The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 829: Who Will Save the Columbia River's Salmon?

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Steven Rinella talks with Donella Miller and Doug Hatch of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC), Brody Henderson, Janis Putelis, Seth Morris, Phil Taylor, and Corinne Schneider.   Topics discussed: The Six Sovereigns restoration initiative of the Columbia River basin; having a holistic philosophy and viewing fish as a forever fixture; salmon runs; steelhead reconditioning; chinook recovery; sockeye and coho reintroduction; lamprey restoration; the sea lion crisis; and more.  Feel free to donate to the recovery effort here: https://critfc.org/donate/ Connect with Steve and The MeatEater Podcast Network Steve on Instagram and Twitter MeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTubeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. This is the Meat Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwearless. We're going to hunt. The Meat Eater podcast. You can't predict anything. Brought to you by First Light.

When I'm hunting, I need gear that won't quit. First Light builds. No compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at First Light. light.com. That's F-I-R-S-T-L-I-T-E dot com. All right, welcome to the Meat Eater podcast. Today we're going to dig into something of great importance that we touched on a bunch of times in the past is what in the world

happened to and what is going on with the Columbia River and the salmon runs. I mean, this is a story that's played out over centuries. Historically, the Columbia, I pulled this from your guys' website. The guess I'm going to introduce them in it. I had always read that historically the Columbia had runs, annual runs of 10 to 12 million salmon. I was reading today, it could have been some of yours as high,

is 16 million salmon ran the Columbia. Our good old boy is Lewis and Clark, who come up every time you're trying to describe something from the old time he days. uh, described salmon in the Columbia as being inconceivable the numbers. Uh, they had fish, salmon species running from March to October, steelhead in there all winter. And then as we'll get into just a never ending series of mistakes, um, intentional actions, accidental actions have led it to be where it is just small fractions of that.

small fractions of those numbers running up and down the river. And we're going to talk with a couple of guests today who have been involved in salmon recovery on the Columbia River from a intertribal perspective. So the Columbia River flowed through, can you guys, I'm leading up to my intro here of you guys, but can you remind me how many miles of river are in the Columbia? Basin. I think it was, I was reading about it today, but I can't remember the number. Well, the Columbia River itself, like where it's coming from Canada is about 750 miles from the ocean, but half of the Columbia is north of Canada. And then you've got all of the major tribes, you know, from the Yakima, the Wenatchee, the snake, the Willamette, you know, just all up and down the river.

So you're looking at even now in the high water years, a half a million CFS have flowed down by Bonneville Dam. Yeah, so half a million cubic feet per second of water flowing through there. And the folks were going to talk to today about tribal efforts to recover fish. The tribes acknowledging that the states just aren't doing it at the speed they would like. and with the vision that they would like them to have. The feds aren't doing it at the speed they would like, and they're not pursuing the vision they would like them to pursue. So increasingly, the tribes, Native American tribes,

have been getting involved in this. And we're going to speak today with Doug Hatch, who's the deputy manager of the Fishery Science Department of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. And also Donella. Donella Miller is the fishery science manager. And real quick, before we dig in too much,

can you tell people what tribes are in the intertribal organization? Yeah, we're a consortia. We represent, we're a technical arm of, of course, the Yakima Nation, which I'm a tribal member of, and also the confederated tribes and bands of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, which my grandmother was from, So I'm also part you, Matilla as well, but also the Warm Springs tribe in Oregon and the Nespers in Idaho.

Okay. So, yeah, we work with those four tribes on Columbia Basin issues. And all four, you know, treaty tribes, we signed treaties with the government in 1855 to retain our, you know, hunting, fishing, and gathering rights throughout our usual and accustomed areas. And that's really key because, you know, we ceded land to the government in exchange for the set boundaries of the reservation and also to hunt fish and gather in perpetuity throughout our natural areas. Yeah. And then that right is infringed by the fact that then the people you signed the treaty with

went ahead and destroyed the fishery. Yeah. And that's really key. the work that we do is, you know, those rights may nothing if there's no fish to catch. The right isn't just to dip our nets in empty waters, it's actual catch fish. And there's language in the treaty that talks about our ability to maintain a modest living. And people can't support themselves on it anymore. Our people, unfortunately, live in poverty up and down the Columbia River at treaty access sites that aren't meant to be lived in.

It's more or less boat ramps. And, you know, they don't have water, power, or just a bathroom. But it's definitely not what we signed up for. Yeah, yeah. So we're going to tell that story. First, I want to do, what day, when did the thing draw out that we made in Texas? Because I explained this all big time in Texas It already dropped

But we're trying to hit it multiple times No, no, it's just being cognizant of the fact that So we record a showdown in Texas Talked about taint and meat, skunks, nuts on a cat In that We explained that there's If you subscribe to the show, you're going to see

If you subscribe to the podcast, you're going to see some changes coming up in March 9. So starting, is it March 9? that's what that's going to happen. Yeah, starting in March 9, you're going to start seeing every week you're going to see two Meat Eater podcast drops.

The regular Monday thing that you subscribe to you now stays the same, and that's like the interview show. So that would be like what we're doing right here right now. We're sitting around with tribal fisheries managers having an interview with them about their area of expertise. That's like the interview portion of the show,

and that will always drop at the same time. In addition to that, there's going to be a weekly news show, news and commentary drop. As I explain, it's like Spencer's concept. We cover our news, your news, and the news on the news show. Okay, three kinds of news. That will drop sometime during the week. It'll vary to when it comes out.

The folks you know and love and the kind of material you know and love from Radio Live, that stuff will move on to this news show. Radio Live won't be like a set. There won't be a live thing anymore and it won't occur at a set time anymore. It'll be the news and commentary show, which comes out when it comes out. Stay tuned for all that. There'll be some new artwork. You'll know it happened because there'll be new artwork.

That'll be the best way you'll know that happened. You'd be like, oh, a new artwork. Must be in this thing happened. And please subscribe on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps a lot. You know what word I learned today from you guys' website? I'm going to do a trivia. test. Don't aunt, don't don't, you know, you guys notice, but don't tell anybody. I'm going to

trivia test these guys. So I was on the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission site today. What is the word? I'm like Spencer here. What is the word for a fish that spawns once and dies? It's in the same vein of like anadromous, catadromous. It's like that flavor of a word. But it's me, you spawn once and die. I've heard this before. Is it diagemus? Like a scientific name? Diadromous.

Yeah. No. Like die. Ha, ha, ha. Brody, you got a joke? No. Sorry. Yeah, you're being clever?

Like, die? No. Oh, I thought he was. I thought he was being clever, too. At first I didn't think he's being clever. Then I thought he's being clever. No. It's like, it's that flavor.

What is that Latin? I don't know. Is it Latin? Diagrinus, cataginus. I don't know, I should look that up. Monodromous. No. I know I've heard it before, but I don't remember.

Dude, I have never encountered the word. I don't know there was a word. Go ahead and tell us. You ready? None of you guys got it. I never even heard the damn word. Catadromus comes from Greek roots. Oh, it's Greek.

This is probably Greek. Semmel Paris. So it's not like those words really at all. How do you spell that? When I say same flavor, I mean like a foreign language sounding deal, you know? I guarantee it's Greek. Semmel Paris. I never heard that word.

Is it? In my note, you know, you got like a notes function on your phone? I keep words that I need to incorporate into my vocabulary on a little list. So those are only the fish that die after they spawn. So not steelhead, not Atlantic sand. Not steelhead, not ocean run cut. Semel Paris. I should know this because I took Latin.

It does have Latin roots. It combines Semel meaning once or a single time. And pario meaning to give birth or produce. Another thing I learned, we're going to go way back deep before we get to this. Another thing I learned on your site that kind of blew my mind is those dams, the dams on the Columbia system did a way to think about it when baby salmon, when smolts are coming back down the river. It's basically you lose 7 to 15% of them die at each dam.

It's an incredible way to think about it. Yeah. Can you? And how many are there? How many dams are there? Well, there's four. Stay up close to your mic. Oh, there's four on the lower part of the main stem Columbia.

And then you have the four in the lower Snake River. And then there's also privately owned dams that are owned by the mid-Colombia public utility districts. So there's four, right, in the mid-sea. So there's eight on the main stem Columbia before you get to Roosevelt, right? Oh, the... Grand Coulee. Yeah, Chief Joseph is... impassable and then Grand Coulee is upstream of that.

But yeah, if you're going to the headwaters of the Columbia, which would be the Metau River, if you're up there, you're going to go over nine dams on the main stem, more if you go on up the tributaries. If you go up the snake, you're going over eight dams before you ever get to the Salmon River or the Amnaha or any of those big rivers in the snake. Eight times 15, that's a big number.

It's big. I mean, then we can do the math. It's more than a hundred. Let's say, yeah. Yeah, therein is the deal. And then there's mortality coming upstream, too. You know, not just every adult. Just because there's a fish ladder, you got to find that fish ladder, and you got to negotiate it.

You got to get over it. You've got to avoid the predators. You've got lots of stuff. Can you guys lay out a little bit like, what did the system look like before the first major impact? Before the first major negative impact can to it, which I guess was the cannery, fish canneries. Like, what did, like, just try to help people visualize it. Like, nowadays people think about salmon runs. And it's like Alaska, right?

When they think about samo runs, it's Bristol Bay, right? This was a bigger salmon run than those. The biggest salmon run, the biggest salmon run in the country, the biggest salmon run in the world was the Columbia. Yeah. You wouldn't have been that you had to, you wouldn't go to Alaska to see big salmon runs. Like the Columbia was the big salmon run. Like what did that look like? Like what fish were there, you know, to what quantity?

Is it even possible? No one scientifically measured it, but like what did it look like? It was, well, that's why Solilo Falls, right? Historically, that was the major trading hub of the Pacific Northwest, you know, that people came from, you know, the Midwest to trade Buffalo and the ocean area to trade salt for salmon. We had, it was even obsidian and toolmaking and things like that. It was inconceivable.

And that's why the over-exploitation happened because, you know, like you said, you read the old-timey descriptions and they thought it was an inexhaustible resource that there was so much that people were able to gather what they needed. And that's what sustained life in our region for millennia. And it was just, you know, the trading and the tribal people living amongst the land is, you know, intrinsically is a part of nature. And, you know, it's just a completely different way of thinking of, you know, like exploitation and things like that. But that, I don't know, that that's why it seemed so that thought process was different from the way that we lived as, you know, taking and being a part. part of the system versus coming in, like how you said the first major negative impact would have been the fish wheels and the,

and even the sainting and things like that. And so those types of things happened. And, you know, when you look at different, everything is always viewed as a resource and how can that benefit man. And, you know, you hear about the salmon. But even further down the road, the salmon kind of became a problem to development in the, of the Columbia River system when they were looking at the placement of the hydro system because then they would have to incorporate fish ladders and deal with the salmon.

It would have been easier if they did away with all these natural runs and we could retain salmon but you retain it in the lower river below the dams so they didn't have to do all these extra steps to maintain the stocks. That's why you see a lot of those hatcheries are below Bonneville dam

and it's unnatural. You know, Spring Chinook and Coho and things like that. And those hatcheries still operate, but the tribes have been working to try to restore and bring them back into their natal areas throughout. And even to me, I think those numbers that you read are actually kind of low.

The 10 to 16 million estimates. Yeah. Because even today you could get, you know, there's been a lot of work in the Okanagan Basin and Lake Okinawagon in Canada where we've seen Sakai returns up to 800,000. adult sockeye returning past Bonneville

and just to think that's just one lake and there's all these other blocked areas in the tributaries and if today we could get back almost a million of just one stock

that and a lot of that work was done it was exhaustive estimate and they looked at a lot of the cannery records and what they were able to process but I think there was

more waste than there were fish actual processed you see those old pictures where you know you have salmon four feet deep and they're just working those cannery lines. Well, when that obviously went bad every day, they'd just shove it out and bring in more. So there was... Because you'd never run out.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the way it was viewed. And just kind of going back to what you, what we were talking about, the 15% at every project, that's only the impact of what that dam itself causes, like fish going through the turbines or, you know, like in the spillway, they get disorienting. and things like that. But that's not adding in all of the other factors that those dams create the reservoirs

and the slack water and the water quality and the predation and all those types of things. So the impacts are huge. And you're right, you add it up. There shouldn't be any more fish left. It's just amazing that we still have fish coming back. Yeah, I should clarify on that percentage. I was making a joke about 15 times eight. But the estimate is 7 to 15 percent.

So it's not all, you know, 15 percent is the high end of what the, estimated losses. Just direct dam mortality, but that doesn't take into account that's the slack water it creates, the habitat that creates for for paciferous predators to eat the fish. They get disoriented when they go through the dam, birds pick them off. So all of that predation part isn't part of that dam mortality. That's just the direct mortality from the dam. And kind of quickly, I guess historically by the numbers, it was right now you've got a

spring Chinook run, right? that's like 80 to 150,000 fish. And then it drops way off for the summers down to 10 or 20,000. And then in the fall, that's the big run now. And it's going to run a couple hundred thousand fish, you know, in our really good years, half million or something. Okay. And historically, it was, it was a big curve.

It was a big mountain. That summer Chinook run at so low, that was the peak. Oh. So Harvard, all of these impacts have split it. to these three different groups of Chinook. And so you've got the fall Chinook, which seems like, which is the biggest now, but historically that was the tail. You know, it was those summer running.

And, and that's what they were going after. The early canneries and stuff was the, the most abundant, you know, group. And so they, they, they made those big impacts on that. And that was the June hogs. That included all of the really big fish that went up, you know, into the lower snake river up in the upper columbus. Columbia, you know, the fish that were 130, 140 pounds. Oh, man.

Jeez. That's a big fish. Dude. It's like, yeah. Yeah, we catch those like eight, 10 pounders in, in southeast. Like, yeah, they got to be 28. Where were you fish? They got to be 28 inches.

