Fall chinook run could double 10-year average

While fishermen might have trouble finding coho salmon in the Snake River, they won’t have much trouble hooking a fall chinook.

Fall chinook numbers are more than double over the past 10 years average, according to Russ Kiefer, Idaho Fish and Game mainstem migration specialist.

Silvers, or coho salmon, are just now beginning to return from the ocean and come upstream in the Columbia and Snake rivers.

Kiefer on Monday said there’s a big overall pattern that the fish react to. When north Pacific waters are cooler than average, the migrating fish to the south of the Columbia River do better. When the ocean is warmer than average, the Alaska runs tend to do better, he said.

Kiefer said the Pacific Ocean waters now are more favorable to fish in Alaska.

“We’ve put a lot of effort in them,” he said.

Coho were designated extinct in the late 1980s. The Nez Perce tribe brought out-of-basin stock to try to refurbish the fish, but that didn’t work out, Kiefer said.

Although counts are still early for Lower Granite Dam, Kiefer said counts indicate good numbers for the coho salmon.

At Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, coho runs begin the third week of August and go through early November. With a 25,000 count so far this year, it is well below the 120,000 average 10-year count.

“Coho are an occasional fish, compared to the chinook and steelhead that have more steady runs,” Kiefer said.

He said the real positive story is the fall chinook runs.

According to count numbers at Bonneville, the 10-year average for the fall chinook run is 390,000. As of Monday, the total count was 804,000 at Bonneville with the run 75 percent done, Kiefer said

“They will probably approach one million by the end of the run. It’s double the forecast for this year,” he added.

Kiefer said in the mid-1990s when the ocean was not favorable to the fish in our area, efforts to make the dams more fish-friendly increased, as well as hatchery production.

“It went from just hundreds of fish to more than hundreds,” Kiefer said. “It’s a good success story.”

Now the goal is to get the chinook de-listed from the Endangered Species Act.

“We use a lot of hatchery fish as a buffer, but to get them off the list, they only want native fish. That will be difficult because we mix them,” Kiefer said. “How do we now try to de-list them?”

Kiefer said research about the native fish is getting better.

“We’re getting a better idea of where all the different populations go and we’ve learned that they don’t do all the same things,” he said. “It takes a lot of research and research will go on for a long time.”