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CapitalPress.com
July 6, 2018
Washington farmers: Seals
thwart salmon recovery
Pinnipeds, killer
whales eat fish
By DON JENKINS
Capital Press
A Washington farm advo-
cacy group wants harbor seals
in the Salish Sea to get the
same notoriety as the Califor-
nia sea lions eating salmon in
the Lower Columbia River.
Harbor seals eat an es-
timated 23 million young
salmon each year in the sea, a
network of coastal waterways
that include Puget Sound and
Strait of Juan de Fuca. The
take dwarfs the number of
salmon eaten by sea lions near
Bonneville Dam. The U.S.
House on Tuesday passed
over to the Senate a bill to
revise the 1972 Marine Mam-
mal Protection Act to let states
and tribes euthanize more sea
lions in the river.
Save Family Farming
says the bill should extend
to harbor seals in the Salish
Sea. The seals are scupper-
ing salmon recovery, which
ratchets up pressure in north-
west Washington to downsize
agriculture to give fish more
habitat and water, according
to the group.
“Everyone is getting so
pinched to give back habitat,
and it’s a little hard to under-
stand how habitat is the only
problem,” said Skagit County
farmer Zachary Barborinas.
“I think this is one more large
factor that has to be consid-
ered.”
A recent study led by Na-
tional Ocean and Atmospheric
Administration scientists esti-
mated that harbor seals, Cali-
fornia sea lions, Steller sea li-
ons and killer whales ate 31.5
million chinook salmon in
coastal waters between Cali-
fornia and Alaska in 2015, a
sixfold increase since 1975.
Some 86 percent of those
salmon were consumed by
the Salish Sea’s 77,800 harbor
seals, up from 8,600 in 1975.
The consumption of salm-
on by the protected mammals
“could be masking the suc-
cess of coastwide salmon re-
covery,” according to the study,
posted online in November by
Scientific Reports.
Save Family Farming direc-
tor Gerald Baron said the group
will wage a social media cam-
paign to publicize how harbor
seals are affecting salmon.
“They (the public) hear talk
about habitat, in-stream flows
and culverts,” he said. “Farm-
ers are not saying those things
are not important, but we’re
saying that unless you address
the foundational issue, they will
be counterproductive.”
Baron acknowledged the
difficulty of targeting a cute
mammal on social media.
“That’s going to be one of our
greatest concerns,” he said.
Killer whales eat the most
salmon by weight, but harbor
seals eat the most individu-
al fish. Harbor seals ate 6.5
percent of the total coastwide
smolt production, according to
the study.
“There’s no doubt there are
a lot of salmon that get eaten by
predators,” the study’s co-lead-
er, NOAA research scientist
Brandon Chasco, said Thurs-
day.
Researchers didn’t project
how reducing the number of
harbor seals would affect salm-
on survival. “What we don’t
know is, if the salmon had
not been eaten by harbor seals
whether they simply would
have been consumed by anoth-
er predator,” Chasco said.
He said it was reasonable to
bring up the study in discussing
fishing, water and land poli-
cies, but the study itself doesn’t
make recommendations. “I
certainly wasn’t in it to change
policy,” Chasco said.
According to the NOAA
study, the sea’s killer whales,
which number about 80, eat
190,000 to 260,000 adult chi-
nook salmon annually. Gov. Jay
Inslee signed an executive or-
der in March appointing a task
force to study how to increase
the killer whale population.
The Columbia River In-
ter-Tribal Fish Commission
estimates that California sea
lions ate more than 8,900
salmon near Bonneville Dam
in 2016. With NOAA approv-
al, almost 200 sea lions have
been euthanized in the river
since 2008, the Oregon De-
partment of Fish and Wildlife
reports.
Prescribed fire clears under story, fine fuels
By BRAD CARLSON
Capital Press
Fire crews continued this
week to control the U.S.
Forest Service’s prescribed
Lodgepole Fire, which spread
slowly into adjacent unburned
areas with help from recent
warmer weather.