You're always like, sweet, he's 28 inches. And like, you go into the bars, you know, you go into old bars, you know, and you always see these kings, you know, from whatever. Yep. Half century ago. And you're like, dude, are they, you know. are they there anymore these 100 plus pound fish but just like there's not and fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer fewer fewer we do we do sampling at bonneville dam so we we sample all of the fish runs coming through bonneville and we'll get a text from from from from the text that are sampling it's like here's a really big one

and a big one now is 60 70 pounder okay those are pretty rare and it used to not be even you know a mere 35 years ago when I started it was we'd get a lot more of those than we do now so definitely the size of maturity or the size of the adult fish has gone down the largest I've caught was 63 pounds and that seemed like a monster well that is a how did you catch that um gill netting yeah in our fall fishery okay but I had it really had a aha moment back when so I think I was 18 as a technician working in the Meadow River. We're doing Spring Chinook spawning ground surveys,

and it was getting later in the season. And so there was this portion of the main stem that would float on the Metau River, and it runs into a wall. There's a big pool, and we floated our raft down, and it was just there was a group of probably about 30 big Junehogs, summer Chinook. They were huge. Of course, you get the magnification of the water, but they were still huge, and we just floated around.

there and watched them. They were just holding up waiting to head up to spawn. But it's just so amazing to see those things. And you were talking about how many miles inland. Also, when I worked up in the Metau, where I think I looked at it. I looked on the map to see it was like 840 miles or in this little bitty tributary to the Metau where we were doing a spawning ground survey. And I was like, just like, because we had to hike in and then walk down the creek is like, how did this fish even make it back here? It's amazing. And then we were walking down another section and there's portions that get dewatered in the fall. And we found a couple of spring snook in this pocket by this boulder. And so my coworker, he takes off one side of his hip wader. And then we fill it with water and put that fish in there. And we just ran it like a couple hundred yards. He was stranded. Yeah. Because pulling out because of irrigation draw. Yeah. So we ran it back to, so he could reconnect with the river. It's like, you can't make it this far and not live.

Oh, man, really? Yeah. So the things you run into being out there, it's just that that's what really helps people's connection to understand and, you know, just thinking and realizing how much they've gone through to get back. Yeah. Can you a little bit explain that? the process or I guess just the evolved thinking that that led to the creation of a tribal organization that would get involved in fisheries management I know like in some notes crin had from pre-interviews she talked about that there was a growing frustration that the states and the feds weren't moving the way weren't moving this the way you wanted to move and the goal was set in a way that the tribes weren't comfortable with the goal. Like, basically the goal being, let's save the fish from genetic extinction.

Yeah. And that wasn't, that doesn't satisfy native peoples on the river. No, unfortunately, a lot of the fish are managed on ESA levels, right? That's holding things on the brink of extinction. And that's one of the issues. with the ESA itself. Well, for one, it's not proactive. And two, they have protections when things get really bad to save them from extinction.

But there's nothing in the act that's binding. It's recommendations towards recovery. There's no requirements to recover a species. So it's just the minimal amount possible that you could do to keep this species from going extinct. And, you know, that's not acceptable, you know, as society. not just with tribes of allowing species to go extinct. We don't want museum relics in the river that we look at, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the bounty and continue our way of life

and, you know, kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties. And that's where the really, you know, sustainable, healthy and sustainable populations that we're able to harvest. Because, you know, we've talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest, but that's a shared right that we have with, you know, with the public, right? The treaties, there's been two big court cases that kind of led to the formation of our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking a leading role. First was USB Oregon, and that was really the tribes being established as a co-manager of the resource

because it was a treaty right so it's our you know we have the obligation to ensure that it persists for future generations and then several years later we had us v washington that um made the determination that the tribes were entitled to 50% of the the harvestable run not just 50% of the total the 50% of the harvestable run and so we have the um you know that unfortunately you know i have you know i have I've heard others, you know, what I've learned is, unfortunately, we operate in gavel-to-gavel fish management. Because you talk about gravel-to-gravel, like, right? You're inclusive of the entire life cycle. But unfortunately, we work in gavel to gavel because it's the-

Just court-ruling to court-ruling. Yeah. And that's, I saw that you have a show out that talks about the recent litigation on the hydro operations of the, on the Snake River Dam. and that's kind of been pulled in, really kind of unfortunately became just a breach campaign, but to us it's a lot more than that because with our culture, everything, the importance, everything has a purpose, a place and a purpose. And so we really have that holistic management aspect. And, you know, we don't really have the silos that a lot of the state and federal agencies work under.

That's why, you know, we have people that want to work for tribes that really care about, you know, the resource and things like that because everything that we do is so broad. And, you know, like I'm wearing the sturgeon hat. And, you know, like all species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon, lamb prey, even, you know, trout and bridge lip suckers and all of those things that are a part of nature. but, you know, we hold all of those things sacred as our first foods. And so that's the way we, what we bring to the table in our management aspect, because, you know, we're not about ESA level. We don't want museum relics. We went healthy and sustainable.

And we would love more than to have work ourselves out of a job. That's what I've heard one of my other bosses say. But just, you know, the tools that we have to work with along the way, like, you know, hatchery production. I know there's a big, a lot of issues between hatchery versus wild. And the tribes do do a lot of supplementation, hatchery production, but we try to bring in non-conventional methods. It's not just fish factories pumping out numbers.

We're, you know, using, we have a genetics lab, a state-of-the-art genetics lab that we have in cooperation with the University of Idaho that's located in southern Idaho in Hagerman. And so we're kind of leading the way on the genetic side. And then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not just releasing them all directly from the hatchery, but taking them out to acclimation sites so they could return to areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that. And as Doug mentioned, we do all of the monitoring at Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through. So we're able to take that information, which also aids in heart.

harvest management and just our work is so broad and diverse. We have an ocean, you know, estuary program that we've acquired about five years ago now. So we're really looking, you know, like I said, gravel to gravel and bringing in all aspects. And, you know, the tribes have, I'd say we're a lot less risk averse, I think, because we take that approach to be careful to do things. It's like we don't want to study things to death. You know, things get wrapped up in 10 plus year studies before you could actually even do anything. It's like, and, you know, myself being the fish science manager, that was kind of, I kind of thought twice about taking this job.

It's like I don't want to be just a research scientist, but the approach that the tributtion. have been taking is like applied research. You're taking actionable measures and measuring the success of those actions. And, you know, you use what's working and advance that. And yeah, I think that's the biggest thing. And, you know, we've really grown a lot. Like I mentioned, those two court cases, USV Washington, USV Oregon, where, you know, the tribes sued the states over harvest and, you know,

co-management and things like that. But we've came a lot, a long ways, and even just recently, during that litigation on the Snake River, the hydro operations litigation, and formed the six sovereigns. That's with our four tribes in the states of Washington and Oregon and come together. And that's how we entered into a stay in litigation. It was meant to be a 10-year stay with a set of commitments over the first five years. then there was a check-in, and then it could have rolled over to another five years. And we were just getting started rolling in that, and it was bringing commitments to the basin and also giving us a voice to look for appropriations.

It's not like we weren't trying to upend energy prices or anything like that. It's just like, okay, can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity that you're benefiting from? And it's not really grandma's electricity or the common person. It's corporate, right? It's industrial customers that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power in the region. And that's why, like, we're talking about fish in the Columbia Basin, but really it's a global thing, right? Because of all of the industry that our region attracts because of the cheap power. Like back in the 80s and whatnot, we had all of the big aluminum.

smelters where we have none of the natural resources to make aluminum, but they were all there because it was so cheap to process because of that cheap power. And then now we're seeing the new onslaught of that is data centers. We have data centers a lot. One, that electricity. Yeah. And water. That's the bad thing is like there's always extraction.

And then we're already like operating in a deficit, but yet we're planning for a future that we don't even have the resources for. And that's why the tribes really bring that to the table of, like, who's looking out for the resource and what's best for the environment. And that's why we talk about salmon being a keystone species because it's good for everyone. What's good for the salmon is good for the environment and for the people and us looking out for that in that holistic manner.

I got three observations I want to hit you with. One is you don't need to take this on, but you know, like people like to look at sort of singular things that had global impacts. And there's this argument that the reason we won World War II is because the dams on the Columbia system. Because we could out, we could produce aircraft. We had enough power to smelt enough aluminum and we out aircraft the Germans. And so, you know, whether that's true or not, it always like sticks in my head, like thinking about what a mistake those, ultimately, what. to mistake those dams were. And I think about that question,

and it always, like, it's just a complication in there. We had on, second observations, we had on RFK Jr. when he was running for president, and, you know,

he went and took over health and human services under the Trump administration, but when he was, he was on, he was talking about his career and litigate, environmental litigation.

And he said, when you look at these big, these big corporations, and they think there are these like free enterprise organizations. He says they never, ever pay the cost. They don't acknowledge that they don't pay the cost.

But in producing that electricity or producing those metals, they never had to account to the American people of what they took from you to make those things. Like no one has ever built them for the cost of an annual run of 12 million salmon. No one's paid that.

You know, he's like, he's like, they don't admit it, but they're subsidized. They're subsidized by what they take from everybody in terms of fish or in terms of anything, clean water. Like, has anyone ever billed them for, do you know what I mean? Has anyone build them for what their clean water should be worth? They'll never pay that shit. Yeah. We have mitigation goals of. the impacts of the hydro system that have never been met, 50, 60 years, and they've never met them by

millions. I think we're barely even at half of what we should have been getting 60 years ago. Imagine how much that would add up to what the tab is. The way that gets wiped clean is they're working toward interim goals. 50 years later, we're still just working towards interim goals. And even today, the interim goals that were working towards restoration, that we actually have the teeth to push on is 5 to 8 million, and that was determined by the Northwest Power and Planning Council

of that is the direct impacts of this hydro system is the 5 to 8 million. And then that's when you, then the other, the other losses are due to like irrigation and the tributaries and other types of urbanization and things like that. So we're, we'll never get, fully get back what we had, But, you know, I know we could do better. And a lot of that, too, is just people's resistance to change.

And, you know, that's the way we've always done things. And the status quo continues until they, I don't know, it's hard. And like you said, we'll never get back. We don't pay the truth cost for power. And a lot of this stuff is for export, foreign companies that come in and exploit our resources, and you still have communities that, you know, they were promised jobs, but that's only during the construction and what's ongoing is minimal. Like even with Google and the city of the Dalles, you know, they came in and updated their waste

treatment plant, but then they built a data center and then two more data centers, and now they're overwhelming that infrastructure that they promised and they were taking groundwater and so they have communities just south of town that are coming up with dry wells and things like that and now they want to buy land in in the national forest to be able to create a reservoir to extract water and then like sam altman and Elon musk they'll never they'll you know he'll emerge as the world's first trillionaire and there will never be a reckoning there will never be a reckoning for the cost of what they did. Never.

Yeah, it was funny. We applied for a grant from Google because they have this. They want to be green by 2030 or something. And then we have a Delta project where the Clickitat River comes into the Columbia that needs some major work. It's never had any maintenance. Like you could practically walk halfway across the Columbia because that sandbar is so big because you don't have the fresh hits that flush it out.

And that's one of our big issues that. that we're working on. It's predation hot spots and warm water and things like that. But we applied for that Google grant. It's just downstream, just across the river. We didn't even make it past the pre-proposal phase. And when we asked why, like, why wouldn't this qualify as good merit and everything, they gave us an AI response. It was just generic. You're kidding. So you paid for your own response. I want to get in like one of the things that I want to talk about what we want to talk about is like what can like what are things that can be done you know and I want to get into

that like like sea lions and all that but there's a thing I want to there's a third thing I wanted to bring up. I'm almost I'm embarrassed to tell you this but all these guys here can vouch me on this. It's like I was raised in the Great Lakes. Okay. And I was raised to know that like the real. villains in fisheries management it's always the natives because people can't reconcile they're like they're like how could it be that they're conducting

commercial fishing you know so they run like in the great legs natives will run fish traps for white fish which white people don't I mean like generally speaking white people don't fish white fish generally some do but it's not like a top tier fish people don't travel like to go there to fish white fish people want the non-native chef or like large miles of native fish all the salmon introduced salmon but you'll go and be like the reason

you didn't catch anything today is because of natives right and you'll hear it so much from guys in the Pacific Northwest where they'll be like you mentioned earlier you having a gill net they'll be like that's the problem with the fishery and it's like but that's what you're raised

to believe that because it's always like a blame game and you look at but Bahamette they fished here for 20,000, 10,000, 16, like thousands of years supported to people on the fishery. Then European culture, like Euro-American culture came in and destroyed the fishery, the things we did destroy the fishery. But now you look, and there's some native people catching some fish in a net, and that's who's, like, that's who's the blame. It's pervade. I don't even know if you realize how pervasive that thinking is.

because it's like it can't click like how could they be commercial fishing when I can only keep one fish or I can't keep any fish but they can commercial fish that's who killed all the fish it's out there like that perspective is just out there yeah and I've I've lived it you know like growing up fishing on the Columbia you do get a lot of a lot of hate people come out and yell at you and and things like that um we've been shot at at night in the dark. We were out and I called the cops. The cops didn't even show up. You could see the muzzle flash. It sounded like a 22 and we were like, what the heck? Good thing we were away from shore in that kind of like a bay area in the 911 operator. Well, can you see what they're wearing?

And I'm like, no, it's dark. I see a muzzle flash. And can you let us know? And it's like we got down and had to drive out of there. And another time I was remember there was a older gentleman. He followed us because, you know, we're tied off of the bank. It was two and a half hours. He stood on the shore and yelled and cussed at us.

Like, I called the cops. Like, I think he might need to. I don't want this guy to have a heart attack. That's how worked up he was. And, you know, like chucking rocks at us and things like that. Because people can't picture the long history. They, like, they look through the dam. They look through the dam or past the dam and they see you.

And that's the problem. Do you know what I mean? They're like, they can't picture what happened. Yeah. You know? Yeah. I guess we're so visible, right?

There's, there's plenty of non-native gill net fisheries that are happening in the lower river and a lot in the ocean. But it's just, we're visible. And that's, like if it wasn't for that little handful of fish, everything would be better. It's like,

no, dude, it wouldn't be better. You're not talking about the problem. You don't want to. talk about the real problem. Yeah. You don't want to talk about the real problem. Yeah. The glass half full thing is I think it's awesome that people are starting to realize like, you know, the work that we do, it benefits everybody, not just the tribes. It's everybody. And so like I've been at places like a, like a trade show or whatever. And then, you know, somebody will come up,

look at my tag. Like, I want to shake your hand. You know, they're, you know, part of the, they're a fishing guide or something like that. And they'll say, you know, say we wouldn't have salmon if it weren't for the Indians. And, you know, so people do see that connection. Yeah, a little bit of that. So they're, you know, we're starting to realize it. And, you know, just the outreach and the partnerships that we have and that the benefits that we bring is for all and not just us.

