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THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26, 2016
Steelhead sanctuary: Keeping it wild
Plugging the gap
Siletz River is well
known in fishing circles
By BENNETT HALL
Corvallis Gazette-Times
SILETZ— Francis “Doc” Reedy raises a pair
of binoculars to his eyes and scans the large pool
of still water where the north and south forks of
the Siletz River come together. It doesn’t take
him long to spot what he’s looking for.
“Wow!” he says. “That’s a huge steelhead!”
The Siletz, which has its source near the bor-
der of Polk and Lincoln counties and flows 67
miles to the sea near Lincoln City, is well known
in fishing circles for its steelhead, an oceango-
ing variant of rainbow trout that, like salmon,
return to their home streams to spawn. Anglers
on the river have reported landing steelhead
more than 30 inches long and weighing well
over 20 pounds.
While there are plenty of good fishing riv-
ers in Oregon, the Siletz is unique in one regard:
It is home to the only wild summer steelhead
run that originates in the Coast Range. For ded-
icated anglers like Reedy, president of the Cor-
vallis-based Bluebacks chapter of Trout Unlim-
ited, that’s a distinction worth defending.
The river’s upper reaches have been man-
aged as a sanctuary for wild summer steelhead
since the mid-1990s, but in recent years hatch-
ery fish have been finding their way past the bar-
riers designed to keep them out, posing a threat
to the genetic purity — and ongoing viability —
of the region’s only summer run.
“The wild summer steelhead runs, they have
been in peril for some years,” said Reedy, a
semiretired large-animal veterinarian who lives
in North Albany. “We just feel that’s an import-
ant resource for the area and the whole state.”
Anibal Ortiz/The Corvallis Gazette-Times
Doc Reedy stands on a platform overlooking the dam and fish ladder at Valsetz Falls on
the Siletz River. An Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife trap is supposed to keep
hatchery-raised steelhead from getting past the falls, but some still get through, posing
a threat to the river’s wild summer steelhead run.
Plummeting numbers
As recently as the early 1970s, state wild-
life managers counted an annual average of 624
wild summer steelhead returning to the upper
Siletz. By the early ’90s, however, the annual
returns had plummeted to less than 100, with
fewer than 50 counted in some years.
Starting in 1994, the Oregon Department of
Fish and Wildlife implemented a recovery plan
aimed at giving the wild summer steelhead a
fighting chance to survive.
The goal was to keep competing fish out of
the upper Siletz by stopping them at Valsetz
Falls, a 40-foot cascade that drops through a
boulder-choked gorge not far from the onetime
timber company town of the same name. While
high winter flows generally keep most fish out
of the upper basin, some winter-migrating steel-
head and salmon were making their way past
the falls during the summer, along with hatch-
ery-produced steelhead.
“The thought was there was so much com-
petition between winter and summer steelhead
that the summer steelhead were just not doing
that well,” said John Spangler, a fish biologist
with ODFW.
To keep the winter-run steelhead (which
spawn in the lower river) downstream, the state
agency used a fish ladder and small dam at the
falls.
When river levels begin to drop in the sum-
mer, Fish and Wildlife crews place boards
across an opening in the dam to divert more
water through the ladder, making it a more
attractive route for fish working their way
upstream. Fish coming up the ladder are caught
in a trap, which is checked regularly by ODFW
personnel. Winter-run fish are trucked back to
the lower river, while the wild summer steel-
head are released above the dam to continue
their journey to their spawning grounds in the
basin’s upper reaches.
At first, hatcheries played a part in the recov-
ery program, with the state releasing 80,000
smolts a year into the Siletz system. That num-
ber has since been reduced to 50,000, and the
state stopped allowing hatchery steelhead to
pass the dam at Valsetz Falls in 2002.
Today, no fishing is allowed above the falls.
Anglers working the lower river can keep up to
two fin-clipped hatchery steelhead per day, but
fishing for wild summer steelies is catch-and-re-
lease only.
Any wild winter steelhead or salmon found
in the trap are trucked back to the lower river for
release, while hatchery fish are either delivered
to area food banks, donated to high school biol-
ogy programs for dissection or killed and placed
in the river, where the nutrients they brought
back from the sea can be recycled.
