Speaker 1: See the kidney. You can screen out the EESA ones from the nun Yeah. So like you we can move you buddy, you got to stay put, no kid Yeah.

02:30:12
Speaker 3: And I think that’s one of the big success stories too, is collaboration. I mean through the six sovereigns stuff that that Danella was talking about with the other with states of Oregon, Washington, the Treaty tribes we work great with and at Bonneville. Dan that’s an integrated crew that we have with the Sea Lion project. It’s got people from State of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Critfic that we have the all working together. It’s under the same permit and it’s all jointly done. So from the dark times that you talked about earlier, it’s it’s we’re not all the way there, but it’s better. It’s looking it’s a lot better than when I started. It’s it’s it’s it’s improving, and it gives you hope that I think, you know, it can get better.

02:31:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, that man.

02:31:04
Speaker 1: One of the things I appreciate about the conversation is I’ve always looked at the whole issue being that be like I always looked at it like binary be that the dam stay and the fish go, or the dams go and the fish stay. And it’s encouraging to think that there could be I mean, as much as it is like becomes a very conservation dependent, very expensive, but you could see some level of progress, you know, and like at least hang on and wait for like a better day, you know, like just to have something to save.

02:31:38
Speaker 5: Right.

02:31:39
Speaker 1: I don’t know I’ve mentioned a couple times ready, but my brother was the fisheries guy in Alaska. He had this really interesting perspective about Alaska versus Alaska versus the Lower forty eight. You said that conservation the Lower forty eight is it’s all recovery. I mean, we’re like we’re in recovery mode.

02:32:00
Speaker 2: Up there.

02:32:00
Speaker 1: They’re still in almost like a classification mode. They’re still trying to go like what’s here, right, Like what is here? Trying to count things, describe things, get a sense of what’s there. And down here it’s like we just look at like what’s gone, you know what I mean, how we try to fix our mistakes.

02:32:21
Speaker 4: So hard because it’s salmon our international issue, right, even the harvest of salmon, because that’s why we have the Pacific Salmon Commission Pacific Salmon Treaty and looking. You know, when things really tanked back in the eighties and the numbers were in dire straits and in the Columbia Basin, and that’s when you know, those court cases were happening, and our tribal fisheries programs were really being established and the tribes started their supplementation efforts. That’s when you could see the rebound in the in the the curve on the graph of when our tribes started doing that that way to get us here.

02:32:59
Speaker 1: We haven’t even gotten into all that stuff with like high seas drift nets and dudes out in almost an international waters peeling off American salmon.

02:33:07
Speaker 2: Man like, we need to get.

02:33:08
Speaker 4: Into that stuff in the bycatch of salmon and other fisheries is.

02:33:12
Speaker 1: Yeah, And then they go digging into kans of salmon and it’s full of canned steelhead that they’re catching out on the high seas.

02:33:18
Speaker 2: You know, it’s just like unbelievable.

02:33:20
Speaker 3: Man, big the year the odd years with the high pink numbers that’s being seen, we’re seeing decreased signal in chinook and other lower forty eight fish. And you know those are Alaska as well as as Japan and some of those Asian countries that are putting out a lot of pinks.

02:33:38
Speaker 2: So it’s into those nets, man, And.

02:33:42
Speaker 4: That’s all it’s done, just for corporate interest, right. That’s not anything natural, it’s not a natural population, it’s not a public service. It’s these groups putting out all this pink catchery production just for this commercial fishery, low value commercial fishery in comparison to what they could be having in sake.

02:34:04
Speaker 1: I sent Yanni the other day. Do you have that text message? Pull up that text message I sent Yannie. Some fish price stuff will close out, almost close out with this.

02:34:14
Speaker 5: And we can’t forget about where to go if you want to donate.

02:34:16
Speaker 1: Yeah, but we’re talking about just relative value here when you’re talking about like the pink, like the pink industry.

02:34:24
Speaker 2: Yeah that mm hmm nickel. This is paid at the dock.

02:34:28
Speaker 7: Yeah, Steve and I exchanged at times a lot of texts, so it’s.

02:34:34
Speaker 2: Taking just a second. I think it was six cents six and then compared to like a sake or king. Hopefully Yannie can find it.

02:34:43
Speaker 4: There’s there’s been years that when I grew up fishing, we were getting two and a half cents a pound for Tooley’s on the on the Toby. It’s the it’s a different stock of fish like that runs in the lower river. You have upriver brights that farther upstream or like th hu Eliott. Yeah, yeah, but two and a half cents a pound.

02:35:09
Speaker 7: Yeah, these were overall average prices paid the fisherman in twenty twenty five. This is the Alaska Fishing Game Department. Chinook took six forty a pound.

02:35:20
Speaker 2: Next down this was paid the fisherman at the docks six.

02:35:24
Speaker 7: Next down the line was Coho at one, Sakka at one seventeen. Surprisingly to me, chumps were eighty cents, and then the pinks came in.

02:35:33
Speaker 2: At thirty well thirty cents, okay, But like just a relative picture the way that the values on these fish are perceived, you know, and then like the amount of like yeah, the other thing about the man, this is such a rich subject. Do you go on and on?

02:35:47
Speaker 1: But like the hat the pink hatchery stuff is you think like you think when you’re running cattle, when you’re running cattle and you want to run graze cattle on public land, you pay a grazing fee. You have a contract and pay raising fee. A cannery runs a pink hatch, they’re grazing for free. That stuff goes out in the open ocean and grazes for free, and then it comes back and you sell it for thirty cent you know, I mean, you sell it for thirty cents a pound, dude. It’s competing with wildfish.

02:36:20
Speaker 5: And then compared to the market, I was looking at just Pike Place fish prices as of yesterday, and of course it’s probably be more expensive, but thirty to forty pounds for wild dollars chinook.