Yeah. So. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, we have commissioners that had spent time in federal prison for fishing, exercising their right to their treaty reserved right to fish. and they were arrested, sentenced, spent time in prison for fishing. So it's a crazy deal. I'm from Idaho.

I saw this, the same thing you're talking about, Steve, with the salmon, what happened in the salmon fisheries in the Columbia. But, you know, that led to those court decisions. And then that formed, you know, out of that, the tribal co-management, that formed the, Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission in 1977. And so this, the tribe started building staff from then. And now we're like at 150 to 170 people at Crittvik in Portland. Each of the four member tribes, the the, the, the Acoma, Warm Springs,

Yumatilla and Nespers combined we have like 750 people working on fish recovery. And I think that's where we get our, the. tribes get their power is that they're co-managers and they get that a singular focus on it's the fish commission right it's not the it's not the fish and irrigation commission it's not we don't have the things that the the states are you know they've got to look after all these other interests and this is singularly focused on on fish recovery so we're not what we want to do we'll we'll provide more fish to our constituents are you know the the tribal fishermen that are out there exercising their tree, right?

And they're entitled to half of that harvestable fish. Yeah. And however they take them, they decide how they're going to take them. And states decide how much they're going to split their 50% into sport fishing versus commercial fishing, however they want to divide it. And the tribes don't, you know, they're party to that, but they don't tell the states how they're going to allocate their fisheries and, you know, kind of should go the same way for the tribes.

This is a big conservation effort. And they run hatcheries, about 10 hatcheries that are run by the tribes to get the money for it. And they don't catch all those fish. I mean, those fish are going out to the public. Everybody's catching them from here to the Gulf of Alaska. And we're kind of end users on some of that. There's some stocks of fish, like the clickitat, the majority of those are caught in Alaska. and by, you know, the other ocean fisheries

along the West Coast. And, you know, we have a pie chart, and then it shows all of the take. And the tribal harvest is just this little bitty sliver. But that's the people putting them in. Yeah. And doing all the work to the habitat restoration, because the work that we do goes beyond just fish.

And that's what, you know, like being in management now, of, like, getting people to understand, like, the things that we do. like, you know, energy production is fish issues because of the hydro system and habitat restoration and even roads. Like we have our habitat staff that they've worked with the DOT to like move a highway and, you know, putting in better fish passage and just, you know, reconnecting rivers, which helps, you know, floods and flood management, flood risk. And then also, especially in the face of climate change and how things are changing.

Like you were just talking about the weather here. You know, we're seeing that. We're, you know, potentially in our three years of drought. And this year isn't looking much better. And so we definitely have our work cut out for us. And it goes a long ways. And like Doug was saying about how the tribes choose to allocate, the other thing that our jobs are so great to me

and why it means so much is on the cultural side. you know, how much that these things are natural resources. And salmon, we refer to ourselves as salmon people, you know, and it's cultural preservation. And that's really what, because I grew up in a traditional home with, you know, like my mother and my grandparents and practicing or, you know, hunting, fishing, gathering and, you know, our tribal religion and all of the things that go along with that, all of our ceremonies are centered around our natural resources around the salmon and

and things like that. And, you know, sadly, we're losing that. And then that's how, you know, people get led astray. You know, you have, you know, the effects of drugs and alcohol and stuff. But if we really had those things that for us to be able to continue, I think would be better off. And, well, I know we would because, you know, living in those communities and it's, It's like we're lost. We're still lost because we were displaced by the construction of the dams on the river.

We weren't relocated or subsidized or anything. It's just they came and spray painted on the houses like at Slylo Falls, took inventory. And that was it. We've never received our Columbia River housing in, you know, for the villages that were flooded. It's just like your house is gone. They painted the ones that were going to be underwall. Yeah, just took an inventory and then people had no choice but to move to the reservation. Or drown.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's funny, even me realizing that now, like, you know, I was born on the reservation and Toppinish and lived at my grandparents' house, but I was even as just as an adult a couple years ago, I realized like that wasn't my grandpa's home. My grandpa was born, born and raised at Solilo. and he went to the war. It's so funny. Like, my grandpa's older sister, she used to tell us this story. And even as an older lady, she would cry about it, it still gets to me.

She was born with cataracts, so she was legally blind. And so she couldn't help do all the work. So she took care of my grandpa. And she said, one day, Salilo, the government, the military, police, everything, they just pulled in with cattle trucks, and they took the children by force and took them to a boarding school. And she said people were beaten, arrested. And she said that she held on to him and was dragged across the ground, crying, no, don't take him as just a baby. And she cried as an adult that she said, if I could have just held on a little longer, maybe they would have gave up.

Mm-hmm. And then he went on to fight in the war? Yeah, he was four years old, taken to the boarding school in Warm Springs, Oregon. He didn't get to come home for two years. And that was only because they were moving them to the boarding school at Fort Simco, which is on the Yakima Reservation. And then he was there through, like, elementary school. And then he got shipped to Chimawa, which is in Oregon. That's a high school.

you know, boarding school, high school. He graduated from there when he was 17. And then he enlisted in the Navy and fought in World War II. You kidding me. Yeah. And his home now sits underwater. That's the home that he came back to from the war. Huh.

Yeah. You know, when I was talking about the conflict between like white dudes that fish and the perspective that native peoples are taking fish, it's like everybody's fighting over crumbs in some regions everybody's fighting over crumbs and they don't even know what happened like if it's bread crumbs

they don't know what happened to the loaf of bread there's you know what I mean it's just gone and now they're just gonna like fight for crumbs and one of the ways that like fighting for crumbs

and it's I guess it's important because once those crumbs are gone everything's gone you know to think of it like in terms of fish right if they if we lose the fish if you lose all the memory of the fish and all the runs and all the historic areas,

it's less that you can build up someday when you get it back together. But what turned me on to even want to talk to you guys is this idea, and my friend Heather Duvill sent me some links about it was, was like the sea line issue. And I want to talk about that for a minute, or have you guys explained the sea line issue for a minute,

just to sort of demonstrate this idea of that to fix the problem is like impossible, or seemingly impossible. damn removal is so hard. And so you got to look like, well, that's what would, like, there's these huge things that would occur and you could slowly rebuild the whole thing. But in the meantime, you got to, like, fight for crumbs. And it's even gotten to what we're fighting for crumbs with sea lions. Can you talk about that, that issue a bit, like how sea lions play into this thing?

Yeah, sure. So, um, sea lions were, were, we're, heavily managed in the late 1800s. And then from like 1915 or so to 1970 into Columbia, there's a bounty on sea lions. A bounty. And a sea lion hunter. So the Oregon Fish Commission hired a guy that would shoot sea lions and cut their ears off

and then get paid by how many sea lions he took care of. And that was specifically to protect the salmon room? Protect the salmon. Exactly. So that was the management that went on. And in that era, the early 70s, when all of the environmental laws got passed, you know, you had the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act. Marine mammal Protection Act is passed in 72. And marine mammals were in terrible shape.

I mean, it was really necessary. California sea lions were around 20, 25,000 coastwide. So it's managed as a single stock. It ranges from Baja, California up to lower BC. Okay. So that stock was 20 or 25,000 animals. Now there's close to 300,000 animals and it's at carrying capacity. So the Marine Mammal Protection Act protected marine mammals.

If you were marine mammals, you were protected. Well, and it's very effectively, man. Yeah. And super successful, right? Yeah. But what wasn't part of the, all in, you know, you had a, Sea otters, whales, all kinds of, polar bears, all kinds of things that are super depressed. And there wasn't any thought put into management.

You know, it's like, we're going to lose them. We need to protect them. And it worked really, really well on some populations like California sea lions. I mean, they're way past, recovered. They're at carrying capacity. It's the classic S curve. It's plateaued. We're at carrying capacity for sea lions coastwide.

Is there any talk of delisting? Oh, they're not that, well, see, it's different. Oh, because it's some of the Marine Mal Protection Act, not ESA. Exactly. So if you're a Marine Mammah, you're protected, period. We've talked about, we've talked about this in management. There's no management provision at all. Yeah.

We've talked about this a bunch times in different management things. We're talking about this year a day. I can't remember what in what context, but ways in which something gets so bad, you can't picture it getting better. and then you draft regulation like the wild horse I always point out the wild horse and borough protection act

things get so bad you draft regulation because you can't picture um the future ramifications and then you wind up late and you're like damn man we should have thought of that

yeah it's like this it's like the sea otters up on POW that have exploded people like well they'll never be abundant why even make a provision for abundance Yeah, and I mean, it's just hard to see over the horizon, right? I mean, you see what's there and it's like it couldn't happen. It gives you hope, though, for salmon, right?

Maybe we can do this. But then what happened. That's a good point, man. With the Ballard Locks up, you know, the inlet or the outlet of Lake Washington in the 80s, all a sudden, sea lions started showing up at the Ballard Locks there. And Herschel, if you remember that, there's these particular California sea lions started preying on the steelhead run going into the Ballard Locks. Like they figured it out.

They figured it out. Yeah. And you've got this growing population. They're expanding, right, to different places where they really haven't been in years and years, because there's no management. And they're decimating the winter steelhead run in Lake Washington. Well, that triggered legislation then to finally amend the Marine Mental Protection Act. And they finally got that done.

in 94, and it was Section 120 that they put into the act. So this was management. It's only on sea lions, and it's that they have to be individually identifiable, and they have to be shown to have a significant negative impact on listed salmon populations. And if you can meet that criteria, and you have a permit, you can remove that sea lion. So it was like, we know this one's a bad egg. We got to get rid of him. Right.

And how do you know? How do you know what that sea lion is? Well, you got to catch him and you got to put a brand on him and you got to have an observer there that sees him eating a fish. Then you got to get, then you got to trap him again and euthanize him, you know. And so it's very tough. And that was the 120 was not successful at the Ballard Locks. The still had population went extinct before, really before the legislation. was passed.

Extinct. Yeah. They're gone. And so then Bonneville Dam. Like that run of fish is kaput. Yeah. Yeah. It's gone.

And now there's actually a current problem, another problem, which is the sock I run in Lake Washington. And it's going down that same, that same route. And the only thing to manage there is this section 120. So they would have to get, you know, they'd have to submit an application to, to national marine fishery survey. us to get a permit through this 120. Yeah.

And that's all to do with the Ballard locks. That's not even the Columbia system. That's not the Columbia. Because in the Columbia system, I don't know if this is true. I was reading that sea lions take more fish than humans. Yeah. Where are they doing that? Because, I mean, they're not getting past dams.

Right. So what happened in about 2000, we started seeing sea lions at Bonneville Dam at the tail race of Bonneville Dam. And it was just a few. And how far up the river is that? 145 miles. Wow. Those sons of bitches swim that far out of the ocean.

Yeah. And I've got all kinds of stories. We've trapped, we've radio tracked them. And they will, they'll go back to Astoria and back upstream two or three times in a year. It takes them just a couple of days. Are you serious? They are, they're pretty remarkable animals. 140 miles up the river.

Yeah. Dude, ain't a lick of salt. Yeah. No, no. Well, then this problem, once these animals saw, hey, this is, this is the buffet, right? Because you've got this concentration of fish at the tail race. They're trying to find the sea ladder or the fish ladder entrances. And so they're congregating. You get a collection of fish. And the sea lions find that. And it's like, this is great. They come back every year. They bring their buddies. They become habituated with it. And they start taking out. a whole bunch of fish. So then the Corps of Engineers who runs the dam. I got a back up on that.

This is an unanswerable question. A sea lion, like a sea lion goes way to hell up the river. Like a pioneer sea lion. Goes way up the river. He's like, holy smokes, this is the promise land.

Right? And he goes back down at some point. No one can answer this. How is it conveyed? Like, how does it conveyed to another sea line. Can you know what I mean? Like,

wherever Billy was, he's looking good. Honeybees, like, honeybees have that deal. Honeybees have that deal where they come back and they have, they have, like,

a thing they do. People call it a dance and they don't, you know, they don't perceive it as a dance, I'm sure. But honeybees come back and they, they have a movement pattern that says, I'm into it.

Heavy duty piling that way. Couldn't it just be, like, a generation, like it's like generational learning, like your kid. Offspring. Yeah, you bring your offspring.

Yeah, you bring your mate. Yeah, you know. And then you bring your offspring. Yeah, because your mate's like, what are they doing? I just don't follow them. Yeah, it's just like, it's so hard to like imagine by the mechanism by which. Yeah. You come back and then there's more.

But yeah, like you just bring your offspring. Then some generations down the road, everybody knows. Well, it's the honeypot. These, these sea lions that go to Bonneville Dam are like the biggest sea lions that, that have been recorded. Hmm. So a California sea lion. And it's only males. So the biology of it is the female stay.

Brody's philosophy. They stay down in the roadries that are mainly in the Channel Islands in California, so you know, off Santa Barbara. So that's where the females stay. And they don't venture out of there. They stay very close to those islands. The males that are going 140 miles up the Columbia are breeding with females in the Channel Islands. Amazing, huh?

Yeah. Wow. Yeah. So what it is is, is it. It's like me telling, I found this really good hunting spot. You want to come and check it out with me. You can't, but you can't talk, though. But obviously they talk.

Yeah. They do talk. So there's photos of them at the rookeries, like on San Miguel Island, where there's a male sea lion, male sea lion. And then all of a sudden there's this gigantic male sea lion. Oh, the brand on him. He was at Bonneville. Really?

Oh, yeah. We have animals that we had captured, branded, and then recapture. two months, I think it was two months later, a month and a half later, and it gained 400 pounds. Whoa, that's a lot of salmon. Yeah, it's a lot of fish. And they do have, so this is the spring of the year. California sea lions arrive at Bonneville early April, and then by the end of May, they leave, and they go, because then it's, it's time to go to the breeding grounds.

So they leave the system, and the stellar sea lions that are there now, which is a newer story, they also leave the system by the end of May. And then the California Sea Lions show up back up the next April. Okay, what are they feeding on specifically when they get there that time of year? At Bonneville, Spring Chinook. Okay. Yeah, Spring Chinook is the big, that's the big one. And a little bit of, there's probably some steelhead around as well, but it's primarily, primarily spring Chinook.

