Spring chinook run looking weak this year
Spring chinook bound for the Snake River are once again teasing anglers and fisheries managers alike and setting up a tense drama for those who follow fish counts.
The run, as measured at Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River, has been weak. Through Wednesday, just 23,731 adult fish had been counted there. The 10-year average is about 80,000.
To be sure, the run was expected to be disappointing and that is playing out. The tease is whether the run will meet the meager preseason forecast and be just big enough to provide fishing opportunity or if it will fall short of the harvest threshold and idle salmon anglers.
At this point, it’s touch and go, said Joe DuPont, regional fisheries manager for the Idaho Department of Fish and Game.
“We are on the edge of shutdown versus some fisheries,” he said.
He’s an angler himself and in true fisherman fashion hoping for the best. But the manager and biologist side of DuPont has him bracing for disappointment.
As is common with spring chinook, the answer will hinge on the timing of the run. If the 2020 run shakes out like the spring return of 2017 — one of the latest ever — “Then there could be a whole lot more on their way,” said DuPont.
An extremely late run similar to 2017 would produce a projected harvest share north of 2,000 adult fish on the Clearwater River and about 5,000 for the lower Salmon River and Little Salmon River fishery.
That is far higher than the preseason forecast of 1,000-fish harvest share on the Clearwater and 1,600 on the Little and lower Salmon rivers. It’s also probably unrealistic.
In fact, DuPont said there is some evidence the run is not late and ahead of the pace set by the 2019 fish.
“If you start looking at individual stocks like Rapid River and Dworshak, based on PIT tag timing over Bonneville compared to the last three years, it looks earlier than the last three years, which makes me not so convinced we are going to see another one of the latest runs ever.”
If the run timing is trending similar to last year, it leads to a harvest share projection of just 214 fish bound for Rapid River Hatchery and a negative harvest share on the Clearwater River.
The ultimate answer is likely to come this week and play out in the fish ladders of Bonneville Dam. If the daily count at Bonneville pushes past 5,000 for a couple of days and stays at more than 4,000 for three of four more, fishing might be saved.
If the run ambles along as it has been with counts less than the 4,000 mark, “that’s not good,” said DuPont.
“This is the week,” he said. “We need to see it now.”
Eric Barker may be contacted at ebarker@lmtribune.com or at (208) 848-2273. Follow him on Twitter @ezebarker.
