I feel for Bob, too... But I understand why WDFW can't afford to make exceptions in this particular case. They simply don't have the personnel to patrol all the rivers and check boat anglers to make sure they qualify for an exception, and you can bet plenty of non-qualifying people will take advantage of that circumstance and count on the high likelihood they'll never get caught.

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Get them off the spawning beds and eliminate the constant straying you see with these inbred fish. They simply are the #1 demise of our native steelhead populations, that simple.

Keith

just wondering, but how many programs also just spawned any returning wild fish with hatchery fish in the beginning, slowly integrating them into the hatchery program.

Are you serious? 100% disagree...

#1demise to nates. WOW BOLD STATEMENT!

Prove me wrong then? Countless amounts of data if you look deep enough that supports my statement.

Keith

Happy to chat with you about it when we are shooting.

The data and studies I'm looking at seem to squarely point the finger at upriver and estuary habitat loss as the largest threats and reasons of a declining (stable at best) wild winter steelhead populations on the EFL.

I would wager a large sum of money that if the studies were done today a new, easily identified threat would be the top culprit, or at least a high contender to the loss/destruction of habitat. The Ocean.

The Ocean and ocean conditions are currently not favorable to a steelhead and a lot of the salmonid species.

Unless I'm missing something, the current data isn't showing any type of significant rebounding effect for the EFL.

It's not crashing in the tank either....but seems to be chugging long at a neutral state with periods of high and low escapement.

Maybe these documents are Fake News.

https://www.ezview.wa.gov/Portals/_1962/...DFW_Feb2019.pdf

https://nativefishsociety.org/watersheds/east-fork-lewis

Historical escapement data says anywhere from 1,000-11,000 seems to fit "the norm".

Escapement goal is 875 wild winter runs.

Look a the escapement graphs. No where close to 11,000 fish....and seems to hang right around the 800 mark and meets escapement.

That just tells me the river isn't outright dying. Not rebounding significantly.

I'm not an advocate for hatchery steelhead, but making blanket statements about how a few hatchery strays and or some magical spawning bed competition and/or hatchery/wild co-mingling in the spawning beds is by far *not* the largest threat to an EFL wild steelhead.

Can flat out guarantee that with absolutely no hatchery turds in the EFL now and in the future, you're never going to see 11,000 returning wild winter runs to that river...... You're never going to see 5,000...or 2,500......

You may see another 1,400 and you're probably going to see sub-800 numbers are well.

Happy to chat with you about it when we are shooting.

The data and studies I'm looking at seem to squarely point the finger at upriver and estuary habitat loss as the largest threats and reasons of a declining (stable at best) wild winter steelhead populations on the EFL.

I would wager a large sum of money that if the studies were done today a new, easily identified threat would be the top culprit, or at least a high contender to the loss/destruction of habitat. The Ocean.

The Ocean and ocean conditions are currently not favorable to a steelhead and a lot of the salmonid species.

Unless I'm missing something, the current data isn't showing any type of significant rebounding effect for the EFL.

It's not crashing in the tank either....but seems to be chugging long at a neutral state with periods of high and low escapement.

Maybe these documents are Fake News.

https://www.ezview.wa.gov/Portals/_1962/...DFW_Feb2019.pdf

https://nativefishsociety.org/watersheds/east-fork-lewis

Historical escapement data says anywhere from 1,000-11,000 seems to fit "the norm".

Escapement goal is 875 wild winter runs.

Look a the escapement graphs. No where close to 11,000 fish....and seems to hang right around the 800 mark and meets escapement.

That just tells me the river isn't outright dying. Not rebounding significantly.

I'm not an advocate for hatchery steelhead, but making blanket statements about how a few hatchery strays and or some magical spawning bed competition and/or hatchery/wild co-mingling in the spawning beds is by far *not* the largest threat to an EFL wild steelhead.

Can flat out guarantee that with absolutely no hatchery turds in the EFL now and in the future, you're never going to see 11,000 returning wild winter runs to that river...... You're never going to see 5,000...or 2,500......

You may see another 1,400 and you're probably going to see sub-800 numbers are well.

Yeah that. See, Paker does still have some biologist in his DNA!

I've written many times that hatchery steelhead don't do any favors for wild steelhead, but maligning those hatchery fish as the number one factor (i.e., proximate cause) of depressed numbers of wild steelhead does little more than deflect focus away from the factors that have significantly greater effects on returning adult steelhead populations.