They also eat sturgeon. That lower, the Columbia River, the lower Columbia sturgeon population has really gone down. and a lot of those would come up in a big congregating area would be the tail race of Bonneville, and they just got decimated by sea lions. So they don't. Oh, no, no. This is like a two-part question. Those sea lions don't have any impact on like non-native game fish that are in there now,

like walleye and smallmouth. And then what kind of impact are the walleye and small-mouth bass having on salmon as well? Yeah. Yeah, so they're opportunistic feeders, right? So whatever's the most abundant. That's what they're going to eat. And a sea lion that's at the ocean is going to have a really diverse diet. And then the further up river they go, the more salmon-centric their diet is.

And when they get to Bonneville, it's they're eating, depending on time, they're eating salmon, steelhead primarily. They're eating sturgeon now and then, and then they're eating some lamprey as well. And that's really it. We see a few other things. You'll see sucker, maybe an occasional walleye or whatever, but that's rare. Do you guys view that, like, walleye and small mouth has a big problem for salmon, or is it more, like, larger predators like sea lions? Walleye and small mouth are a problem for sure.

And it's probably a bigger problem upstream of Bonneville. In the reservoirs. Yeah. You know, the thing with the sea lion issue that I hadn't really put thought of before, but I mean, that's almost a, that's almost a dam problem. Like the dam is creating the fishery for the sea lions. Yep. Because it's creating a holding pen form where they can't get past.

Right. Right. And, and like you brought up Lewis and Clark, when they went through solilo, they, they talk about seen Foka. Well, they'd never seen a sea lion. So they thought it was a seal. That was what they called seals. Oh, so they were run. Okay, they ran into them way up the hell river.

So they ran into them there. And they were there in October. right, late September, early October at Solilo. And, uh, they shot one, um, but they weren't, but they weren't able to collect it. So they were trying to, to document it and stuff, but. So they had historically used the resource away. Yeah. So our tribal members are certain that they came up there in the fishery, they took care of the, of the problem.

The sea lions didn't stay long as a competitor there through the archeological stuff that they've done. they do find sea lion bones, but not in huge numbers. So they probably had hunts that would go down to get sea lions occasionally or trade or something. But it isn't like salmon bones that you just see everywhere. So it wasn't nowhere near as important as salmon or something like that. The competition factor when you've got 15 million salmon, like there's room for the sea lions to take what they need. Yeah. You say the Stellars are coming up there, too.

They're coming from the north. Yeah. So as the plot thickens and the story goes on by the states of Oregon and Washington put in for this 120 permit to remove animals at Bonneville. I bet the animal rights. People love that shit. Yeah. It was, it was a challenge. Yeah.

And they got it. They got the permit in 08. And that was after documenting the presence of these animals for a long time. And how many animals are there? How many fish are they eating? How many days are they staying there? All of that stuff. All of that information was necessary to get the permit.

As soon as they got the permit, then Stellar Sea, so they got a permit to remove California Sea Lions. And then two years later, Stellar Sea Lions are in bigger numbers at Monaville than California Sea Lions. And what had happened... Who's bigger out of a stellar? Stellars are gigantic. Stellar or male.

And again, it's males only. And they'll go a ton. Can you, for people who don't know the difference, can you explain like where the Stellars are coming from versus the California one? Yeah, so California sea lions range from British Columbia to southern part of Baja. And the rookeries are primarily in Baja and along California. And then you got a couple of little places at California or along Oregon coast, but that's it. Stellar sea lions are more northern. So they will range down into California, but they'll go up into British Columbia.

probably up into Alaska. And you have them. Oh yeah, in Southeast Alaska. Yeah, and you haven't broke into two stocks. This is the eastern stock, which is like the 144th latitude. Anything that's east of the 144th degree latitude is the eastern stock of stellar sea lions. And those are the ones that we're getting at Bonneville.

To the west of that are the ones that are up in, in southeast Alaska, off the illusions and then further up. So those dudes aren't coming all way down to the Columbia. No, they're not, and they're not in very good shape. They're listed, they're a listed species, those Western stock. The Eastern stock. Dude, I know a rock that would beg to get them. The Eastern stock.

I was just think of that rock. The Eastern stock was listed as threatened and then were delisted by 2013, 2012, 2013. So that was why they, you couldn't, even if, even if they had a bench, going up at Bonneville and it would have been on the permit. We never would, states never would have got a permit to remove them because they were listed. Now they're, now they're, now they're unlisted and they are part of the removal program now. I want to get to that program.

I got one last little technical question. You mentioned earlier, catching them and branding them. Yep. Can you explain that? Catching them how and branding them how? Yeah. So the way we catch them is a trap that's a dock. It's like a 16 by 16 square foot dock with chain like fence around it.

a big chain link fence, and then like a gate that's on a guillotine type thing, and you can hold it up with an electronic device to trigger it so we can remotely drop that gate. You wait for sea lines to get on that trap. You bait them or just letting them haul out? No, so they just haul out. So they want a place to rest. And so you're looking for places for them to haul out.

And so that's the live traff. That's part of the trip. Like a big old have of heart. Is you got to set these traps where they, They've been hauling out where you think you can get them to use. And then they get accustomed to it and they'll haul out. And then you'll drop the trap. And then we have a barge with these transfer cages.

You go up against that trap, open the doors, run them into that transfer cage. He just pissed probably. Yeah. How do they react when you walk up to them? So stellar sea lions can be pretty onry. They, they don't, yeah, they don't take to it very well. California sea lions are pretty docile. They will, they'll move

around. You could get in there with a piece of plywood in front and you could kind of hurt them, but nobody would do that with a stellar sea lion, right? They're big. I mean, it's a 2,000 pound animal that's pissed. In fact, we're taught, now we put these arrays, so we take these 16

by 16 traps and we put three of them together. A couple of times we had single traps and you'd get three or four or five stellar sea lines in there and then they'd start doing the WWF and they'd roll the trap over. So yeah, they're big. And are you branding them with a cattle brand? Yeah.

What's the brand? So a ladder up there at sea and then a number at different locations. There's branding programs at different places. The state of Oregon used to brand at Astoria. So there's there's animals from there. there's, you know, all these different places where studies have been done. They have kind of a coding system. Where do you hit them on the hip?

Right on the back. Okay. Cross the back. Huh. How long do they live? Like, are you seeing the same ones year after year after year after? Right. So adult, these are mature adults that we see primarily.

We do see occasionally a few smaller sea lions now. But they'll live. They can live, you know, like in captivity. They might live to be in their 20s. but they'll probably in the wild maybe 15. Yeah. And how many, like at peak spring Chinook run, how many are in that dam or at the foot of that dam?

How many sea lions? So from the observation program that the Corps of Engineers does, the highest observed consumption was 10,000 fish that they saw, that they documented being eaten there in a tail race. And- What does that mean over how much time? That's over the spring. So that's April through mid mid-May to late May.

So they'll see 10,000 Chinook get eaten by sea lions. And that's cherry pick. And that's the top. That's the top number. But that were represented almost 5% of the spring Chinook run that was going over the dam. Okay. So you're losing 5% to sea lions. Yeah.

Well, that's within this quarter of a mile that you can see from the face of the dam and do the observations. National Marine Fisheries Service has done studies in the lower river where they, We put pit tags in them. So that's, you know, that's the way we track salmon into Columbia. And it's basically the same thing that you get in your dog to track them. And there's a huge program in the Columbia where they, these pit tags go over antennas. It activates the antenna and records the number. So they're all individually numbered.

So we know any, any salmon that we put a tag and we know by, by individual. And at all of the dam ladders, like at Bonneville, we have pit tag detectors. So when they cross the dam, we know it. So they captured these by gill netting in the lower river down by Astoria. National Marine Fisheries Service would capture these fish, put pit tags in them. This was Spring Chinook, and then release those fish. It also took genetic samples. And with the genetic samples, we could figure out what their origin was.

So you could subtract off any fish that were going to lower river tributaries. Also, harvest is highly regulated, and we know what the harvest estimates are for each week. So subtract off harvest, and then you have the number of fish that you tag that should go over Bonneville. And in the biggest year, which was 2015, the biggest loss, 50% of the Spring Chinook run was lost between Astoria and Bonneville. and that's peer-reviewed publication, 50% attributed to sea lions. And so we had a 200,000 fish were eaten by sea lions, 200,000 fish cross bono. And that's the largest spring chinoch run we've seen in decades. Going back to what Steve said, how many sea lions are consuming 200,000 salmon?

Yeah, it's crazy. You can ballpark it. It's not that many. Right. You know, that are at Bonneville. It's like, I think a couple of years we've maybe seen 200, a little over 200 individuals. Okay. So it isn't huge.

And the animals that have been from this group of branded animals, there's a big hall outside at Astoria called the East Mooring Basin. and we'll cite animals there. And then the ones that you'll see at Bonneville or at Willam at Falls, another place where they congregate similar situation with sea lines, it's only about 7% of that branded population go that far up. But that seven come back every year, just like you're talking about. They habituate. They're as faithful as the salmon, man. Yeah.

Once they've locked into it, they come back. And we'll see them multiple years, three, four, five years. But so the tribal rights, because it seems like sometimes they can trump other laws and rules and regs, but I'm guessing it doesn't work in this case to trump the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Yeah, because of the act. And that's what I've been talking about is like... Well, you guys don't have harvest rights on sea lions. No.

Because historically, they didn't come back in those numbers. And they're not coming above Bonner. Well, we have a few that come above. Bonneville Dam, where our gillnett fisheries are only above Bonneville Dam in the Zone 6 fishing area. And so we don't harvest them. Like the big numbers are the lower river. And how you said sea lions are a dam problem, well, it goes beyond just the dam problem when they're using that entire stretch of the lower river from Astoria.

One year at Astoria, what he was talking about that east mooring basin, I think there were, Was it 10,000? 8,000? It was right around 4,000. Yeah, at the East Mooring Basin, in the East Mooring Basin, it's not very big. You know, it went from the early 2000s. There would be a couple hundred a year, and they do counts every day on these, and they'd haul out on the docks.

The East Mooring Basin is not used anymore. Used to be commercial vessels there as well as recreational, and it was taken over by sea lions, basically. Well, I think what, but I think what Yanni is asking is like, picture that, like, for instance, I have more familiarity with regulatory structure in Alaska, but, but there are cases where you have NOAA administered species, you have, like, U.S. and Fish and Wildlife Service administered species, whatever, but you have, like, tribal harvest rights. where like, you know, they can harvest, um, they can harvest walrus. They can harvest whale species, right?

The things that would be off to, off limits everybody else. If, if you're, if the intertribal group on the Columbia, like, if you wanted to, you wouldn't have the authority of just saying, we're going to do sea lion control

on our own. Because we're not beholden to, we're not beholden to ESA or we're not beholden the Marine Animal Protection Act. Like, you don't have that ability, that you don't have that legal ability, just to take it into your own hands. Yeah, we actually have, I know Yakma has written their own resolution, right, which is a tribal law that the taking of sea lions to protect life and property. And it was funny, I actually ended up in that situation where I fish by the city of the

Dals. Okay. There was an animal, there was a boat basin, right, where people have house, boats and whatnot. Well, there was one that was actually living on a dock in there. And those people were feeding it. It was there for a couple years, right? It wouldn't leave. And it was, I'd be running my nets and it would be swimming back and forth right next to me. And, you know, they had passed that resolution. And my supervisor at the time was like, you could shoot it. And I was like, yeah, that would be real good optics. Yakima Nation fish biologist. And I don't want to end up in court

for the next 10 years. I didn't want to be the test case on it. But in hindsight, maybe I should have. Like, you could have. Yeah, I could have. But those types of things are happening. But like I said, the animals aren't up where we gill net. They're down below. So it would be hard for us to. And we still have those laws in place.

But, you know, and a lot of it is just being good co-managers, right? We don't want to, you know, we want to work together with that. You don't want to go rogue and on that kind of thing. Yeah. Because there's so many other issues. Like we talk about death by a thousand cuts, right? Yeah. This predation, the sea lion.

is a huge impact, but there's tons of other things that we work together on. I got you. Yeah. So we're just pushing. If you make too much smoke around this sea line issue and you create like a bad optic situation, it could impact you addressing all of the other issues that are making the problem. And funding as well, just because you get the permit doesn't mean that you're getting any

funding that comes from appropriations and things like that. is so this the program that we have like how Doug's explaining the trapping and it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian and things like that so it's really inefficient like because there's that's that's in the act right that it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian like it would be so much easier if you had it and you could just shoot it you know that's humane as well like rather than dragging them through all of that. Got it. Yeah, like torture before leading them to their death.

And, you know, it's really inefficient the laws that are put upon us to be able to do this work. Like, we could be doing a lot more like darting. You could dart to euthanize, but then you have to be able to recover the animal as well. So it's like you have no choice but to trap. And, you know, like you said, you see the same. animals. And as I was mentioning, too, like, it's not just a damn problem anymore. That's why I brought up how many come to the mouth at Astoria. There's thousands there, but they're learning traits. Like when we have smelt runs returning, when we have sizable smelt runs coming up. And, you know,

historically they were in the lower tributaries and a lot come back to the Cowlitz River. Well, the sea lions follow the smelt up to the Cowlitz River, and there'll be hundreds, like 500 plus sea lions at the mouth of the cowlitz feeding on the smelt, which are also threatened as well. And there was- So they'll narrow down on something that small. I didn't know that. And so they follow up the smelt. They hang around there. When the smelt run trickles off, then they could move upstream like to the Lewis River and eat, you know, juvenile salmonids leaving the system. And then by then it's time to head up to Bonneville because you have spring Chinook coming. So they're exploring.

that whole stretch of the lower river, and the removal program starts at the I-205 bridge up to McNary Dam, so it's really site-specific. We don't have the ability or the flexibility to address to these changing needs. For one, we don't have funding. It's largely underfunded. There's so much red tape and how you do things. It's inefficient, and we don't have the ability to react and take action where it's necessary. like Doug said about that, that steelhead population in Ballard Locks going extinct.

You know, the same thing could happen with their sockeye, same thing could happen with ours. And there's no hierarchy. There's no act amongst the act about how the MMPA plays into the ESA. And another whole can of worms is the Migratory Bird Tree Act, right? You have huge avian impacts of goals and things like that that are eating like up to 70% of Juvenile stillhead leaving the system. Are you eating by goals? Yeah.