“We know hatchery fish pose a risk to wild
stocks,” Spangler said. “(We’re) trying to find
this balance between conservation of wild
stocks and still having this opportunity for har-
vest of hatchery fish.”
The wild summer steelhead run seems to
have responded well to that approach, according
to Spangler, with a much higher annual return.
“Now we’re getting on average over 500
fish,” he said. “When we stopped those win-
ter-migrating fish, it really zoomed back up.”
The hatchery threat
Apparently, however, some hatchery steel-
head didn’t get the memo.
A few years ago, members of the Blue-
backs monitoring the area above the falls
started noticing clipped-fin steelhead in the
upper Siletz. In 2014, some of the steelheaders
donned wetsuits and snorkeling gear to do an
in-stream count.
“We saw quite a few hatchery fish, and that
alarmed us,” Reedy said.
Last year they commissioned a snorkel sur-
vey by professional fish biologists that con-
firmed their fears, finding that hatchery fish
made up roughly 20 percent of the total steel-
head population above the falls.
According to Reedy, that’s a problem for
several reasons.
For one thing, hatchery steelhead compete
Those protections may not work, though, if
hatchery fish can’t be kept out of wild steelhead
spawning areas such as the upper Siletz. After
learning of Trout Unlimited’s concerns, ODFW
took steps to address the problem at Valsetz
Falls.
Spangler thinks the hatchery steelhead found
in the upper river got there by swimming up
the falls over the last two summers, when the
agency neglected to put in the dam boards to
divert water into the fish ladder.
“Those weren’t put in, and it allowed more
fish to get over the dam,” he said, but added
that’s no longer the case.
“We put a lot of effort into keeping hatchery
fish out of the upper basin this year,” Spangler
said. “The expectation is we should have very
few if any hatchery steelhead above the falls.”
To test that theory, McMillan led a snorkel
survey of the upper Siletz on Sept. 30. Joining
him were two other fish biologists, Nick Cham-
bers of Trout Unlimited and Conrad Gowell of
the Native Fish Society. Reedy drove a support
vehicle.
Armed with wetsuits, snorkels and diving
masks, the three scientists surveyed 11 miles
of river. They moved methodically from pool
to pool, counting every steelhead they could
find and keeping a wary eye out for the telltale
clipped adipose fin that marks a hatchery-bred
fish.
They didn’t expect to spot every summer-run
steelhead that made it past the falls this year.
Instead, they wanted to see whether the propor-
tion of hatchery fish had gone up or down from
last year’s 20 percent.
The results were encouraging. The final
tally: 147 steelhead. Of that number, only nine,
or 6.1 percent, were hatchery products.
“That’s probably acceptable,” said Cham-
bers, an organizer for Trout Unlimited’s Wild
Steelhead Initiative. “We’d like to see that at
zero, but under the circumstances . that’s cer-
tainly much better than last year.”
A delicate balance
Anibal Ortiz/The Corvallis Gazette-Times
Hatchery-bred steelhead have found ways to bypass this trap at Valsetz Falls, getting
into a part of the Siletz River that is managed as a sanctuary for wild fish.
Anibal Ortiz/The Corvallis Gazette-Times
John McMillan, head scientist for Trout Unlimited in the Pacific Northwest, takes part in
a snorkel survey of steelhead populations on the Siletz River.
with their wild counterparts for food. They can
also create crowded conditions that facilitate the
spread of disease.
In addition, hatchery fish sometimes prey
on wild steelhead. But a bigger problem comes
from the introduction of large numbers of hatch-
ery smolts into the river at one time, which can
act like a magnet for predators such as seabirds,
herons, otters and mergansers that feed on wild
and human-raised fish alike.
“When the hatchery fish come through,”
Reedy said, “the predators just go nuts.”
Another concern has to do with DNA.
Researchers have suspected for years that hatch-
ery fish are less genetically fit to survive in the
wild than native fish, a theory that appears to
have been corroborated by an ODFW-Ore-
gon State University study published in Febru-
ary that found hatchery steelhead differed from
wild fish in more than 700 genes after just a sin-
gle generation.
Specifically, the study determined that many
of those altered genes showed adaptation to
highly crowded hatchery conditions. Passing
those traits on to the next generation could result
in steelhead less suited to survive on their own
while watering down the native gene pool.