Keith, since you cling to the studies showing where the presence of hatchery steelhead correlates with depressed wild runs, you could go a long way in explaining that the correlation is indeed causation. Show us why wild runs in river systems with or that have had hatchery steelhead fluctuate proportionately with wild steelhead runs in rivers that have never had any hatchery steelhead stocking at all. Ever.

There are many more steelhead streams on Vancouver Island and the BC coast that have never had a single hatchery smolt stocked than there are that have been stocked. Yet these forever unstocked rivers' populations fluctuate up and down the same as the populations in the Salish Sea and WA coast where hatchery steelhead have been stocked for a half century or more. Every biologist I've talked with about the subject believes that a factor common to both stocked and unstocked streams is the causative factor. And that factor is the fluctuating ocean survival.

Keith,

"Same" was not the best choice of words. "Similar" would be better. A "good" return to a LCR tributary like the EFL will correspond to a "good" return on the WA coast, PS, Van. Is., and lower BC coast. Correspondence dissipates by geographical region when their respective steelhead populations migrate to differing ocean foraging areas.

Straying does happen. But there are two different kinds of straying, and their difference is important. The first is the one that concerns you, where a hatchery steelhead strays into some part of the natural environment and spawns with a wild steelhead, thereby diluting the reproductive fitness and productivity of the wild fish. Chambers Ck hatchery winter steelhead do this, and the effects vary. They vary depending on whether there are any wild steelhead in the same place at the same time as the ripe hatchery fish. The presence of early timed spawning wild steelhead is usually associated with tributary streams with lower elevation headwaters. These instances are reported to occur more in LCR tributaries, Willapa tributaries, and too a lesser degree, along some WA north coast streams. The remainder of the coastal and PS watersheds headwater at higher elevations and a later spawn timing that does not coincide with Chambers spawn timing.

This is not to say that there is no genetic introgression of Chambers DNA in these populations of wild steelhead. Rather, the amount of such introgression is exceedingly small. At first by coincidence, and later by design, Chambers steelhead DNA has remained mostly absent, that is, occurring at a very small percentage, in PS wild steelhead populations, even though Chambers Creek itself is a south PS tributary stream.

One of the best examples of the inability of Chambers Ck steelhead to successfully interbreed with wild steelhead is lower Cowlitz River tributaries. the old WDG deliberately stocked literally millions of these Chambers Ck hatchery steelhead fry into 3 or 4 lower Cowlitz tributaries for several years. If ever there was an opportunity for these hatchery fish to swamp a wild population and become the dominant genetic type present in a stream, these were it. Comes now the Cowlitz steelhead genetic study, dated about 2010, and low and behold, while Chambers Ck DNA was present in wild steelhead in these tributaries, it was present at a very low level, with typical lower Columbia wild steelhead DNA being the dominant genetic presence. I think that this tells us that the selective breeding of the Chambers Ck hatchery steelhead made them very unfit to reproduce naturally in natural stream environments. And while they may have compromised the fitness of any wild steelhead that they spawned with, their long-term damage to such populations appears to have been minimal.

I mentioned there are two types of straying. The second is very common, especially with summer steelhead like you have experienced on the N Lewis. Summer steelhead dip ins happen all over the lower Columbia. The Columbia River runs warm in the summer, and the tributaries are cooler. So summer steelhead dip into various tributaries, like the N Lewis, Cowlitz, Deschutes (until recent years, when the Pelton-Round Butte tower came on line) to avail themselves of the cooler water temperatures. You should know about the Kalama Falls hatchery, where summer runs were Floy tagged and passed upstream. Then, when the fall rains came, those tagged fish that were strays backed downstream to the Columbia and proceeded upstream to the tributary streams that were their natal waters.

I think the same thing happens on the coast, where summer steelhead have sometimes shunned the Columbia, only to temporarily ascend the Hoh or Queets - that have cooler water - and stay for a while and later disappear. My hypothesis is that they eventually enter the Columbia and migrate to whatever tributary they originally came from, but I don't have the data proving it. The upshot is that while summer steelhead do stray into and spawn in non-natal waters, most of them don't.

I think your hypothetical straying by steelhead into BC tributary streams falls into this second category, where they dip in but most don't stay to spawn. To reiterate, I completely agree that hatchery steelhead don't give any favors to wild steelhead. However, suggesting that hatchery steelhead are the proximate, i.e., the number one, cause of depressed wild steelhead populations is very badly misplaced.