Yeah, goals, carmarans. Yeah, and then now we have pelicans too that are feeding on adult Sakai. Like I mentioned that year that we had the 800,000 returning past Bonneville, the majority going to Lake Okinawagon, half of them died because that year there was also a heat dome, warm, lethal temperatures. There were swimming zombies. and pelicans just eating them like crazy. We have pelicans that are resident in the Columbia there.

It's like a couple thousand breeding pairs, right? It's a ton. They don't leave the system anymore. And you can't just go out and start doing control measures. I know it's like as cormarans were delisted, at least some of the kinds. They're all protected. They're all protected under the migratory bird act. Yeah, but there's places where there are doing corn rams.

Like they're squishing the nests and shit, you know? Yeah. Yeah. True. It takes so much to get to that. Like you wouldn't even think the seagulls you see everywhere at dumps and at places eating French fries, right? How protected they are. There's a rocks like by island in the mid-Columbia, right?

It's called Miller Island. And it's just the outcropping of rocks where there's this gull colony that I think it was like they were attributed to eating mid-Columbia steelhead, 31% of the juveniles out migrating from that one colony. And we are still working in that process. Like you have to do so much effort of non-lethal hazing where we're using like boom cannons. And the next year we used a falcon. And then finally we were able to do some lethal take and able to oil like some eggs and things like that.

But when you do those things, you're just playing whackamol. You're just moving. Sure. That's what it sounds like. Yeah. somewhere else. So there's really no ability to manage even on that. And so.

Yeah, that river would flow with blood, man, if you just needed to get rid of everything that was eaten. Everything that was eaten. Well, the thing is fish always kind of get the short straw when it kind of, like you can't be shooting birds that people like to watch or sea lines that people like to, you know. Yeah.

So that's the biggest thing. There's no act amongst the acts. There's no hierarchy. How do we, We have these species, these fish that are on the brink of extinction and these sea lions that are exceeding carrying capacity. That's why they're moving to find other food sources. And like looking at the future with sea level rise and change and everything, that was what Doug's been working on with NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service as well, looking at impacts to the juvenile outmigration. That's what he says they eat a lot more French fries than we ever imagined.

So are you guys involved in the, I have an older brother. He's in his early 80s. He's been turning in his, he fishes the Columbia every day in the summer. He's been turning in, you know, he's been doing a lot of bounty hunting on northern, on the pike minnows. What's the story with that? Are you guys involved in that? we're not peripherally, but I mean, Washington, state of Washington is the one that that runs that program.

Is that, is that like productive or is that just like tidily winks? Like, is that, you think it's just pissing in the wind or, yeah? Yeah, because when you have a bounty like that, you have people exploiting it, right? And I think there was somebody that was growing some, you know, Oh my gosh, really. Some dudes are clearing 100,000 bucks a year on that bounty. He's not. Yeah.

He was telling me he. recently had a check for 70-something dollars. Covered his gas. Yeah. Well, he's primarily a small mouth fisherman, but he likes to make a little side money on Northern bike mills. Yeah, and with that being an actual native species, just the, you know, the change in the reservoir system, but I think we're getting a lot bigger issue on the predation from the

warm water fish, the bass and walleye. Oh, like there's more, that's doing more damage than northern. their pipe minnows. Probably. And then I got buddies like, God bless them. I got buddies that like to fish those, like to fish smallmouth there. They're all up in arms about people pointing the finger at small mouth. Yeah.

That's what I was getting out earlier. Because it's like the crumb fight, dude. The crumb fight is a complex crumb fight. Why would you want to get rid of this beautiful game fish? Yeah, exactly. And then you have these gigantic walleye that they're catching up there around Humatilla area, right? And so it's attracting people to come there to catch them.

these big walleye. Well, a big walleye eats a lot of smolt. Yeah, there's probably some group like walleye fishermen of the Columbia and all that's like fighting to like preserve the walleye or whatever, you know. Up and down. It is and that's a big issue. Like, um, and then you have the fishing guides, right? They say, well, that's our, that's our off season from salmon. It's like, restore the salmon. And then you'd have a lot more salmon openings. Like they show those big walleye and they cut them open and there's like tons of smolts in them. And, multiply that. This guy down here, big walleye guy. Guilty. You could have them. Come get them all you want.

You know what shows that mind frame is like totally different water system. But you're familiar here. Here we have the Yellowstone Park, you know, and Yellowstone Lake had a, at some point in time, they put lake trout in there, which real detrimental to the cutthroats. And so at one point they like made it that I think it was mandatory retention. you know, if you caught it, you had to kill it. I had a buddy. He lived here in town years ago. He would love that to go up there and fish.

And I remember I was asking him about it. And he's like, yeah, I like to hit it, but I'm always conscious to not damage the resource. About the lake shop. Because, like, people just get, that's just how people's minds work, you know. Like, you go out and you catch some big old small mouth. And then it's just, you know, there's like a certain human adaptability, I guess, man. Like people, maybe you get where you get where you get fatalistic or pessimistic or something. And you get where we're not going to, the salmon thing is not going to get fixed.

And I love the fish. And they're not going to fix that. So I'm here for small mouth. I'm here for walleye. And that'll have to, that'll do. That'll do for me. No, I'm going to try to see the hundred pound Chinooks. Oh, yeah, for sure.

I'm just trying to get into the, like, you know, I mean, like, that's probably, without even thinking about it, that's where people arrive. Plus, you're, like, you've created a recreational fishery that never existed before. So people jump on it, you know. Yeah. Do we know how, and stop me if I'm going to jump ahead too much, but I got to get this question. Are you going to ask, why can't we just get rid of all the dams? No, but it is dam related. But do we know how now, with all of our knowledge, to do hydroelectric,

power and salmon simultaneously. Oh. Is there, it has someone Yeah, has someone figured out how to do it,

but we just don't have the funds to do it? Like, is there a way to make these things not be part of the central, you know, system of the river

where like the nature could still do its thing, but offset from that, you'd have hydroelectric power? We keep, it's, it's,

ever changing goalposts, right? There's no limit or there's no oversight of, carrying capacity, it's always more. Like, we could be, we could have, there's room for salmon in the northwest, you know, in the environment with this amount of electricity and that spill, right?

Having spill, keeping the river or river and not just, you know, the way they want to operate it for the grid stability is to turn it off and on like a battery, like a light switch. And which is unnatural, you know, like you have, you know, your peak loading and, and things like that for to support industry and things like that. So that's what's really damaging. You don't have the spill to flush out the juvenile salmon because that's when- You mean a spring runoff? Mm-hmm.

Okay. And then even in the, even in the summertime, right, like late spring when fish are moving out, like the journey that used to take two weeks now takes two months and they've expended so many of their resources before they even get to the ocean that survival decreases and the same thing when adults are returning you have you know the the temperature of the the Columbia is warming earlier and earlier every year so that you know you have it's reaching 68 degrees like days earlier we have a chart that that I could share with you over time of when you're reaching these lethal temperatures and that's why we have dying sockeye now before it we used to

to be seeing those getting up to the lethal temperatures in the fall, but then you'd get fall rains that would cool it back down, but you're not seeing that anymore. So it's just a lot. That's why the litigation has been there for so many years is because it's hydro operations is the huge factor in survival. But is there a like, how have you measured the amount of electricity? Okay, like take any particular dam and you measure how much, what do they measure it as? What is a dam measured as it puts off blank megawatts okay yeah toiani's point

it'd be like if you take a dam and it produces 100 megawatts i don't know what hell 100 megawatts would you know what an engineer now look and go like oh man nowadays i could give you 100 megawatts without all that

or i could give you 100 megawatts with a much better fish passage system were we to start from scratch do you i mean like is there ways in which there's an engineering solution? And I always say they're constantly asking for more and more and more megawatts, but if there weren't, just

theoretically, if they weren't asking for more megawatts, could you get it all in a way that wasn't so damaging to the fish now that we have all these technological advancements that have occurred since 1950? Yeah, that's tough to do. So, and all of them are different, right? Wells Dam, which is one of the highest, the highest passable dam on the Columbia, has what they call a hydrocombined. So the spillway is, it sits and then underneath

it is the pinstocks for the powerhouse. Well, they're, the attraction flow for the pins is all in one place and you can kind of direct your fish up into the spillway and get them over. Other places, you've got the spillway a quarter of a mile away from where the powerhouse, Some of them are built in L. You know, I mean, every one of them is a different place because they had to be to put them in those locations. And so I think it would be like the complete tear down and rebuild. So the infrastructure cost would be huge. And unless NERF starts making turbines, there isn't really a way to do it, you know.

Yeah. So there's not like retrofitting and things. It's just they built them and that's what they are. They're better and better. They're updating. We just visited, I toured John Day Dam recently, which is, I think, the third largest power producer. They have Grand Coulee, Bonneville, and then John Day. And the size of the turbines are huge.

Like, you go in there, like, the dam doesn't look that big when you're driving, but the width of it, those turbines in there, I think they're like 60 or 90 foot diameter. Okay. Like, that's how big. And they're like 30 feet tall. like there's one that's needed repairs. They had it lifted. You could see it.

They've been doing repairs on it for 10 years. And they were saying that that one's the next one scheduled to be updated with this newer turban that they have at Bonneville. And that's supposed to be, you know, more fish safe and water efficient. Because these are literally killed. They're literally hitting fish and killing them. Yeah. Yeah.

What, um. But that, but just going on head, the scale is like, I had to physically see it to understand, like, my God, these things are massive in the amount of money. Like, that project schedules to start. And I think he said 20, 30 cost several billion dollars and take 20 years to complete. So even if they. That's fixing existing stuff. There's like has to be, these power companies are like have to be under some pressure to at least.

on the face of things show that they're doing things to help these runs. Like, what kind of partners are they to work with? Like, is it just like, do you feel like it's just lip service or is there like a bona fide effort to help out? Or like, what's the, what's the relationship with these power companies? Well, the hardest thing is because it's not a power company. It's the federal government. Right. So they could more or less do what they want on the time.

scale that they want and how things get done with, you know, 10 years of studies and appropriations, five years out. And it's not even sufficient for today's dollar, let alone in five years. So the dams are managed by the federal government. Yeah, they're operating. Corps of engineers. And the business end, the marketing end of the power is Bonneville Power Administration. And that's 100% of business.

focused on money, not looking at mitigation. They have the Fish and Wildlife Program. Like, there's been years of, like, unanticipated revenues. Like, they've made, like, millions and millions more than they anticipated. Okay, so the Fish and Wildlife Program is X amount. They have all this unanticipated revenue. There's a cap on how much goes to the Fish and Wildlife Program. the rest of it, they go back to pay down their debt with the feds.

And they also give breaks. They give money back to their industrial users. Like, what company does that? Do they just kind of view you guys as like a fly buzzing in their ear? Yeah. It's sad. Yeah. Yeah, the solutions aren't new.

I mean, basically, it's running a river more like a natural river. The more you could do that, the better it is for fish. But it's like, even with the dams. Yeah. Even with the dams in place. I guess that's kind of like, I guess I'll jump to what would be sort of a version of my last, my last question would be years ago we had Mike Simpson on. And Idaho representative, House Representatives. He came on and he was at the time, I don't think it went anywhere.

He was pitching a plan on a dam removal plan, which had so many facets around agricultural production, shipping and all that. it came with this it came with this stipulation that were they to do this this removal project all the litigants all the environmental groups imagine tribes would agree to sort of this this like cease they would they would stop lawsuits for some period of time on on fisheries that dam's still standing right um so like a sort of like broad ultimate question would be What are the odds that dams come out? If you had to crystal ball a century into the future, do we have fewer dams then? And the offshoot of the question is if no, the dams will never, it's not real, the major dams will never go away.

Then it's what could be done differently. And you're kind of getting at it, I guess, like you could, the dams could still be there, but there are other things that are plausible that could help. Yeah, you got to run it as close to a natural river as you can. It's priorities, right? If you prioritize fish passage higher than you do now, it's prioritized for power production. Yeah. Right? And so it's maximize or optimized power production.

And then whatever's left, it's the crumbs. Whatever's left, we could do what we can around the edges for fish. But if you raise that and made the fish more important, you know, you can look at papers from the 50s. some of the solutions. These aren't new, but it's, it's always been that the money is from the dams and the power production and that's,

that's run the whole system. And it's all, it all operates and revolves around that. Did they, when they were conceptualizing those dams, I've asked other people this question. I don't have ever got like a great answer to it, but like,

when they were pitching the dams, the engineers, right, everybody's getting together on these dams, Did they realize, do you think they knew, do you think their discussions included conversations about how catastrophic this would be for fish? Like, did they, they knew? There was actually, the memos were discovered by OPEB,

Oregon Public Broadcasting recently. You did a, Tony Schick did a series, Salmon Wars podcast. but yeah, he had the memos that talked about the kind of the cost-benefit and analysis. Like I said, the salmon became a problem because then they'd have to put in fish passage. And they also labeled it as an Indian problem. We get rid of the salmon. We don't have to deal with the Indian problem on the Mainstim River anymore.

So that was in all of those, it was a choice, even on the upper reaches. They were wide-eyed about it. Because they looked at building Bonneville without passage with or without. and thankfully with. But, you know, you look up in Hills Canyon, Hills Canyon Dam, there's no passage, but there could be. They could bore through the mountain for their turbines, you know, to make the turbines more efficient, but they couldn't provide passage. So all of those things you visit them, it was a choice and all based on cost.

And also looking at long-term maintenance. And he talked about, like, will these be here forever? No, because there's lack of maintenance. Like Doug said, like, okay, all the, all the money and the emphasis is put on power production and things get fixed really fast. But when there's an issue with the passage thing or especially monitoring, that's the first thing to get sliced off of the budget. Is that right?

And you were talking about, you know, litigation. We had that stay in litigation, which was going good. We were just getting started. But in June of 25, it was canceled, terminated by the current administration. So we lost all of that headway that we had made over those couple of years with the Biden administration. So we're back to, we still have the six sovereigns working together, pushing to advance those efforts and looking for appropriations. But we don't have the commitments from the agencies of the federal government, the Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps, and everything like that to address. address these problems. And, you know, when we started, our advocacy, we were talking about the

billion dollar backlog, the billion dollar backlog in needs in the Columbia Basin. Well, once we started writing it down on paper, it actually came out to be like $2 billion, like a billion in passage at the dams, and then like another billion in hatchery maintenance, because they built these hatcheries. They're so outdated and never reach full production. They have failing intakes, crumbling raceways. They're not efficient. And so the things that we advocate for isn't just for us. It's actually, can you appropriate the money for you to fund yourself to do the things that you should be doing? And then even, you know, looking at habitat restoration and, you know, the roads and culverts and irrigation intakes and everything.