“My worry is inbreeding,” Reedy said. “If
you lose that resiliency and (genetic) diversity,
you’re in trouble.”
In response to those concerns, conservation
groups such as Trout Unlimited and the Native
Fish Society are pushing the notion of establish-
ing wild steelhead sanctuaries.
The state of Washington recently declared
the Elwha and Nisqually rivers wild steelhead
gene banks, where hatchery-raised fish are to be
excluded and other measures taken to protect
native steelhead runs. Oregon has taken sim-
ilar steps in some smaller watersheds such as
the Siletz, and U.S. Rep. Peter DeFazio recently
introduced legislation to implement steelhead
protections in the Steamboat Creek drainage in
the North Umpqua River basin.
“We can’t go back to 1950,” said John
McMillan, head scientist for Trout Unlimited in
the Pacific Northwest. “But we do think there
are places that are more special than others, and
we think those places deserve special treatment
so these fish can be protected.”
Of course, hatchery fish are far from the only
threat to the Siletz River’s one-of-a-kind wild
summer steelhead run.
As in virtually every other river system in
the United States, fish in the Siletz basin are
under pressure from a host of human activities.
Those include water withdrawals for residen-
tial, industrial and agricultural use; loss of for-
est cover to various types of development; the
possibility of dam construction, such as the pro-
posed Polk County reservoir project at the old
Valsetz town site; and logging activity, which
can lead to increased sediment loading, higher
water temperatures, herbicide runoff, higher
water volumes during flood events and loss of
downed wood needed to supply nutrients, create
channel complexity and provide habitat.
Logging is an especially sensitive issue in
the Siletz basin, where about 75 percent of the
total area is privately owned industrial timber-
land. The remaining 25 percent or so is held
by the Bureau of Land Management, including
the Valley of the Giants, a 51-acre old-growth
preserve, and Boulder Creek, a key spawning
stream for summer-run steelhead.
“This is the most deforested watershed in
Oregon — 42 percent of the Siletz basin has been
clearcut in the last 12 years,” Reedy said. “And
the problem is they’re not happy with that 42 per-
cent. They also want the BLM lands, to cut that.”
The federal agency is currently evaluating a
new management plan for western Oregon that
Reedy fears could lead to intensive logging in
the Boulder Creek drainage.
“That’s a great steelhead stream,” Reedy
said. “In the back of my mind, I feel like that’s
what kept the steelhead alive for a lot of years.”
If even more of the Siletz basin is logged, the
wild steelhead supporters argue, it could upset
the delicate balance that has allowed the sum-
mer run to bounce back, reversing the progress
it has made so far. That could lead to a listing as
threatened or endangered, triggering a cascade
of legal restrictions on logging and other activ-
ities under the federal Endangered Species Act
— something nobody seems to want.
“Our message at Trout Unlimited is that
when you have a lot of uncertainty, you need
to manage on the side of caution,” McMillan
said. “Because these fish are really valuable, not
only to fishermen but in terms of how we man-
age these lands.”
Or, as Reedy put it: “Part of what we’re
doing is trying to preserve the fish, but it’s also
to keep them from being listed as an endangered
species.”
Dual refuge
Spangler argues that ODFW’s management
strategy is sound, pointing to the increased wild
steelhead returns since the 1990s as evidence.
“I think it’s the best approach we’ve got at
this point,” he said. “I’m pretty confident that the
recovery plan that was developed is working.”
Despite some reservations about the state’s
plan, Reedy hopes it does prove successful in
the end.
He made his first visit to the Siletz River in
1972, not long after moving to the region as
a recent college graduate from the Midwest.
Since then, he’s fished these waters many times.
Even when the steelhead aren’t biting, he says,
he values his time on the river.
“It’s a unique experience in that respect,” he
said. “Even if you don’t see any fish, it’s a beau-
tiful area.”
The Siletz, he adds, is especially precious
because of its location in the midst of an indus-
trial logging zone. As an isolated oasis of natural
beauty in one of the most heavily logged parts
of the Coast Range, Reedy argues, it provides a
refuge not only for wild steelhead but also for
the outdoor lovers who fish for them.
“It’s nice to have those places, just to get
away,” he said. “It’s good for the body, it’s good
for the mind and it’s good for the soul.”