In April 2008, I wrote about tagging fish with tiny chips and placing downstream fish traps on rivers and streams feeding Lake Billy Chinook for future fish migration studies. Well, the future is now.

PGE’s Megan Hill and her fisheries studies crew have been extremely busy keeping the six downstream-migrant fish traps operating on the Metolius, Deschutes and Crooked rivers and tributary streams feeding Lake Billy Chinook.

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We have now captured over 100,000 fish at the new downstream fish facility at Round Butte Dam. The numbers of salmon smolts (juvenile salmon migrating to the ocean) entering the new fish facilities increased dramatically during March and April, with several days when more than 7,000 salmon and steelhead were caught. The fish passage crew worked overtime to get them sorted, marked, transported to the lower Deschutes River and released safely to continue their journey to the Pacific.

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