We're just, like, out there looking for everybody to do the right thing of what we all should be doing for our environment. And, you know, it's like a shared responsibility from all of us. And, like, the acclamation, we were involved with a dam removal project. It didn't get as much media attention as, like, Elwha Dam. but it was actually a bigger project, and it took like 19 years for that dam removal. And the only reason it got done, it was because it was with the private company. It was Pacific Corps. And then it came down to the license for them to update the license.

They had to either provide passage or take it down. And then they drug that out for five years. The tribes, Yakima and Kripik, actually pitched in money together to fund the study, the cost-benefit analysis that showed that removal would be cheaper. And then Pacific Corps finally breached it. But it's like we have to hold their hand and walk them through everything and keep pushing all the time. It's just more like... Pushing and paying.

To hold them accountable of things that they should be doing and funding things appropriately. We could have these acts and permits and everything. But unless we have the resources to enact them, it's meaningless. I'm going to go out on a limb on this one, but I mean, the way the Trump administration's playing out with their like conservation record, I can't imagine there of any help on salmon issues on. It's got to be low priority to them. It was actually the Trump administration that signed the permit for the pinnipede removal, right, during these first. Oh, so really? Yeah.

But the thing that we get from congressional and actually our supervisor, our executive director, actually just testified in Congress last month on this Pinnipede issue. Um, and we're a Republican witness because, and we have our, Oh yeah, I could see it be that, I was thinking of that being like an interesting trade off is what the administration is going to give you is probably greater latitude. Cause like a like of a, like of a general suspicion of some of these acts that were passed greater latitude for some things like removal of species.

was sort of just like generally less sympathy about river flows and things, I would imagine. Yeah, that's what we're after is that, you know, there's no management provision in the Marine Ammal Protection Act. We'd like an amendment to add management provisions. And so a way that you could analyze the problem and if it's river otters somewhere, if it's California sea lions or sellers or whatever, the problem is, there would be a process you could go through to get some management in place and be able to do that. I guess I get quickly back to the to the sea lion thing. What we talked about earlier was the 120 removals. And then there was an amendment that was passed in 2018.

It was signed by Trump and his first administration that did recognize the co-management of the tribes. So tribes, our four tree tribes, were able to be party to permits along with the states. And then our tribes could delegate to Crithwick to do that. in doing that sense. But it's, you know, red tape is a killer because that was passed in December of 2018. We immediately applied for a permit. And our joint permit was finally issued in August of 20. So two years, two years.

And then we start implementing it. And then that provision, it's 120F, it allows area management. So that was the above the 205 bridge. if an animal's up there, he's individually identifiable, and he's having a significant negative impact. So if you can collect that animal, you can euthanize it. But it's very restrictive. You can't go out and specifically you can't shoot them. You have to trap chemically euthanized.

So there's still some burden to it, but it isn't the level that we used to do when it was individual sea lion management. So it's a little better, but it only applies to the Columbia. So, yeah, on the question about the different administrations, I don't want to put you in a rough spot. Maybe my assumption is wrong. But like, I just remember years ago, I can't remember if it was the first time Trump was running. He was kind of, he was in California. He was like ridiculing the Delta smelt, you know? Like, why would you ever sacrifice anything for some little fish?

And I think there's just like in that way, like sort of a dismissiveness about some fisheries issues. But I have you guys found that like, have you gotten more done during the Trump administrations than you do during the Biden administrations? or is it not that simple? No, it's not that simple. A lot has to do with funding that's coming into the federal agencies. The federal agencies now that we work with have been gutted, right? So there's less people to do the same amount of work and with less money, which is a problem. So you felt the impact of some of the cuts to the land management agencies.

Yeah. But also a red tape reduction. So less money and less red tape? No, it's still there. It's just the process is just take longer now. You know, or you don't have somebody there to, you don't have that human there to process this permit, which we ran into last year on a tagging project. Like we couldn't access that area because there was no, the person was doge that did, wrote that permit for us. I see.

And just things like that. I think the around this predation thing is like the one crumb that we. could actually get done during this time. And because like I said, we were a Republican witness and resistance to change. And we're mindful of, you know, ag and transportation and things like that. But we're looking for responsible ways to do things. There's beyond the status quo. And, you know, there's a lot of interest in just protecting the dams. So they're quick to point at sea lions. they are a huge impact, but that's not the only impact. But if that's the only thing we could get right now,

then we need to maximize our effort and jump on that and get these things done now while we have the chance, while the focus is on that. That's a conservation gamble that just in the conservation movement at large, that is a gamble that causes for people who like things simple. That's a gamble people have to. live in that makes people uncomfortable especially people that want things to be very cut and dried good guy bad guy really simple but did an organization yourselves or any number of conservation

organizations with a new administration comes in and you're like here's all the things we're not going to get but there's this you know and we can be friendly and try to get this one thing or we can dig in our heels and spend four years with nothing you know i mean and a lot of people want you just to dig in your heels and get nothing rather than look like you're cooperating, you know. And then it flips. Then four years later, it flips the other way around. You're like, you know, killing sea lines is out. Yeah.

Right. But we might get some sympathy on this other issue, you know. It was really hard. We were kind of a perfect storm we ran into was right. We had that, we've had this Accords agreement since 2008. It's the Bonneville Fish Accords. where it was a 10-year agreement 2008 to 2018 where there was a set program. We said we won't sue you and you fund these programs.

And the benefit in that is we weren't having to justify and fight every year for funding to do this or that. We're really micromanaged. Even now today, we're still really micromanaged as fish managers, the expert, micromanaged by the funding agencies, of course, because they control the purse strings and that's still a frustration for us but the accords gave us the ability to do non-ESA work and work on things like sturgeon and lamprey and things like that kind of expand what we were doing and we made a lot of progress and since then we never signed another long-term agreement we went through

two three-year extensions in 18 the and so we were just starting to negotiate that a new long-term agreement, Bonneville rolled the dice on the election, and they won. We didn't get another agreement, and they gave us another extension. And I mentioned the litigation on the hydro operations around the ESA litigation. And so we were in that stay. We were living good, looking forward to a new, another, you know, favorable administration. And it flipped the opposite way. We lost that agreement. It was terminated. And then this Bonneville piece, they have no, the accords ended.

They have no written legal binding commitment to us, except this really hard, long process of, you know, the Power Council, the Northwest Power Act, their commitments to the Fish and Wildlife Program, their responsibilities that's, which is really tough. So the accord's ending. and then there was money left over from that that was tied up in their years of red tape to build facilities or do certain projects. Well, when the tribes signed to take the litigation back into court, the stay was ended.

Okay, let's reinitiate this litigation. Bonneville viewed that as a negative action towards them. And they said, we don't owe you that money anymore. you violated the, of course, it was $50 million to the tribes that there's still, our tribes are having to go to D.C. to lobby to get that money back to, like, we have projects we've been working on for 15 years. And that would have been 50 million bucks towards salmon. Not like for people to walk home and put in their bank accounts.

No, it was all earmarked for projects that we weren't able to get done on the ground. because of their red tape. Yeah. So. I got a question about the Klamath. Like the dams aren't coming down on the Columbia, right? At least not anytime soon. But, you know, a year or two ago when they took out the four dams on the Klamath,

it's like now seen as a success for salmon. Like, I know you guys are focused on the Columbia, but is there like opportunities like the Klamath on other rivers besides the Columbia? Yeah, that one I mentioned on the white salmon, the one that we did with Pacific Corps, which is funny, that was the same company that owned the Klamath dams that removed them. And it was a lot because of, you know, reservoir succession and things were so bad in that system. They had no choice, which we're seeing in the Columbia every year by a degradation of water quality. sediment accumulation and things like that.

We're not, we're not keeping up in the Columbia either. And like I mentioned that, um, the dam on the little white salmon that was removed, but it took 19 years to do that. Yeah, they got the ones down on,

on the calamith pretty quick. It seemed like, no, they were in the fight for decades as well. You just don't hear about it until, until like things are happening. Oh, they're taking them down. Yeah.

Yeah. And then always, like I'm, I mentioned, the only reason we got that dam removed is because of the licensing process that required fish passage was the same thing on the Klamath. They could have done fixes to maintain the dams, but it was cheaper for them to take them out. Like how you were saying, it's like things get costed out. And it's never, it's not like, yay, we won. They did the right thing. It's like they did what was cheapest for their pocket. Yeah. That that's always the trade-off. So I think- How quickly do you you see how quickly when a dam comes down like that like in the clam or whatever how quickly do you see

results in terms of fish passage the next year it was it was like that in in the white salmon when we removed that dam actually a few years ago i hosted the we had a 10 years returning salmon celebration there because they thought it would take like several years to rebuild but those fish have been coming back like you open the door they're they're gonna yeah there was salmon that were running the clamoth this past fall, I think. Yeah. Yeah, so it was that very next year. They're going up to like, this place is sweet.

Yeah. This is the place my grandma was talking about. But yeah, it's just when you reconnect, you know, have those openings, then they're going to find their resources and return to those areas. They find their niche.

Hmm. Yeah, I see Doug has some pretty cool pictures of sea lions at Astoria was bringing it out. Yeah, yeah, I want to show you those things. We don't have a great media for that, but yeah. Well, we can share it with Bill and he can put them on. Okay, yeah, yeah, pretty astounding.

These were from 2015 when that kind of been the peak of the sea lion issue, but they're just like all the docks in the East Mooring Basin and Astoria completely covered with sea lions. And then they're patrolling into water trying to find a spot to get out. I keep sort of asking this, and I think Brody asked too, but I just want to be clear on it. In a century, the big, like, in a hundred years, the big Columbia dams will still be there. It's hard to say because things are getting so bad now. Like, you're starting to have closures of parks and boat ramps and areas because of toxic algal blooms.

in the summer because of heat. And I know right there in the Tri-Cities, there's been dogs that are dying people. You know, the dogs are running around in the water. And so I think when it starts, it's going to start impacting people and those types of resources because of the degradation of water quality.

We didn't do it for Sam and might do it for dogs. Oh, yeah. If it starts hurting their furry pets, buddy. Yeah. The wrong suburbanites dog. And they're going to be like, this cannot stand. Yeah. And then, you know, like when cattle end up in those toxic algal bloom situations, it's like, well, if you would have just had this buffer from the stream to protect the nutrient loading in your creek, then your cattle wouldn't have died.

But they're still up in arms about their cattle dying because of that. So it could be like a broader, like a broader litany of environmental degradation could. bring up in the future more serious discussions about like doing something really radical. Yeah. And that's the thing, you know, like I mentioned the Sixth Sovereigns and then we had that resilient Columbia Basin Agreement. But our negotiating piece was the creation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. That's an initiative that's created and vetted by the Sixth Sovereigns.

It's the tribes. Because our tribes, we've had, with Kripik, we've had the Waikanishmi-Wakishwit, you know, for 20 years, you know, that set these recovery plans and recovery goals. Well, this was taking that to the next step and coming together with our co-manager. It's our guiding North Star that we're still working towards. And so that's what we're looking at today about, you know, habitat restoration in the mid-Columbia. and also, like I mentioned, it's cold water refusia, through the migration corridor of the Columbia, where you have the tributary mouths,

the deltas that are all full of sediment and, you know, have all the predation and water quality issues and things like that. So we're able to, like, have this input of cold water to corral so that returning adults, they have respite as they travel these hundreds of miles upstream. and that's something that's doable today. You know, we just got to break through the red tape

and get the funding to actually do it. And that would be a huge benefit for salmon. Like we have all these recovery plans for the basins and, you know, habitat projects just waiting to be funded and then addressing these things, you know, predation. I've been the squeaky wheel about predation over the past few years like the Pinnipid predation, but also the eight.

fideon predation and the picein, the warm water predators, but there's also invasives that are heavily impacting our river system, and that's American Shad. Those were introduced in the 1800s, and there was a very problematic, I saw article from the Seattle Times on the Shad issue, that they're just becoming accepted. That was the title, There's a new top fish in the Columbia, and it doesn't mind the warm water. where we've had years of 8 million shad returning. Ro shad, yeah. And so that's totally unnatural, and that feeds the predators when, you know, because their

life cycle is opposite. So when these warm water predators, the Salmonids are out, they're eating juvenile shad. And then you have all the pelicans that are feasting on shad. And they're spawning in the mainstem. So it's a huge nutrient load. And so you have all this aquatic vegetation and algae growth because it's not meant to be there, right? You have barren tributaries that don't get those marine nutrients, but they're all piled in the main stem. And why the main stem is green now and not.

But do, go ahead, bro. One more. You hinted at how far these salmon will go earlier. If those dams weren't there, like what would be the terminal point for these, these Chinook, like how far would they go and where would they end up? I know, like, distance-wise in the snake basin would be at Twin Falls because you have the falls that was, it's huge. And then they went all the way up into the tributaries and the headwaters in Canada,

you know, that little piece of Montana where the Cootney is. And, you know, like you have the Wenatchi, the Metau, the Antiet, and, you know, the Antiet, the Yakima basin. So all up into the cascades up into Canada, around the Montana, how far it stretches, Idaho, and even Nevada, right? Yeah. It's incredible, man. Yeah, steelhead did go all the way up the Hawaii River there in the Nevada.

You'd get them up the Salmon River up past Stanley, almost the Galena Summit right at the headwaters the salmon, which is like 40 miles north of Sun Valley. So like twice as far as where you were seeing them. Yeah. And even like the other species, like I always said, were, you know, comprehensive and holistic in our salmon recovery efforts like lamprey. I think, you know, we put, you know, they're a sacred food source to us. And they were also medicinal, you know, like, because they're so oily that that was your skin salve and your ear drops and stuff when, you know, before you could go to the drugstore. And but the benefit that they brought to the system in all of the nutrients in the forests and,

and the animals and, you know, like forest habitat, like they're lacking those marine-driven nutrients to, for the standing forests. And then also, like, management. I think back to, I watched your hunting show, Blue Mountain Bulls, and it was on fire, right? There was forest fire. We're seeing that more and more.