Higher
temperatures
quickly dried needle litter and
heavier fuels, allowing the fire
to spread and prompting local
reports of smoke visible along
the Middle Fork Payette River
and into the town of Crouch
north of Boise. The fire re-
mains within its designated
project area about 14 miles
north of Crouch on National
Forest System Road 671.
The immediate area offers
limited opportunity for farm-
ing or grazing given its steep
terrain, but the prescribed fire
could benefit timber operators
by burning out under-story
vegetation and brush, helping
larger trees, Boise National
Forest spokesman Michael
Williamson said.
Following a prescribed
burn or mechanical thinning,
the remaining trees are health-
ier because they have less
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The Lodgepole prescribed fire north of Crouch, Idaho, spread this
week as higher temperatures made more types of fuels available.
competition, more in-ground
nutrients available and great-
er capacity to fight insects
and disease, he said. Thinning
also can raise the tree canopy,
in effect keeping fire close to
the ground and less likely to
become large and catastrophic.
Crews have been putting
in a fire line to reduce the
blaze’s spread, and putting
out flames found in heavy fu-
els. The 1,250-acre prescribed
fire was started in late April in
the largely south-facing area
partly to improve wildlife
habitat.
Williamson on Monday
said the previous weekend’s
approximately
60-person
crew made significant prog-
ress and was expected to
downsize to about 20 over the
next couple of days.
He said closures of two
short spur roads near the base
of the fire, which starts at the
river and moves higher, are
officially in effect until Au-
gust but will be re-evaluated
continuously. This will help
crews monitor and control
any rollout — loose material
moving down from above af-
ter fire moves through.
The fire first burned vege-
tation as well as heavier dead
and down fuels. Williamson
said higher temperatures sub-
sequently dried finer fuels and
enabled the fire to creep into
previously unburned areas,
producing smoke as it found
larger fuels such as small
pockets of unburned timber or
stumps.
Fire lines create fuel
breaks to stop the fire from
spreading, though it can con-
tinue to creep within contain-
ment boundaries, he said.
The Crouch area includes
homes and recreation desti-
nations.
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Mateusz Perkowski/Capital Press
A helicopter demonstrates aerial spraying at Western Helicopter Services in Newberg, Ore.
Workshop examines aerial spraying
By MATEUSZ PERKOWSKI
Capital Press
NEWBERG, Ore. — Last
year, Western Helicopter Ser-
vices could only spray herbi-
cides about a third of the time
that was scheduled.
The rest of the time, they
were waiting for the weather
to improve and become suit-
able for spraying.
“We don’t go out and
spray willy-nilly,” said Rick
Krohn, president of Western
Helicopter Services of New-
berg, Ore.
Due to the speed and ef-
ficiency of spraying by air,
though, the company was
able to make the best use of
the time windows that be-
came available, Krohn said.
“If we were trying to get that
done by ground, (we’d) never
get it done.”
The realities of aerial her-
bicide spraying in forestry
were discussed during a June
22 workshop organized by
the Oregon Forest Resourc-
es Institute, an educational
organization that examines
controversial issues in timber
management.
“You don’t get much
tougher than herbicides right
now,” Mike Cloughesy,
OFRI’s director of forestry,
said of the issues facing the
industry.
In recent years, two Or-
egon aerial applicators have
faced regulatory penalties for
spray violations, and one of
them was sued over alleged
trespass damages by rural res-
idents. Several bills have also
been proposed in the Legisla-
ture to restrict aerial spraying,
and voters in Lincoln County
banned the practice under an
ordinance that’s now being
challenged in court.
Speakers at the workshop
explained why aerial spray-
ing is a commonly used tool
in the timber industry.
Aerial spraying plays a
role in the “vegetation man-
agement” phase of forestry,
preventing weeds from dom-
inating young trees, said Jay
Walters, field coordinator at
the Oregon Department of
Forestry.
Under the Oregon Forest
Practices Act, timber clear
cuts must be replanted within
two years and trees must be
“free to grow” unencumbered
by vegetation or other serious
problems within six years.
