BLM Logging Plan Poses Risk to the North Umpqua

by Joe Ferguson

The Draft Environmental Impact Statement for BLM’s Western Oregon Plan Revision (WOPR) is available for public comment until January 11, 2008. WOPR is a result of a settlement agreement between the Bush administration and the American Forest Resource Council requiring management of the O&C lands (lands that were granted to the Oregon and California RR, and eventually returned to public ownership) to be oriented primarily towards timber production as directed in the O&C Act passed by Congress in 1937. Timber harvest has declined as a result of implementing the Northwest Forest Plan, and has not met estimated production goals or resulting revenues paid to Oregon counties with O&C lands.

Most of the affected lands in the Umpqua basin are west of I-5; however BLM lands in the North Umpqua watershed extend from Boundary Pool (just above Fox Creek) downstream and include major tributaries including Rock Creek, Hill Creek (at the Racks), Clay Creek, Honey Creek, Susan Creek, Bob Creek and the majority of the Canton Creek watershed in the Steamboat basin.

BLM’s preferred alternative would open old growth reserves, roadless areas, and riparian buffers to logging. Some of the critical changes to mention in your comments are:

1.) Timber harvest would increase from current 268 mmbf/year to 727 mmbf/year.

2.) Riparian protection areas would decrease by approximately 75%. RPA’s on fish-bearing and perennial streams would go from 360’ to 100’ on each side, with some timber harvest permitted in this area; intermittent non-fish bearing streams would be reduced from 180’ to a 25’ area containing 10-15 trees per acre on each side.

3.) Shade would be decreased and siltation would be increased, although BLM claims there would be no negative impact.

5.) The DEIS claims no increase in peak flows that would be detrimental to fish; there is no analysis of decreased summertime flows resulting from higher winter-time runoff rates.

6.) The DEIS makes sweeping claims for a huge area based on analysis of 5 subbasins in western Oregon, and cannot address potential impacts resulting from localized management activities.

7.) The preferred alternatives will increase the spread of invasive plant species There is an assumption of no damage to the Outstandingly Remarkable Values (ORV’s) on the North Umpqua River’s Recreational River segment of the Wild & Scenic River System. The ORV’s include water quality, the fishery, cultural resources, and visual resources. Impacts to these resources are not specifically evaluated. The Seattle office of the Environmental Protection Agency has officially expressed concern about negative impacts to water quality under this proposal.

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President’s Message

Please take a few minutes to look into this and write in support of these steelhead!

A special Steamboater Thank You to Michale from Petersburg, Alaska, who made a $200 donation to the Steamboaters in the memory of her mother, Ruth Collins. Ruth and Chuck Collins, Michale’s parents, were Steamboaters, members of the Isaac Walton League and “all around conservationists,” according to Frank and Jeanne Moore. There is a Collins memorial at the Smith Springs Wayside.

The North Umpqua Foundation is sponsoring a fundraising raffle featuring a custom Bellinger 8-1/2 foot, 8-wt bamboo steelhead rod and matching hand-crafted Bellinger fly reel. According to Chet Croco from Bellinger, “We wanted to come up with a unique look that drew influence from our friend, Dan Callaghan. The rod features Amboyna sapwood burl, black silk wraps with white tipping and claret accents, a white agate stripping guide, blued ferrules with water buffalo horn used as the reel seat insert, fighting butt knob and ferrule plug cap. All of the hardware is nickel silver and features Bellinger’s signature knurling – truly a one of a kind fly rod.”

In October, Jeanne and Frank Moore visited the United States Military Academy at West Point. They were the guests of Col. James “Buster” Hayden and his wife, Sugar. Col Hayden is the son of Steamboaters’ founder, Col. Jim Hayden.

Buster Hayden was honored as a Distinguished Graduate of the Academy and received the salute of all 4000 Cadets as they passed in review on the parade grounds.

North Umpqua Chronicle

Laura Jackson is the new district fish biologist for the Umpqua basin. Laura has been the district Salmon and Trout Enhancement Program (STEP) biologist for the past nine years. Laura has a Bachelor of Science in fish and wildlife biology from Michigan State University and a Masters degree in wildlife biology (with a minor in communications) from Colorado State. She worked in Colorado as an outdoor writer, which she described as “getting paid to go hunting, fishing and skiing – imagine that.”

Laura then went to work for the Iowa Department of Natural Resources as a non-game project coordinator. Some of these programs included butterfly gardens, river otter reintroductions, peregrine falcon reintroductions, and bald eagle viewing events. She was the primary author of The Iowa Breeding Bird Atlas.

Laura moved to Oregon in 1994. She worked as a fish-permit and fish-habitat biologist for the ODFW prior to accepting the STEP job in 1998. Her husband, DeWaine, also works out of the Roseburg office as the research wildlife supervisor for the Southwest District. Their son, Chayse, attends Roseburg High.

“My vision for the future of the fish in the Umpqua basin is to manage the resource with the best possible data we can acquire and to work with a variety of partners,” says Laura. “If we do a good job of communication and build strong partnerships with people in the Umpqua basin, we will be successful.”

Greenburg believes that we cannot directly blame Hemingway for the terminal damage to the great bluewater fish. “Hemingway,” says Greenburg, “lived in a period when estimations of ocean fisheries went from limitless to limited. And it’s doubtful, given the rise of modern industrial fishing, that the animals he killed would have lived to spawn so many heirs.”

“But we can blame Hemingway,” Greenburg argues, “for some of the damage that others are still doing. Despite the havoc wreaked on the big fish by commercial fishermen, sports anglers still want that Hemingway photo: standing next to a giant fish, hanging a casual hand on the animal’s lifeless dorsal fin. Today, every animal strung up for a picture is another animal that can’t contribute to the rebuilding of these species.”