It's forest management practices, but also, you know, like we don't have the same nutrients coming into the forest to grow. But, you know, that's the other side of the aspects. We will touch all aspects of it. And I think Lamprey is a huge part of that. Doug showed me a picture. It's the Bruno River that flows into Nevada.

It's they dewatered this dam or whatever they're standing on the cement. There's like thousands and thousands of Lamprey. And that's hundreds of miles from the ocean in this one little tributary. imagine how many there were all throughout the basin, millions and millions, and all of that's gone now. And there's an effect. It's a ripple effect through the entire ecosystem. And so us just to try to put all these building blocks back together to create that better tomorrow, because we can't restore the salmon back to barren streams, even looking at, you know, benthic organisms and things like that.

So, you know, working with beavers and all of that stuff. So we're coming at it from all angles. And to bring it back to your Similperus fish, see, these fish died, right? They go up and they die and they brought all those nutrients from the ocean back to the forest. Yeah. And they get hauled out by bears and otters and everything else and brought in. And so the whole thing has been cut off. Those forests have lost all of that nutrient input.

it for 100 years, 150 years. My brother's a fisheries biologist in Alaska, and they've been tracking that with marine isotopes. Yep. So you have all these, these like traceable elements. Yeah, strontium is one that they... That you know came from the ocean. Yep.

And the way it got from the ocean into the mountains was on a fish. Right. And then you look at how that stuff is used by vegetation and animals, and it's like marine, just a picture. of like that fish are a way of like wheel barrowing in nutrients into nutrient poor regions. Yeah. Yeah. You pluck that out and it's like you're not fertilizing it anymore.

Yeah. I mean, you get up like I said in that upper part of the salmon, it's just granitic soil. There's no nutrients to speak of up there. Ultra clear water. It's gin clear, but the nutrients aren't coming from what's running on. So it used to get millions of pounds of natural fertilizer. Exactly. You know.

Exactly. And the other thing you were like Janice you were asking, is there a way to operate the hydro system and still have salmon? But like I said, the ever-changing goalposts and maybe things that would help would be like, you know, bringing on renewables and also battery storage. So you're not depending on the river to be your battery that you turn off and on. But then there's impacts, there's tradeoffs and everything you do. But that's where the tribes come in and advocate to do things in a responsible manner. like all of our tribes have their own, you know, utilities. We're looking at different types of energy production.

And that was part of the agreement and the litigation was funding for energy projects, you know, administered by the tribes like the Yakmination. They're working on a solar over-irrigation project and also a dry pump storage project using rail, railroad cars that you lift up and down the hill. and they're working at pump storage at several places. One is a really big issue for our tribes, and especially the Acme Nation, is the Goldendale Pump Storage Project. They want to withdraw water from the Columbia,

build the reservoir up on the hill, and then they just pump it in a loop. They generate power when they need it, and then pump it back up off-peak when it's cheap. And then so you have all these, for one, they're boring through the mountain, and then they want to tap into the John Day Powerline system to export that power. And then there's also a super fun site below from an abandoned aluminum smelter that's never been cleaned up. And it's one of our sacred sites.

It's like Pushpum, it's like the mother of all roots. It's a place where we still go and gather. And they just like, okay, yeah, you move aside. and we're going to do this here now. And it's literally drilling a 30-foot diameter tunnel through the mountain. And you'll see that also all in the surrounding area of the windmills, the wind generation, which, like, why does it have to be all on our, you know, native lands, open lands? Like, isn't there like low-value agriculture that they could incorporate agrivoltaics and things like that?

It's always looking at what's cheap. and easiest, and that's like these public lands that they get a 30-year lease from. And, you know, once they go in and alter it, it's, you know, it's never the same. And it impacts the withdrawals from the river for these things. And even the solar has huge impacts to the water table because they need water to clean the solar panels. So there's a huge water usage even with solar production. So what we're saying is we're not against all of these things. But, like, let's not be in a rush to do it and let's do things right. And we can't put all of these burdens on the backs of the salmon and all the users who depend on them, the tribal people and the community members, because we're the ones that these resources are extracted and all the burdens placed on us.

And it all goes outside. It's all international companies exporting power to California and to these industrial use. users and data centers and things like that. It's like again and again the same story. So let's do things slow down, do things better. Like, yeah, we can. We need to do better. Find renewables, but let's do it right.

So not just what's cheapest. What's cheapest today may not be in the long run. Because even if they, maybe they would have put more maintenance into the hydro system now, we wouldn't have these billion dollar backlogs and things like that. so yeah man I was hoping you guys are gonna tell me something gonna put me on a good mood well they got some success stories

we should go over yeah let's close out with some success stories there's this too there's like speaking of bogeyman like I feel like we grew up and the lamprey was the devil of all devils that's non-native right

yeah I know but still like I've never heard of a good lamprey and here you guys are trying to like promote it so can we just touch on that a little bit. Yeah, because when we grew up in Michigan, it was like when you went to the hatchery, we had I can't remember the name of the hatchery

now, they're in Kalamazoo, but like every year you'd go on a field trip there and like it would just be nothing but placards on the walls about how the lampreches killing off everything in the Great Lakes. It's like a system that's like any invasive species story. It's a system that hadn't adapted with it.

And then all of a sudden, to-da, here's a bunch of lampreys and like every non-native species story, it just explodes at great expense to native fish. And so then you hear like, oh, you know, where they are from. But in your neck of the woods, they coexist. Yeah. And they have that relationship, right? They're parasitic, but not lethal.

You could see sometimes you catch salmon. It has a little round mark with the teeth. They were lethal lake trout. Yeah. In the Great Lake system, they were killing. Yeah. Because, again, it was a fish. hadn't adapted with the risk, you know.

Yeah, so they do, they are parasitic, they, but they don't kill their host. Like they drop off and they can swim and migrate and everything. And then the benefit that they serve to the salmon is, you know, they're spawning in these tributaries as well. And then they're breaking down all the detritus and things like that. So they're the filters and the cleaners in the tributaries. And so, yeah. And these are Pacific lamprey that we, have those are sea lamp ray in the great lakes okay and you know that's like you said that's an

invasive in the great lakes these are these are native fish and so where is a sea lamp ray originally from east coast and and yeah and what happened was sea lamp rays couldn't get past Niagara Falls and so then when they got moved eventually like that was a natural barrier and so the upper systems never had them and then eventually on ship ballast or whatever lamp rays got moved above a natural barrier and then and just decimated lake trout you know and they started all those different programs of poisoning spawning beds and it still goes on the people like another like you're talking about like another doge cut was there was a big do there was a big doge cut around like all this work to try to get

lamprey's under control in the great lake system and then they were axing the people that run the program and that was when that was going on i pointed out like on the show i pointed out that um there's a little bit of a, like you said, like paying attention to what the ramifications are, we've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars getting them under control. And then you, and then you go to save a couple bucks by ditching some dudes, you know, and then all of a sudden the whole investment goes out the window, you know, because you're trying to save a couple dollars, right? Yeah.

But that's different watershed, different problems. Do people ever eat these Pacific Lampert? Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I meant to bring some today, but I didn't get to. to meet up with my with my friend that she had some that she had put away that um it was we we dried them you know you eat them fresh to roast them and um they're really really rich it's i'd say it's acquired taste i'll i'll send some to you guys you can taste it some dried lamprey but yeah it's

really oily fish and you know like that was highly sought after right you need those calories to they're in a scofia's cookbook one of the things that when i was doing uh Scavenger's Guide to Oak Cuisine, one of the things I bombed out on them was getting lampreys, but that was in the Schofier's cookbooks, like French French prepereate French lamprey preparation. Is it a bit like a mac, like mackerel or eel, right? It's an eel. It's like, you cut its head off.

You think you're looking at eel. And they're a crazy, just the biology of them is pretty crazy. They're carlaginous fish. They're an ancient fish, jawless. They're 400 million years old. I mean, and they were here that long. I mean, when that was when, you know, the continents were all connected. Yeah.

And they've been able to figure out how to survive until man put enough dams on the river that we've, you know, they went down to critically low numbers in the Columbia, probably down to 20,000 or so. It's, we've had Lampere programs going for a while now at the tribes. And it is coming back. And we've got Lamprey that we've got coming back to Idaho and other higher tributaries. They're really, you know, they're a weak swimmer. so getting over dams is a difficult thing. There's been a lot of technology stuff to try and figure out. How to get them moving.

But it's getting better. You go to like the Yukon, Costco Quim, Cobbock River. That's like an indigenous subsistence fishery still with lampreys. Yeah. It was 50% at each main stem project that you'd lose of adult lamprey returning. So that's why it was the tribes that took the initiative to start the lamprey translocation. So collect that Bonneville dam and then take them up to the. the tributaries, and that's how we're starting to see fish returning.

So we want to do more of that. And also installing passage for Lamprey, like a wedded wall, you know, for them to work their way up because they can't go up the fish ladders because there's, you know, perpendicular surfaces. They can't jump. Yeah. So they're trying to swim up. They can't make it, but they could go all the way up that wedded wall. And so we're looking at adult passage at the dams, translocation.

And another hard thing is a lot of the juveniles get sucked out into irrigation because, you know, it's like a little worm in the slats on a screen. You know, they would have to be outrageously small to keep the lamprey out. So they wind up going through sprinkler systems. End up in all the irrigation canals and whatnot. And we do salvages when they shut down the canal. We'll go in there and try to salvage as many of the juveniles. Oh, really?

And they're super complicated, so the life history of them. And so everything you learned about salmon doesn't really apply. So it's trying to relearn all these things. They don't home like a salmon. If you get it in a particular area, they're going to come back to that spot to spawn and lamp rate don't. So it's. Oh, they don't have like site fidelity. They just go wherever they go.

They're like American eels, like they're just distributed by currents. Yeah. To a degree. Yeah. There is some that come back and they do have a pheromone that they give off. If there's juveniles there, they'll come back to that location. But it wasn't necessarily be where they were born. So it's complicated to try and restore them.

And really, it needs a broader coastwide effort than if you need to improve it in a lot of streams, not just, you can't just do a stream like you do a salmon and expect that that homing is going to help you out and they'll come back. It isn't going to happen. And they're an agamist, but not. the word I was saying earlier. They're not similar Paris. They're literal Paris. Yeah, they can repeat spawn, although not that much. And we don't know so much of it, we just don't know about it because it hasn't been a sexy fish to study.

No. Right. Yeah. Well, there's a lot going on with them now. And what's crazy, it's funny, but it's not. We were at the dam, right, Bonneville Dam, where they have the fish viewing windows. And that's where they count, right? back in the 90s

the Corps actually used to have an air blast system those damn lamprey getting in the way they would air blast them off oh really? Yeah it looked like a series of moss you know or they'd be attached to the window and it would obstruct the view to count salmon so they'd blast them off every 10 or 15 minutes and they'd push him down the ladder.

You know my brother Danny who's a salmon biologist in Alaska he works on that stable isotope issues and a bunch of other stuff. A lot of like warm water issues and other things, but impacts warm water. One of his first, I think his first paid fisheries gig was he was in Walla, Wall of Washington,

and he was paid to sit there looking out that window. Counting fish. This is one of his first paid gigs, man. Yeah. Yeah, sit, like living in, basically living inside the dam, counting fish in the window and writing it down. Well, man, I feel like we, go on all day, but...

We didn't even hit success stories. Or more success stories. Who can conveniently give us some success stories? Well, we can just read them off and have them give us the short version. Steelhead reconditioning. Yeah, so that's a thing I've been working on for 25 years, along with a really good group of people. But basically, so steelhead are iteral paris. they repeat spawners, their rainbow trout.

So they can spawn and they can spawn again. They'll go up to whatever river they're in and then they spawn and they try to go back downstream and go back to the ocean. And in a totally natural system, the number of repeat spawners that you have in your population will range anywhere from, you know, five to six percent up to maybe 30 or 40 percent. It's kind of dependent on how close you are to the ocean, closer to the ocean, the higher you get of these repeat spawners.

through the hydro system they don't make it. I mean, it is definitely not set up for large fish to pass downstream. And a lot of them will go through the bypasses, the juvenile bypass system. And there they get screened off and we collect those fish, collect them at lower granite, other places. We take those fish then into a hatchery, put them in tanks. We've got specialized fish culture, fish care, and we'll feed them to where they survive and then they'll remature.

And this has been concentrated on wild fish. So it's a fish that successfully spawned. There were no eggs in it when we collected them. Got it. They go up. We've reconditioned them. We release them either that fall or some of them will skip and they won't spawn again until the following fall.

We'll hold them for 18 months. Keep feeding them. We let them go downstream of where we had cloned. collected them and then they go back upstream and spawn in the river. And they skip their whole return to the ocean. Right. So we've circled. We've circumvented that.

Yeah. No kid. Yeah. So you've cut out whatever mortality happens out on the open ocean. Exactly. Our communications director, he made a, um, a little pamphlet and it shows like the steelhead spa where he's kicked back. No kid really.

Yeah. And just say like, we'll take care of everything, brother. Yeah. And then when you're ready to go again, we'll let you go. And they home back to the same stream. And we have... How many fish can you actually do that with it? Well, it's a safety net thing, right?

I mean, you've got these low numbers of fish in certain populations, and you can target it to those streams by having a weird or some way of collecting to that stream, especially in a place where you're really worried about them blinking out. Or you get bigger collections more generalized like lower granite has the whole snake river. We release them, though, and the fish... How many fish? A hundred maybe or a hundred. We've been concentrating.

We've been doing it a research scale. You know what I'm saying. This is now. Yeah, I'm not trying to dog on it. I was just trying to get a sense of it. Now we're gearing up to do this as a production scale. It's a first tribe project at a production scale. Oh, that's cool.

But there's fish that go back to the Amnaha, the upper salmon river, the Grand Ron, the Clearwater, the seash, everywhere. This is, but it'll, like, it's great. And it's great. And it's wild fish. And I know we're looking for positives. It's great, but it's like, that is sort of like definite. you know the term conservation dependent that is like like the poster child of conservation dependence right

you know i mean we have the fish because we literally handle it and care for it you know yeah it's it's great but but it i mean you know i don't want to be debby downer it's great but it's like holy shit has it come to that do you know i mean That's the problem is that wild steelhead recovery, nothing's really worked. Yeah. You do supplementation. Some things that have worked, we've been able to pull off with salmon hasn't worked for steelhead. We get hatchery fish, but getting more wild fish is hard.