The chemicals must be
mixed and loaded more than
100 feet from streams that
bear fish or that are used for
domestic water, and aerial ap-
plicators must spray at least
60 feet from waterways and
standing water with a sur-
face area larger than a quar-
ter-acre, said Walters. Under
a law passed in 2015, aerial
applicators must also main-
tain a 60-foot buffer around
inhabited dwellings and
school campuses.
A year ago, digital sub-
scriptions to the ODF’s
“Forest Activity Electronic
Reporting and Notification
System,” or FERNS, were
made available to members
of the public who wanted to
learn about upcoming timber
operations.
The number of subscrip-
tions has grown to nearly
600, up from about 400 under
the agency’s earlier paper no-
tification system, Walters said.
Even so, the Oregon De-
partment of Agriculture and
Oregon Department of Forest-
ry haven’t noticed an increase
in complaints about herbicides
since the digital subscriptions
went live.
“People who had con-
cerns were getting through to
Forestry and us,” said Mike
Odenthal, ODA’s lead pesti-
cide investigator.
Notifications must usually
be submitted to ODF at least
15 days before a spray opera-
tion but they remain valid for
a year.
Because there have been
examples of malfeasance
among applicators, people
should be notified of spray
operations to make arrange-
ments, such as keeping an-
imals and children indoors,
said Sen. Michael Dembrow,
D-Portland. Dembrow, chair-
man of the Senate Environ-
ment and Natural Resources
Committee, was among sev-
eral elected officials at the
workshop.
“I think there’s a need for
us to build on the FERNS sys-
tem to be a more real-time no-
tification system,” Dembrow
said.
Economists: Trade threats weigh on dairy markets
By CAROL RYAN DUMAS
Capital Press
Slowing milk production
and strong exports should be
painting a positive picture for
U.S. dairy, but talk of trade
wars with Mexico and China
seem to be weighing on dairy
markets, according to econo-
mists at the University of Wis-
consin.
U.S. milk production is
staying below a 1 percent in-
crease year over year, which is
going to help tighten supply,
Mark Stephenson, the univer-
sity’s director of dairy policy
analysis, said in the latest
Dairy Situation and Outlook
podcast.
“... We’re still carrying his-
torically high inventories of
product, but I don’t think it’s
alarmingly large,” he said.
Fellow economist Bob
Cropp agreed: “There’s plen-
ty there but at least it’s not a
growing problem.”
On the export side, the
latest data show record ship-
ments, with milk powders up
37 percent and cheese up 22
percent. April exports repre-
sented 18 percent of U.S. milk
production.
“That’s pretty significant,”
Cropp said.
University of Wisconsin
Bob Cropp, left, and Mark Stephenson
That’s a big number, but
there are concerns, Stephen-
son said.
“We’ve been rattling the
saber pretty hard with trade,
and we’ve gotten some blow-
back back into dairy,” he said.
U.S. tariffs on steel and
aluminum imports from Mex-
ico drew threats of retaliatory
tariffs on U.S. cheese of up
to 25 percent. U.S. tariffs on
a number of imports from
China also resulted in threats
of counter-tariffs on a slew of
U.S. products, Cropp said.
The tariffs have not yet
taken effect, but dairy futures
have deteriorated in what he
thinks is an overreaction to the
announcements, he said.
Stephenson also thinks the
markets have overreacted.
“But I didn’t expect them
not to react at all,” he said.
USDA is still forecasting
pretty robust export markets
this year. But product prices
have dropped since the first
of June, and Class III milk fu-
tures are in the $15s per hun-
dredweight. In May, October
futures were about $17, Cropp
said.
“So everything has really
reacted downward,” he said.
Absent any of the trade
war discussions, most of the
fundamentals would have
supported the $17 milk price,
Stephenson said.
“We haven’t actually had
anything take place. We ha-
ven’t had products that have
been rebuffed or anything else
from high tariffs. This is just
in anticipation that it could
happen,” he said.
Domestic sales have been
pretty good. Stocks aren’t bur-
densome and will come down.
Exports are record high, and
milk production is only in-
creasing slightly. World prices
are holding, and U.S. products
are competitive, Cropp said.
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