May 31, 2025
Eric Barker

Wild spring chinook and steelhead from the Snake River continue to struggle while fall chinook are one of the bright spots in a biennial report from Washington’s Salmon Recovery Office.

The report concentrates on salmon and steelhead that spawn in the Evergreen State and says Snake River spring chinook are in crisis. There are only three populations of Snake River spring chinook that spawn in Washington. The Asotin Creek population is functionally extinct, and the Tucannon population is dangerously close.

Last year, 250 spring chinook returned to the Tucannon River that spills out of the Blue Mountains and joins the Snake River near Starbuck. Only 67 of them were wild. While those numbers are poor, they are an improvement over other recent years. In 2023, 30 chinook including nine wild fish returned to the Tucannon. In 2019, 22 fish returned with just eight of them being wild, according to the report.

The Nez Perce Tribe and Washington Department of Fish and Game have taken desperate measures to save the fish, including releasing 50,000 smolts raised at the Tucannon Hatchery below Bonneville Dam on the Columbia River. They hope bypassing the need for the juvenile fish to pass through the Snake and Columbia River dams and reservoirs will result in higher survival. Any adults that return to the release point will be trapped and trucked back to the Tucannon Hatchery.

“When you start seeing fish and wildlife agencies doing crazy stuff like that, you know a population is in trouble,” said Chris Donley, fish program manager for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife at Spokane.

He noted this year’s run might be slightly larger.

“We’ve got about 300 fish in the system which is double what we have seen in the last five years in any given year,” he said. “But the vast majority of those are of hatch origin.”

The third Snake River spring chinook population that spawns in Washington does so in Butte Creek, a tributary of Oregon’s Wenaha River in the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness Area. The report did not include spawning information on the population.

Wild Snake River spring chinook are protected as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The bulk of the Snake River population spawn in Idaho and 42% of the Snake River populations had crossed the quasi-extinction threshold — defined as having 50 or fewer spawners for three consecutive years — according to a 2021 analysis by the Nez Perce Tribe.

The same 2021 modeling by the tribe showed 19% of wild Snake River steelhead had 50 or fewer spawners for three consecutive years. The recently released Washington report listed Snake River steelhead, a threatened species, as “not keeping pace.” In Washington they return to the Tucannon River, Asotin Creek, Joseph Creek and the lower Grande Ronde River.

Donley said fisheries managers are bracing for a poor return this year.

“In years we have a lot of pink salmon it appears steelhead are not doing as well,” he said.

Snake River steelhead tend to return in lower numbers and at smaller sizes during odd years. It is an inverse relationship to pink salmon salmon runs that boom in odd years. Scientists speculate that the super abundance of pink salmon every other year stunts the growth of steelhead, also in an every-other-year pattern, as the two species compete for limited resources in the Pacific Ocean.

Snake River fall chinook were listed as “approaching goal” in the report. The fish that return in August and spawn in October and November have benefited from hatchery programs by the Nez Perce Tribe and Washington. They have exceeded abundance goals for several years and have been considered for removal from ESA-protection as a threatened species. However, in 2016, the federal government rejected a delisting petition, saying wild fish numbers appear to be dependent on yearly supplementation from the hatchery program. They also suggested the fish could be delisted if a population were to be established upstream of the Hells Canyon complex of dams on the Snake River. Those dams, constructed in 1950s and 1960s, cut off fall chinook from a majority of their habitat.

Overall the report said eight of the 14 ESA-protected salmon and steelhead runs in Washington are struggling or in crisis and six are improving.

“Salmon are critical to our economy and way of life,” said Megan Duffy, director of the Washington State Recreation and Conservation Office in a news release. “They support our commercial and recreational fishing industry. They are food for other animals including endangered Southern Resident orcas. They are key to Tribal culture and treaty rights and they support many tourist communities. It is encouraging to see there is progress but the number of salmon populations still struggling reminds us that now is not the time to let up. We must continue investing in saving salmon so we all may benefit.”

The report is available at stateofsalmon.wa.gov.

Moscow-Pullman Daily News: Report says Snake River chinook and steelhead still in peril