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.

As of the first week in June, more than 30,000 yearling spring Chinook salmon, 5,000 steelhead and 47,000 yearling kokanee/sockeye salmon have been passed downstream. Another 25,000 older kokanee, bull trout, brown trout and assorted other species have been released back into Lake Billy Chinook. We expected numbers to decline more as May ended, but we are still passing more than a thousand smolts per day, mostly spring Chinook and steelhead.

The steelhead are especially vibrant and beautiful. In the Deschutes Basin, more than half of the steelhead migrate to the ocean after two years of rearing. However, some rear for three years before migrating; these fish are big, beautiful and feisty when we capture them. We have to keep the holding raceways covered with a net to keep them from jumping out – and when netted, and handled, they invariable squirm and often splash the marker.  

The crew is marking all the smolts sent downstream by clipping the small bone along the right side of each smolt’s mouth. The absence of this “right maxillary” bone will identify them as originating from the Deschutes Basin upstream of the hydro complex. When they return as large adult salmon and steelhead in two or three years, this external mark that will tell us which fish can be passed back upstream. Initially, we will be able to only pass fish back upstream that originated from above the hydro complex.

I am extremely excited and eager to see large adult salmon and steelhead spawning in the historic locations like McKay Creek near Prineville, Whychus Creek at Sisters and in the upper Metolius River and Lake Creek near Camp Sherman. These large fish, which are symbols of the Pacific Northwest, have been conspicuously absent in these waters since the 1960s. But a new era is unfolding.

 - Don Ratliff, senior PGE biologist

This entry was posted on Friday, June 11th, 2010 at 11:48 am and is filed under Chinook salmon, Crooked River & tributaries, Deschutes River & tributaries, Fish, Juvenile fish release, Metolius River & tributaries, 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.