Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire $9 Billion Spent On Salmon Recovery In Oregon Has Produced "Few Discernable Results"

You wan to help fish shoot sea lions. I'd do it for $5 a piece. Stack em up like cordwood.

This is a very uncomfortable conundrum for the sustainable energy zealots. The dams generate electricity with miniscule carbon footprints.

It isn't a conundrum at all, those dams should never have been built in the first place.

Actually there are no boats dragging salmon off their spawning beds. By the time salmon start to spawn they are too dark to eat. Unless you are talking dogs and pinks where the processors make lots of money on ripe roe.

You list a lot of issues but there are so many more in so many places, ways, and killing salmon at so many different stages. Last number I heard for the Columbia dams was over 10% of smolts are killed at each dam.

But the real elephant in the room is the proverbial elephant being inspected by blind men. No one man gets the real picture because everyone is looking at different parts. Divide and conquer... this is truly where we are.

As for dams on the Klamath River, only one was built with a good fish ladder. There is no ice cold water rsleased from these dams, because there is no cold water stored in these shallow water, algea infested pools of water. The ability to dump water volumn from the bottom of Copco and Irongate dams does not exist. If the Klamath is to be restored the Trinity River needs to run free. Thats where the water issue is, taking out the other dams might help, without the water from the Trinity forget about saving anything. Removing the Trinity dams will never happen. It's now supplying California's population, which as we all know is more important than fish. This is a complete different situation than the Columbia and Snake River problems. There you have a choice, that effects the west coast. Remove the columbia dams and remove power from most Washington, Oregon and a considerable amount of California, plus some of Idaho.
The lake feeding the river above these dams to be removed on the Klamath River was 69 degrees surface yesterday, with an average depth of 8 ft, not much cold water to release. One problem is hatchery removal, and thinking that the hatchery and native had not cross spawned, prior to trying to segerate them! Goverment at work. The netting, sealions and over fishing the off shore comments are right on!

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/9...gon-has-produced-few-discernable-results


Today in "your tax dollars at work" news, the state of Oregon has found out that $9 billion it has doled out to help its salmon population (yes, the fish) has failed to produce any discernable results.

And to think, that's perfectly good money we could have sent to Ukraine!

A new report from NBC affiliate KGW8 this week noted that "hundreds" of projects the Columbia River Basin has undertaken - including "habitat restoration to bounty programs on other fish that prey on salmon" - have all failed to produce results.

The revelation came from a Oregon State University co-authored by Bill Jaeger, an applied economics professor at the university. His research was recently published in the journal PLOS One.

His study looked at 50 years of salmon return data from the lowest dam on the Columbia River. The study found that before the dams went up, 16 million salmonids returned to the basin each year. By the 2010s, that number had fallen to 1.5 million.

“For a long time, there have been questions about the effectiveness of a wide range of activities taken to try to restore salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River Basin. We do not find evidence of an increase in wild fish,” Jaeger said.

The salmon are facing pressure from “hydro, habitat, harvest and hatcheries,” he added, noting there have been "steep declines" in coho, chinook, sockeye and steelhead populations because dams block fish from swimming upriver.

“Many of those species listed since the 1990s under the Endangered Species Act are ones for which the numbers have declined and continue to be of great concern,” Jaeger added.

He railed on the egregious spending's lack of impact: “Cost effectiveness was a term that was occasionally used in a report but was never really undertaken as a serious methodology for determining where to spend money. The operations and the administration of these projects could have done a lot more to do serious cost-effective analysis to determine which of these activities seems to be generating more bang for the buck.”

He concluded: “I'm not sure how useful it is to talk about whether the money was wasted or not. That's behind us. I think what one can do, and what one should do, is look at this evidence and ask 'what should we be doing differently going forward?'”

The 3 biggest concerns for returning runs here are HABITAT, HABITAT and HABITAT! If they can’t spawn no amount of money will increase escapement.

As Calvin mentioned earlier the wash from the roadways after the first heavy fall rains has killed untold numbers of coho here. The oil, rubber and crap from cars all summer long washes into the creeks and rivers during low water of summer and since dilution is the solution to pollution there’s not enough water to dilute it to tolerable levels.

Habitat HAS to be a priority!

Heym, I'm no fish guy by a long shot...and I don't carry a thermometer in my pocket...but the fish ladder you spoke of is on the last dam downstream...Irongate. It goes directly into the hatchery, I have accompanied at least 4 skool kid field trips to the hatchery over the years, it is and has been a hugely successful operation for 60+ years. Copco 1, Copco 2 and Irongate are over 77 feet deep full pool and the water IS ice cold below the surface. Link River dam/Klamath Lake itself is a pool of water and cowschidt, horrible water quality...John Boyle dam is only 12 feet deep...at each succeeding dam downstream the water quality IMPROVES because the temp and silt load go down. Time will tell, but I predict more stress on the Chinook runs. And just as a side note, 2 of the Karuk Tribal hires, paid as full fledged fish biologists and dam removal experts? I know them personally, neither graduated High School. The fix is in...and Warren Buffet's PacifiCorp is smiling.

Heym, I'm no fish guy by a long shot...and I don't carry a thermometer in my pocket...but the fish ladder you spoke of is on the last dam downstream...Irongate. It goes directly into the hatchery, I have accompanied at least 4 skool kid field trips to the hatchery over the years, it is and has been a hugely successful operation for 60+ years. Copco 1, Copco 2 and Irongate are over 77 feet deep full pool and the water IS ice cold below the surface. Link River dam/Klamath Lake itself is a pool of water and cowschidt, horrible water quality...John Boyle dam is only 12 feet deep...at each succeeding dam downstream the water quality IMPROVES because the temp and silt load go down. Time will tell, but I predict more stress on the Chinook runs. And just as a side note, 2 of the Karuk Tribal hires, paid as full fledged fish biologists and dam removal experts? I know them personally, neither graduated High School. The fix is in...and Warren Buffet's PacifiCorp is smiling.

The salmon are screwed…. they have too many interface points with us, too many ways things can go sideways in the various stages of their life cycle.

I agree that it can be argued in good faith that it’d be throwing good money after bad to keep trying to save the runs. I’d add to that that it’s be a pathetic state of affairs if we don’t at least keep trying.

I catch them in the ocean. Not that that’s better karma or anything like that; but the quality of the meat is off the charts when they haven’t sniffed freshwater yet.

Yes, that calm looking pond is the Pacific. She lays down for us some days.