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Steelhead will test the waters

A half century after the dams, a reintroduction comes to fruition

By Kate Ramsayer / The Bulletin

Published: April 14. 2007 4:00AM PST

The pioneers now lie in trays in a hatchery north of Maupin, little more than a big eye and a yolk. But in a few weeks, once these summer steelhead eggs have hatched into tiny fry and used up the energy from the yolk, they'll be trucked to Whychus Creek downstream of Sisters and released. As they settle into the slow-moving side channels and backwaters of the creek, they will be the first steelhead to swim above Lake Billy Chinook since the Pelton Round Butte dam complex was constructed about half a century ago.

And they'll be the first test of whether more than a decade of planning by numerous agencies will enable ocean-going fish to migrate from and return to the Upper Deschutes Basin.

"We're certainly really, really excited about the reintroduction on all fronts," said Steven Marx, interim Deschutes District watershed manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

"The big thing is it's been 50 years since waters upstream from Pelton Dam have seen summer steelhead."

But Whychus Creek will soon host steelhead, and chinook salmon will follow next year, Marx said. As part of the relicensing of the Pelton Round Butte dams, these anadromous fish will be reintroduced to their historic habitat.

"We've been looking forward to doing this for many years," said Mike Gauvin, fisheries management supervisor with the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs natural resources. "Our overriding goal for the tribe is to provide fish in the future for tribal harvests."

But people realize that long-term goal could take a number of years, and a number of adjustments to the reintroduction plans and strategies, he said.

On Friday, some were making one set of adjustments: testing how to best transport the tiny fish from the hatchery to the stream, said Don Ratliff, senior aquatic biologist at the Pelton Round Butte project for Portland General Electric.

"They're so small, they're real delicate," Ratliff said. In previous reintroduction efforts elsewhere, he has put fish in heavy-duty plastic bags with a little water and a lot of oxygen, so he was planning to try out that method as well as others to determine the way to go.

The perils don't end for the fish once they get to the creek, either. Many will be eaten by predators, some could be washed away by fast-moving water or succumb to disease, while others could face competition for habitat and food, Marx said. Plus, they have to find their way through the river system to Lake Billy Chinook and the fish passage system that will be constructed to move them around the dams.

"There's a number of pressures on these young fish," he said. The biologists involved in the reintroduction project plan to release 175,000 fish. Of those, said Ratliff, only about 1 percent will survive two years to migrate past the dams and to the ocean. Of those that pass the dams, only between 1 percent and 10 percent are expected to return to Whychus Creek to spawn, he said.

Key habitat

State Fish and Wildlife surveys done in the early 1950s showed areas of Whychus were key for summer steelhead spawning, Marx said.

The steelhead spent two years in the creek, growing and gaining strength, before migrating down the Deschutes River, down the Columbia River, to the Pacific Ocean. They lived a year or two in the ocean before returning to their natal creek to spawn.

But when the dams were constructed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they cut off the migration route of these fish. Although fish passage was incorporated into the dam system, it didn't work properly because of water currents in Lake Billy Chinook.

"Adults were passed upstream, but the problem was getting juveniles back downstream because of the current patterns," Marx said.

In 1995, with the dams coming up for federal relicensing, the co-owners of the dams - Portland General Electric and the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs - along with other agencies and organizations, started developing a plan for fish bypass.

"We've actively been working toward fish passage since we started relicensing in 1995, with different concepts and ideas on how it might proceed," Ratliff said, adding that returning fish above the dams is something that he has been dreaming about his whole career.

The concept for the fish passage system went through about eight different versions, Ratliff said. In September, workers are due to begin constructing the final iteration, which selectively takes water from different layers of the reservoir at different times of the year in order to solve the water current problem.

"Nobody's ever built anything like this before," he said.

Once it's up and running - scheduled to happen by early 2009 - it will draw fish in from the surface layer of the reservoir. The fish will be collected and tagged in some way to identify them, and then trucked down below the dams and released in the Lower Deschutes.

But there must be fish to transport.

Releasing steelhead

In the first few weeks of May, biologists and volunteers will release 175,000 tiny steelhead fry, each just a couple inches long, into Whychus Creek downstream from Sisters. The release is timed so that when the fish are big enough and ready to migrate, the fish passage operation will be ready to escort them around the dams. The first batch of steelhead started as eggs in March, bred from hatchery fish whose descendents were from the Deschutes River basin.

“What we want to do with the reintroduction is, one, produce or reintroduce a stock that is as adapted to the Deschutes Basin as possible,” said Scott Carlon, a fish biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service in Portland. The steelhead from the Round Butte hatchery could still have genetic remnants that make them uniquely well-suited to the climate and habitat of the Deschutes Basin, he said.

A second goal, he said, is to not infect the current runs of fish with new diseases. To minimize that risk, the eggs and fry are being incubated at Oak Springs Hatchery, north of Maupin.