Can we draw parallels from the decline of great pelagic fish to the salmon and steelhead of the Umpqua River? Of course we can. I trust that no fish manager or sports angler today thinks that the resource is limitless, although I am sure that some folks will continue to argue, despite hard evidence to the contrary, that producing more hatchery fish will assuage our concerns about harvest, habitat and hydro. And others will surely argue that wild winter steelhead should be returned to a kill fishery in 2009 and beyond (the 2008 regulation does not allow the killing of any wild steelhead in the Umpqua basin).

Greenburg ends his essay this way: “Hemingway, however, did the service of fixing the big fish in time. With his writing, he drew a line in the sea beyond which our perceived baseline cannot wander too far. Thanks in large part to him, we know that not too long ago it was normal to catch many big marlin and tuna within sight of shore. And for that alone we should praise the old man. If he had never given us a glimpse of that seemingly limitless ocean, we might never have realized how much we have lost.”

Killing big wild fish gave Hemingway a moment’s pause 80 years ago. He was even known to release a fish now and then. But we know so much more than Hemingway did about the resource. We are salmon and steelhead experts. We know how to identify the broken links in the life-history chain of our anadromous fish, and can plan repairs, but unfortunately wild steelhead and salmon are often low on the political action list. So it is up to us, the community of fishers and fish advocates, to tell the resource managers and politicians that our concern for the future of wild fish in the Umpqua system is more important to us than the Hemingway photo. To paraphrase Greenburg, we know how much we can lose.

Steelhead raised in a hatchery for two generations had about half the success of wild reproduction as did fish raised in a hatchery for one generation. “Using hatchery fish to produce more hatchery fish results in stocks that perform poorly in the wild” said Blouin, a professor of Zoology. “The type of effect didn’t surprise us. Man has domesticated animals for thousands of years, and those tamed animals wouldn’t survive well if released back into the wild. The speed at which these changes occur in the hatchery-raised fish is what is remarkable.”

The data in this study was collected from winter run steelhead in Oregon’s Hood River. All anadromous fish that wish to pass upriver and spawn are blocked at Powerdale Dam, a barrier to fish passage located 4-miles up from the river mouth. ODFW employees trap fish at the base of the dam, collecting scale samples and a fin before allowing the fish to continue upriver. The year in which each returning adult was born is determined by reading the scales, and the parentage (either hatchery/hatchery, hatchery/wild, or wild/wild) is determined by a DNA-fingerprinting method. Offspring from these different mating scenarios are then trapped as returning adults in subsequent years and sampled. From these data the relative reproductive success of all three matings can be determined.

Obviously the results from this work raise some concerns for advocates of wild steelhead. Recently government agencies have tried to count hatchery fish with wild fish when evaluating the health of some ESA-listed runs. As Dr. Blouin said, “This study proves that wild fish and hatchery fish are not the same, despite their appearances.” And while not thoroughly studied, these results increase the concern over hatchery fish interbreeding with wild fish and thus diluting the genes of the wild population. The continual influx of hatchery genes into the wild population could conceivably reduce the reproductive fitness of the wild stocks. The key to any responsible hatchery program would then be to minimize interaction between the hatchery-born and stream-born fish.

“Hatcheries are very good at making large numbers of fish for harvest, but those fish are maladapted to life in the wild”, said Blouin. “There is good reason to be concerned about hatchery fish interbreeding with wild stocks.”

THE THIRD LADDER AT STEAMBOAT FALLS?

I have been informed by people local to the area that, prior to the construction and reconstruction of the ladders, no steelhead got past the falls. To a degree this belief is understandable since few people knew where the holding pools were and the road system had only been extended above the falls in the early fifties. Frank Moore was one of the people who saw the gathering of the hundreds of wild summer steelhead that has been going on at Big Bend Pool for hundreds if not thousands of years.

Anyone who has looked closely at the Steamboat Falls ladder recently knows that it is in pretty poor shape. The concrete is deteriorated, rebar and other type of fish-injuring heavy-wire mesh get more exposed with every season, a headgate has been smashed for years, and some of the channels built into the ladder and designed to produce flows that attract the steelhead to its opening are now dysfunctional. Add to this the fact that the ladder has to be checked for blockage every season. Until sometime in July on the average year, steelhead jump and jump and damage themselves trying to get past the falls, unable or unwilling to readily find the ladder’s opening.

All this adds up to the fact that the Steamboat Falls ladder will fail again. The only real uncertainty is when this failure will occur. Natural probabilities will play a hand and could do so this coming winter; no one knows.

So, when it does, what do the steelhead do . . . or I should say, what do we do? As people who care about the North Umpqua Basin and this fish, it is probably time to consider options. Do we wait for failure and then react or can we think ahead and fix this problem before it happens. For what it’s worth, I think that it is time for the falls to be made naturally passable for the fish again and without the use of concrete. Think outside boxes, concrete ladder boxes or other kinds. Why not carve out the bedrock, recreate the necessary and regenerating (and self cleaning) plunge pools again?

Elsewhere, falls have been made passable without constructing ladders. The engineering exists. There are funding sources available.

We are reasonably sure we know what the wild steelhead populations that use the middle and the upper parts of this basin want and need to do. Their jumping at the falls gives them away. What do we want to do?

Editor’s Note: Steamboater members and ODFW employees opened passage to steelhead in June. The crews went back in August in lower water and removed a log from the upstream ladder opening and also moved a slab of cement in the underground section of the ladder. Steamboaters Joe Ferguson, Dale Greenley, Pat McRae and Larry Levine did the heavy lifting in August, in addition to ODFW employees Sam Moyers, Jim Brick and Jay Potter. Thanks to all!

Steamboaters Board of Directors 2007 - 2008