02:36:33
Speaker 2: Thirty to forty bucks for wild pound pound of wild chinook.

02:36:36
Speaker 5: Yeah, and then that’s that was an average. Then Pike Place was fifty five for full as Sacy is about fifty dollars a pound for full ats and coho is twenty.

02:36:49
Speaker 2: Eight or pink’s on her uh.

02:36:52
Speaker 5: No, ste white sturgeon was like average ten to thirty, depending upon you know, you.

02:36:59
Speaker 2: Know who else we didn’t get to.

02:37:00
Speaker 1: We didn’t get the bitching about killer whales, who I guess could go into a school of pinks. If there’s a king in there. They going to that school. It could be thousands of pinks and they’re gonna grab the king.

02:37:12
Speaker 2: Dude, they know they know the price, Like, yeah, isn’t that wild.

02:37:18
Speaker 1: They’ll they could, they’ll sort through, They’ll sort through and find kings because like that’s the good one, that’s the bad one right there.

02:37:26
Speaker 4: Well, that’s like with sea lions, right Doug was talking about the stellars that eat a sturgeon. They were primarily going after the big females and eating out the bellies. Roll yeah, yeah, animals.

02:37:39
Speaker 7: Well, it gives me hope, Like you’re your aha moment story of seeing those giant fish in that pool. I feel like the stuff you guys are doing, if at the minimum, you’re giving the opportunity for future generations to have that moment. Hopefully we can keep the whole thing going. And then to think that we could have like what Alaska has like literally right here or within a half a day’s drive where we’re sitting right now, and that we don’t, and that we’re not putting more effort into doing.

02:38:08
Speaker 2: It because I’ve walked across the river around them.

02:38:11
Speaker 6: It’s kind of crazy.

02:38:12
Speaker 4: It’s the resistance to change and moving beyond the status quo of that’s the way we’ve always done things. Like you have this old car that’s all beat up and I’m barely keeping it running, but I refuse to to trade it in.

02:38:27
Speaker 7: Well, it’s the baseline syndrome too, right. None of us here in this room have ever would ever know see, have seen or would know what it was like to have those kind of fisheries right here.

02:38:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, Like my little kids, like if if we don’t turn things around on Sam, and my little kids would be like.

02:38:44
Speaker 2: Man, twenty twenty five is bitch, and dude, we got three kings. Yeah, you never see that now.

02:38:51
Speaker 4: Well, there’s a lot of misca.

02:38:53
Speaker 2: That was the good old days, dude.

02:38:55
Speaker 4: There’s a lot of misconceptions too. People don’t understand that, Like what are they complaining about. Like they see those reels and those videos of all those fish coming back to those pink catcheries, you know, and that’s what they’re showing. That’s not what’s going on in the in reality and having fish coming back to the rivers and the spawning grounds and things like that, that’s more natural. But they see these these outrageous things and think that’s not a big deal. And there’s also a lot of misconception. And call it the numbers game, right, they’re looking at the total number of salmon that passed Bonnaville down. That’s kind of what the outsiders view is success of the health of the river. Like you know, we’re around two million now, but a lot of that is still lower river hatcheries. You have a little white salmon and spring chinook catcheries, but where they’re not whereas wild wild chinook, wild spring chinook in the Upper and mid Columbia, you’re only getting like a thousand.

02:40:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, I gotcha of that. So you make them. You can show what you want to show with the numbers.

02:40:06
Speaker 4: And then also understanding that harvest is limited by those weaker stocks because you have ESA restrictions on spring chinook all throughout the basin, so you have very little access to harvest spring chinook. And you know the numbers are slow, well, sea lions are eating most of them before they get to us. And then we fight over the what seventeen percent harvests that shared between the states and the tribes. And then also in the summer, because of the ESA listed Sokai concerns and we can’t access we can’t fish those on the successful Okanagan fish or you know Upper Columbia fish because of ESA restrictions, and the same thing happens in our fall fisheries. We have mesh restriction sizes because of b run steelhead limitations. So it’s like things are great, but like, no, it’s not. You have to look at the real picture of what’s going on throughout the basin.

02:41:16
Speaker 2: Well, well that’s that, man, We go on all day. But this has been great talking to you guys about I’ve learned a ton and I’m just one person.

02:41:23
Speaker 4: We have a ton of great experts on any subject you want to touch on, and it would be really awesome to you know, like focus more on the CBRI, the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative, and you know, that’s what we’re continuing to work for towards and advocate for to get these actions done to continue the success and also you know, looking for partnerships of you know, how we could work together because you know, the only time we make actionable change is when we set aside our differences to focus on our commonalities and that’s when we connect and also connecting as people like how I said about you know, salmon. It’s the heart of our culture. It’s cultural, it’s spiritual, you know, like and even things don’t have to be religious to be spiritual. It could be that way for you or anybody else. Like I talked to a lot of our staff. I shared my aha moment of that seeing that fish eight hundred miles away, and they’ve talked about sitting alongside the stream bank and seeing that fish jumping to get over this barrier or things like that. Like we can all feel that connection if we get out there and it’s there’s you can’t put a value on that.

02:42:37
Speaker 5: So take a first step. Audience members, if you want to donate, can you guys plug your website. I know there’s a donate tab therea.

02:42:47
Speaker 4: Yeah on our on our web page, the Columbia River Inner Tribal Fish Commission.

02:42:51
Speaker 3: It’s at.

02:42:53
Speaker 4: Www dot CRYTF dot org. So ce R I t e FC dot org.

02:43:03
Speaker 2: All you non Indian fellers out here, these are the fish, same old fish. Thanks for coming on, guys, Thank thanks, thank you,