Yeah, all this conversation about how do you get these big ass fish out of the ocean to their spawning grounds? And with steelhead, it's like, okay, let's get these big ass fish out of the ocean, up to their spawning grounds, back to the ocean. Right? Yep. And you're like, oh, that's tricky. Yep. Right. They're not going back down. Yep.

What about like Snake River Fall, Chinook, and then Sokai and Kohoe? We've got those on the list for your success stories. Yeah. So in about the early 90s, Snake River Falls Chinook were under 100 fish at Lower Granite. And Nezperst Tribe

had a hatchery program for Fall Chinook. And that stock has rebounded to where the peak was about 90,000 fish in the Snake River. I think it's hovering now around anywhere from 30 to 50,000. With some natural reproduction? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So you get some natural. So the idea there is to collect the fish and then outplant those juveniles so that they'll return to the river. So there you're helping them get back to the ocean. Yeah, kind of that hatch. It's integrated hatchery program. So you're taking in wild fish as well as the hatchery fish trying to maintain the genetic, you know, your genetic integrity and stuff. And those are getting back home on their own fins.

I mean, they're going back up to, yeah, they'll later make it up on the right. Yeah, there's fisheries now. There wasn't a fall shen- when I was in college, there wasn't false Chinook fisheries in the, in the Snake River. There are. How big is the fall shenook there on that river? 25, 20, 25 pounds, 20 to 30. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and it's fisheries all the way down as well as off the coast. Oh yeah. Yeah. Dudes are catching those fish all on the whole system. I'm everywhere. What about Sokai and Kohho?

It says you had some reintroductions. Yeah, and that was a tribally led effort. Like how I had mentioned, a lot of the hatchery production being in the lower river, which was a natural. You're just feeding your sport and commercial harvest and totally excluding the tribes and everybody inland. So we started the Kohoe reintroductions back in the 90s and taking juveniles from the lower river and taking them back into their tributaries, like in the Metau, in the Wenatchi,

the Yakma, and that was highly successful. And so that was replicated by the Nez Perch tribe. And it was actually the state of Idaho has a law against reintroduction programs. And it was by night that actually, it's our tribal chairman now, Gerald Lewis. He worked in fisheries for a number of years. And it was back when he was in fisheries, he drove the truck in the middle of the night of taking those coho up to the Nezperst tribe so that they could reintroduce them. Because it was becoming illegally.

It was illegally. Yeah. So under threat of arrest by the state. Even on tribal land? Because more do they, because they don't want to then create like new ESA issues for themselves. Yeah. More responsibilities for maintaining and all that type of thing.

I don't know. Where? Like the level of cynicism, dude, is this unbelievable. Yeah. Like, like, don't put some there because then we'll be obligated to like do something to allow them to live. So the cohort reintroductions were, we're high lake successful. We brought, we started out bringing in juveniles and we'd hold them in acclimation pawns for a month or so and then release them from there. And then as they started returning, then we started building things out.

into a full supplementation program where we're getting our own brood to spawn and all these generations. And then we're still incorporating some of the lower river, like, as needed. But, yeah, it's almost becoming a self-sufficient program. And but also you have the anti-hatchery group, but we're leading on the genetic side where we're incorporating, you know, trying to have that genetic diversity and we used stocks that were like similar to this area and distance and things like that. But, you know, we're just being mindful of the work that we do. So there wouldn't be there wouldn't be Coho above Bonneville Dam if it wasn't for the efforts

of the tribes. And I always credit our senior most biologist Tom Scribner with Yakima and he hates that I call him out all the time. But that was his life's work. He did years and years of advocacy and then also fighting with our state co-managers because they were against it because there was worries because, you know, Kohohor are more voracious eaters and they were worried about them eating the spring Chinook. It's like these things coexisted for millions of years. It's like we just need to get them back and they'll work out their areas and where they live. And, you know, like it took us to mess them up.

Let's help them recover. And the same thing with the Sokai reintroduction. You know, we're working with the Okinawana Nation Alliance in Canada, collecting fish at Wanapum Dam, which is just upstream of the Snake River, because the Snake River Sokai are listed. So that's what, that has all the ESA restrictions and concerns. So we're collecting above the snake. And then so we did reintroduction programs into the Yakima.

into Lake Cleolam. And we just completed a passage project at Lake Cleolam because that was used as an irrigation reservoir. You know, it was checked up. And so there was no passage. And that's how the Sakai were extirpated. And the tributaries was from irrigation, the beer reclamation, you know, these dams,

these diversions without passage, no fish screens and dewatering events and things like that. So, you know, the tribes have really been working together with BOR and the local irrigation districts to be able to get fish, like, how can we work together? The Yakima Basin Integrated Plan is a great success story of that. They got this like $30 million fish passage structure at Lake Lillem for juveniles to outmigrate. They'll still have to truck the adults over the dam, but they could go up into the tributaries

and spawn rear in the lake and have access to get out. So that's been a huge success story. And we've been talking, working with the Nesperst tribe. They want to do reintroductions into Lake Wallawa for Salki as well. Oh, wow, man. Yeah, but that's really complicated because, you know, like with the ESA listings and what poor shape the Snake River Salki are in. So they're collecting at Bonneville Dam. And they actually utilize our genetic technology.

They collect that Bonneville Dam. and then they screen out and, you know, they could see. You're kidding me. You can screen out the ESA ones from the non. Yeah. So like you, we can move, you, buddy, you got to stay put. No kidding. Yeah.

And I think that's one of the big success stories, too, is collaboration. I mean, through the six sovereigns stuff that Donella was talking about with the other, with states of Oregon, Washington, the treaty tribes. We work great with, and at Bonneville Dam, that's an integrated crew that we have with the Sea Lion Project. It's got people from state of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and Crithwick that we have the all working together. It's under the same permit and it's all jointly done. So from the dark times that you talked about earlier, it's, we're not all the way there, but it's better. It's looking, it's a lot better than when I started.

It's improving and it gives you hope that I think, you know, it can get better. Yeah. That, man, one of the things I appreciate about the conversation is I've always looked at the whole issue being that, like, I always looked at it like binary. It would be that the dams stay and the fish go or the dams go and the fish stay. And it's encouraging to think that there could be, I mean, as much as it is, like, becomes like very, very, conservation dependent very expensive but you could see some level of progress you know and like at least hang on and wait for like a better day you know like just to have something to save right i don't know i've mentioned mccultons right but my brother who's the fisheries guy in alaska

he had this really interesting perspective about alaska versus Alaska versus the lower 48 you said that conservation in the lower 48 is it's all recovery do i mean we're like we're in recovery mode up there they're still in almost like a classification mode they're still trying to go like what's here right like what is here trying to count things describe things get a sense of what's there and down here it's like we just look at like what's gone you know i mean how do we try to fix our mistakes. So hard because it's salmon are international issue, right? Even the harvest of salmon, because that's why we have the Pacific Salmon Commission,

Pacific Salmon Treaty, looking, you know, when things really tanked back in the 80s and the numbers were in dire straits in the Columbia Basin. And that's when, you know, those court cases were happening. And our tribal fisheries programs were really being established. And the tribes started their supplementation. efforts, that's when you could see the rebound in the, in the, the curve on the graph of when our tribes started doing that. Yeah.

That work to get us here. We haven't even gotten into all that stuff with like high seas drift nets and dudes out in almost an international waters peeling off American salmon, man. Like, we didn't even get into that stuff. And in the bycatch of salmon in other fisheries is here. Yeah. And then they go digging into cans of salmon and it's full of canned steelhead that they're catching out on the high seas, you know.

It's just like unbelievable, man. Big, the year, the odd years with the high pink numbers, that's being seen, we're seeing decreased signal in Chinook and other lower 48 fish. And, you know, those are Alaska as well as as Japan and some of those Asian countries that are putting out a lot of pinks. So it's complicated. No one's sorting through those nets, man. And that's all there, it's done just for corporate interest, right?

That's not anything natural. It's not a natural population. It's not a public service. It's these groups putting out all this pink catry production just for this commercial fishery, low-value commercial fishery, in comparison to what they could be having in Sakai. I sent Yanni the other day. Do you have that text message? Mm-hmm.

Pull up that text message. I sent Yanni some fish price stuff. We'll close out, almost close out with this. And we can't forget about where to go if you want to donate. Yeah. But we're talking about just relative value here when you're talking about like pink, like the pink industry. Do you have that? Nickel.

This is paid at the dock. Yeah. Steve and I exchanged at times a lot of tech, so it's taking just a second year. I think it was six cents. Six, yeah. And then compared to like a sock eye or king, hopefully Yonni can find it. There's been years that when I grew up fishing, we were getting. getting two and a half cents a pound for Tullies on the,

what's the, it's the, it's a different stock of fish like that runs in the, the lower river. You have upriver brights that were farther upstream. Oh, T-H-U-L-E. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, but two and a half cents a pound. Yeah, these were overall average prices paid to fishermen in 2025. This is the Alaska the fishing game department. Chinook took 640 a pound. Next down... This is paid to fishermen at the dock, 640 a pound. Next down the line was Coho at 141.

Socki at 117. Surprisingly to me, chums were 80 cents, and then the pinks came in at 30. Oh, 30 cents, okay. But like just a relative picture of the way that the values on these fish are perceived, you know, and then like the amount of like, yeah. The other thing about the, man, this is such a rich subject. You go on and on. But like the pink hatchery stuff is you think like you think when you're running cattle.

When you're running cattle and you want to graze cattle on public land, you pay a grazing fee. You have a contract and pay a grazing fee. A cannery runs a pink hatch. They're grazing for free. That stuff goes out in the open ocean and grazes for free. And then it comes back and you sell it for 30 cents a pound, dude, it's competing with wild fish. And then compared to the market, I was looking at just Pike Place fish prices as of yesterday. And of course, it's probably going to be more expensive.

But 30 to 40 pounds for wild Chinook. 30 to 40 bucks for a pound of wild Chinook. Yeah. And then a pie. Oh, that was an average. Then Pike Place was 55 for fillets. Um, sock eye is about $50 a pound for fillets and Coho is, uh,

28. Or pink's honor? Uh, nope. White sturgeon was like average 10 to 30 depending upon, yeah. You know who else we didn't get to? We didn't get to bitching about killer whales. Who I guess can go into a school of pinks.

If there's a king in there, they go into that school. It could be thousands of pinks and they're going to grab the king. Yeah. Dude, they know. They know the price. Yeah. Isn't that wild? They'll sort through, they'll sort through and find kings. I was like, that's the good one.

That's the fatty one right there. Well, that's like with sea lions, right? Doug was talking about the Stellars that eat sturgeon. They were primarily going after the big females and eating out the bellies. Yeah. Yeah. Animals. Well, it gives me hope, like your, uh, aha moment story of seeing.

those giant fish in that pool. I feel like the stuff you guys are doing, if at the minimum you're giving the opportunity for future generations to have that moment, hopefully we can keep the whole thing going. And then to think that we could have like what Alaska has, like literally right here or within a half a day's drive, we're sitting right now,

and that we don't. And then we're not putting more effort into doing it. It's walked across the river on them. It's kind of crazy. It's the resistance. to change and moving beyond the status quo of that's the way we've always done things like you have this old car that's all beat up and I'm barely keeping it running but I refuse to trade it in. Well it's the baseline syndrome too right? None of us here in this room have ever

would ever know see have seen or would know what it was like to have those kind of fisheries right here yeah my little kids like if we don't turn things around on salmon my little kids and my little kids would be like, man, 20, 25 was bitching dude. We got three kings. Yeah. You'd never see that now. Well, there's a lot of mis- That was the good old days, dude.

There's a lot of misconception, too. People don't understand that. Like, what are they complaining about? Like, they see those reels and those videos of all those fish coming back to those pink catcheries, you know, and that's what they're showing. That's not what's going on in the, in reality and having fish coming back to the rivers and the spawning grounds and things like that, that's more natural, but they see these outrageous things and think that's not a big deal. And there's also a lot of

misconception and we call it the numbers game, right? They're looking at the total number of salmon that passed Bonneville Dam. That's kind of what the outsider's view is success of the health of the river. Like, you know, we're around two million now. But a lot of that is, Lower River hatcheries, you have a little white salmon and spring Chinook hatcheries, where they're not, whereas wild, wild Chinook, wild spring Chinook in the upper and mid-Columbia, you're only getting like a thousand of that. You can cook the numbers, you can show what you want to show with the numbers. And then also understanding that harvest is limited by those weaker stocks.

because you have ESA restrictions on spring Chinook all throughout the basin. So you have very little access to harvest spring Chinook. And, you know, the numbers are so low. Well, sea lions are eating most of them before they get to us. And then we fight over the, what, 17% harvest that's shared between the states and the tribes. And then also in the summer, because of the ESA-listed Sokai concerns, And we can't access. We can't fish those on the successful Okanagan fish or, you know,

Upper Columbia fish because of ESA restrictions. And the same thing happens in our fall fisheries. We have mesh restriction sizes because of B-run steelhead limitations. So it's like things are great, but like, no, it's not. You have to look at the real picture of what's going on throughout the basin. Yeah. Well, that's it, man, we go on all day, but this has been great talking you guys about. I've learned a ton.

And I'm just one person. We have a ton of great experts on any subject you want to touch on. And it would be really awesome to, you know, like focus more on the CBRI, the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. And, you know, that's what we're continuing to work for towards and advocate for to get these actions done to continue the success and also, you know, looking for partnerships of, you know, how we could work together because, you know, the only time we make actionable change is when we set aside our differences to focus on our commonalities. And that's when we connect.

And also connecting his people, like how I said about, you know, salmon, it's the heart of our culture. It's cultural. It's spiritual. You know, like, and even things. don't have to be religious to be spiritual. It could be that way for you or anybody else. Like I talked to a lot of our staff. I shared my aha moment of that seeing that fish 800 miles away. And they've talked about sitting alongside the stream bank and seeing that fish jumping to get over this barrier or things like that. Like we can all feel that connection if we get out there. And it's there's, you can't put a value on that. So take a first step audience members. If you want to donate, can you guys plug your website? I know there's a

donate tab there. Yeah, on our on our web page, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. It's at www.cc.org. So c-r-I-tfc.org. Yeah. All you non-Indian fellers out here, these are the fish. Same old fish. Thanks for coming on, guys. Thanks. Thank you. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.