There, the water is clean and disease-free since it comes right from the springs, said Lyle Curtis, hatchery manager with the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“We don’t want to take any chances that we could amplify something, or possibly move those bugs to an area where they might not exist,” Curtis said.

The steelhead will hatch at Oak Springs, and stay there until they’ve consumed all their yolk sac. At that point, they’re what fisheries folk call “swim-up” fry — ready to swim up and start their lives, he said.

Then, they’ll be trucked to Whychus Creek, using the optimal transport strategy gleaned from the recent trials. Project managers are also figuring out how to get the fish to the river itself, which can be hard to access at points, Ratliff said. Volunteers from the participating agencies, conservation groups and other organizations will probably carry the fish in buckets and backpacks to the sites.

“People will probably have buckets with little aquarium nets, and they’ll ladle out a few fish at a time,” Ratliff said.

Although the exact release sites haven’t been chosen yet, biologists are looking for backwater habitats or quiet waters on the edge of the channels for the young steelhead, Marx said.

“They’re not strong swimmers yet, so they’ll live and rear in backwater areas and shallow areas of Whychus Creek,” he said.

Before the dams went up, fish surveys revealed that about 1,000 steelhead spawned in Whychus Creek in one year, said Michael Riehle, Sisters Ranger District fisheries biologist with the U.S. Forest Service. The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management own about 55 percent of the fish habitat upstream from the dams, and so the agencies are involved in the relicensing project.

And the habitat now is possibly even better now for the fish than it was in the 1950s, he said, since recent conservation efforts have resulted in more water left in the creek instead of used for irrigation.

“I think we’re optimistic that Whychus can still produce a good amount of steelhead even though they have added obstacles to make it through with fish passage at Pelton Round Butte,” Riehle said.

The managers will be learning as they go, trying to figure out the best possible way to release fish into the creek, Marx said.

“We’re really using kind of an adaptive management approach to see what works best,” he said. “We’ll be learning a lot in this process, we’ll probably do a better job next year.”

Once the fish are released, the department will monitor them at various sites in Whychus Creek, and study their movement patterns from the creek through the fish passage facility.

Summer steelhead spend two years in freshwater habitat, so they’re scheduled to arrive at the Pelton Round Butte complex in spring 2009 — shortly after the passage facility is completed.

“Then away they’ll go,” Ratliff said.

They’ll migrate to the ocean, where they’ll live for either one or two years. The first batch of adults returning to spawn could make it to the Lower Deschutes in summer 2010, and arrive at the Pelton Round Butte complex in the late winter of 2010 and 2011.

“Theoretically, there could be adult steelhead spawning in Whychus Creek in March of 2011,” he said.

The rest of the surviving fish released this spring are expected to return the following year.

Continued reintroduction

The reintroduction efforts will continue in coming years, with new release sites and spring chinook salmon releases, as well.

The biologists are still trying to sort out the long-term reintroduction plan, said Gauvin, with Warm Springs.

“It’s the first a time a lot of us have been through it here,” he said. “We’re learning as we go, taking the best science into account.”

In February 2008, the project managers plan to release chinook salmon into Whychus Creek and reaches of the Metolius drainage, Marx said. Because those salmon stay in freshwater for just more than a year, they’ll join the 2007 class of steelhead at the dam in spring 2009.

And biologists will keep reintroducing steelhead as well, both into Whychus Creek and the Crooked River. The one-year postponement on the Crooked is a recent change, but occurred so that managers could have more time to develop release sites and monitoring locations, Carlon said.

In addition, since steelhead are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act, the extra year will allow for more preparations. These will ensure they get the protections needed and that irrigators and others along the river make changes and get permits to ensure they don’t get in trouble for inadvertently harming the fish.

In 2009, biologists could also release older steelhead that have radio tags. The state and the tribes are very interested in releasing these smolts, Gauvin said, since they are ready to start migrating to the ocean as soon as they hit the water. By tracing smolts, biologists can determine more precisely how the fish passage facility is working, he said.

Once the facility is up and running, the scientists might also try to re-establish a run of sockeye in the Metolius basin, Carlon said. Sockeyes are anadromous versions of freshwater kokanee, which are plentiful in Suttle Lake. Often these landlocked forms can start migrating again, if given a chance.

“The thought is that these fish still have a tendency to want to move toward the ocean,” he said.

Biologists will keep a close eye on all of the fish populations in the rivers upstream of the dams, Marx said. They will be learning and adapting as they go to try to foster self-sustaining populations of steelhead and salmon. There possibly could even be tribal and sport fisheries in the future.

“We’re going to learn a whole lot in the next few years,” Marx said.

Kate Ramsayer can be reached at 617-7811 or at kramsayer@bendbulletin.com.

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