The Union River near Belfair — the last estuary you come to when
venturing into Hood Canal — slaps us in the face with an
enigma.
The Union River flows into
the very end of Hood Canal near Belfair. The red outline is part of
the Pacific Northwest Salmon Center.
For the moment, I can’t do much more than pose some perplexing
questions. But I get the feeling that if we could get the answers,
we would understand more about salmon recovery in Lower Hood Canal
and possibly other places as well.
The Union River also highlights the customary finger-pointing as
to why certain stocks of salmon declined in the first place and
what it will take to bring them back. Of the four H’s — harvest,
habitat, hatcheries and hydro — the greatest finger-pointing goes
on between harvest and habitat.
Let’s take Hood Canal summer chum and focus on the Union River,
which was the subject of a story I wrote for
Monday’s Kitsap Sun.
First, why did summer chum go extinct in the Dewatto and Tahuya
rivers — the closest rivers to the Union — while maintaining a
viable population in the Union?
A research effort to restore “threatened” steelhead to several
rivers draining into Hood Canal is beginning to yield some
interesting and important results.
Sean Hildebrant of Hood
Canal Salmon Enhancement Group shoots 2-year-old steelhead into the
Dewatto River.
Photo by Steve Zugschwerdt for the Kitsap
Sun
In a story I wrote for
Friday’s edition of the Kitsap Sun, I described this
multi-agency research effort led by Barry Berejikian of the
National Marine Fisheries Service. The work keeps piling up
critical data that offers hope for the recovery of steelhead in
Hood Canal and maybe other areas as well. (See also the video
of the latest release.)
One line of study points to the success of growing steelhead
more slowly, so that they are ready to go out to sea in two years
instead of just one, as in most steelhead hatcheries. Growing
two-year-old smolts mimics natural conditions and seems to
dramatically increase the chance of survival.
Other work involved in the Hood Canal Steelhead Project is
focused on counting fish coming and going, tracking their movements
with implanted acoustic tags and examining any shifts in
genetics.
Last year, I wrote about the last of the propagated steelhead to
be released into the Hamma Hamma River, where supplementation
started a decade before. (See
Kitsap Sun, March 16, 2008.) Thanks to this supplementation
project, the number of steelhead returning to the Hamma Hamma have
increased from an annual average of 17 to more than 100.
Barry Berejikian tells me that he won’t be alarmed if the
numbers of returning adults to the Hamma Hamma drops somewhat, now
that supplementation has stopped. We won’t really know the carrying
capacity of the river for a few years, but it’s important to
understand that the productive part of the river is relatively
short because of an upstream fish barrier.
Available habitat is not so limited with other Hood Canal
streams, such as the Dewatto, which is now gaining increasing
attention.
So why did the steelhead decline to such feeble numbers in the
first place if the habitat has always been there?
One theory is that fishing knocked the numbers of spawners down
so low that the populations were just hanging on. If that’s true,
then a supplementation program could be the trick to restoring
healthy numbers to sustain the run. The Hamma Hamma could be the
case that supports this idea.
For additional information about the Hood Canal Steelhead
Project, go to the
Long Live the Kings Web site.
For other information about Puget Sound steelhead, which are
listed as threatened under the Endanagered Species Act, see two Web
pages by the National Marine Fisheries Service:
