It all seems surreal. I’ve been a biologist at the Pelton Round Butte Project since 1971. That was only a few years after we learned that the original downstream fish passage system was unworkable because fish couldn’t find the outlet. The fact that we have completed the new selective water withdrawal intake and downstream fish facility at Round Butte Dam – and are passing salmon smolts downstream – is amazing!

This present project – planning, modeling, designing and constructing the facility – started 15 years ago. The fact that we are finished and are working hard on actually operating the system is hard for me to assimilate. But as I write this, our partners from the Oregon Department Fish and Wildlife and the Confederated Tribes Fisheries Group are planning to release spring Chinook fry upstream the first week of March. This will be the third consecutive year of Chinook releases. In May, for the fourth year, several hundred thousand steelhead fry will be liberated into their historic habitat in stream reaches above the dam.

The downstream smolt migration is just beginning. Since we first started the facility in early December, we have passed about 500 yearling spring Chinook smolts into the lower Deschutes and about 300 yearling kokanee. The kokanee we are attempting to “reanadromize” – turn them back into ocean-going sockeye salmon. One of only two historic runs of sockeye in Oregon used to return to Suttle Lake in the upper Metolius Basin. In British Columbia, similar efforts at reconnecting populations of kokanee/sockeye to the ocean are showing good results.

To date, we have only caught a few steelhead smolts, as they migrate almost exclusively in the spring. Check back on this Web site for more results as the year progresses.

We do need to temper our expectations, as it will take nearly a year of surface water withdrawal to set up the stratification and surface currents that will be a big help in guiding smolts through the reservoir. Nonetheless, we are already capturing fish on the move every day. We expect the spring Chinook and kokanee/sockeye migration will peak in April and steelhead migrants will peak in May.

- Don Ratliff

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 4:59 pm and is filed under Chinook salmon, Fish, Juvenile fish release, Steelhead. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.