For centuries, killing
predators was to fish and wildlife management what leeches were to
medicine. By the mid-20th century, even the dullest minds in
government had figured this out.
But duller minds were
yet to come. Enter the administration of George W. Bush. In 2008,
it is hawking control of salmon-eating birds, fish and mammals as
if this were Dr. Kickapoo’s Elixir for Rheum, Ague, Blindness
and Insanity.
Virtually the entire scientific community
agrees that if the four nearly useless Snake River dams remain in
place, Columbia and Snake river salmon stocks will go extinct. Even
Bush’s National Marine Fisheries Service has admitted this.
Mostly because of these dams, the system’s cohos are already
extinct, sockeyes functionally extinct and 13 stocks in 78
populations are threatened or endangered.
Yet last
October, the Fisheries Service released its draft Columbia-Snake
salmon plan that calls for a surge in the war on predators. The
surge, together with barging young salmon, increasing hatchery
production and all the other bells, whistles and tweaks that have
failed so spectacularly in the past, will cost $800 million every
year. By comparison, the Army Corps of Engineers estimates the cost
of breaching the dams at $1 billion.
There is no legal
alternative to saving and restoring Columbia-Snake river salmon.
The Endangered Species Act requires it. U.S. District Court Judge
James Redden, who declared the Fisheries Service’s previous
plan illegal in 2005, and its amended version illegal in 2006, has
threatened to vacate the administration’s current plan, in
which it trots out the ancient predator-scapegoats — squawfish,
Caspian terns and sea lions.
Squawfish, or
“pikeminnows,” as the PC fish police have attempted to
rename them, proliferate in dam-made dead-water where they eat
ocean-bound salmon smolts, especially the ones milling around as
they strive to figure out the nearly non-existent current, and
those injured or disoriented by passing through turbines.
Although no bounty system anywhere has ever worked, the Bonneville
Power Administration is funding the biggest one in history.
Implementing this counter-insurgency are Oregon and Washington.
“How can YOU save a salmon? Go fishing!” proclaims the
Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, calling to mind the
equally brainless bumper sticker popular in Idaho and Wyoming:
“Save a Deer. Kill a Wolf.”
For your first 100 squawfish
you get $4 each; then $5 each. When you hit 400 fish, the bounty
rises to $8. Catch a tagged squawfish and you collect $500. Last
year, taxpayers paid out almost $1.3 million in squawfish bounties.
Yet the squawfish population remains healthy and stable: In 2000,
bounty hunters killed 187,596 fish; seven years later they killed
190,870.
Squawfish are natives. But what are the feds and
states doing about the alien smallmouth bass that also proliferate
in the tepid impoundments and that also eat smolts? Nothing;
they’re popular with license buyers who almost always release
them.
Then there are those pesky sea lions. Because
salmon out-swim them in the open sea, the fish aren’t their
natural prey. But sea lions are quick to take advantage of
unnatural situations. So they’ve learned to travel 140 miles up the
Columbia River and chow down on adult salmon butting into the
Bonneville dam. Last March, the Fisheries Service granted Oregon
and Washington permission to annually kill 85 sea lions.
But there are also those voracious Caspian terns, which see the
salmon hatcheries on the lower Columbia as the world’s
biggest bird feeders. By 1998, 18,000 terns were nesting on
dredge-spoil dumps. Because they were also eating wild fish, the
Fisheries Service and the Corps of Engineers set about moving the
colonies to another spoil dump closer to the Pacific. But the birds
continued to proliferate. Now the feds plan to move them yet again,
this time to six new locations, including an island the Corps will
build for them on an inland reservoir. Projected cost for the first
year: $2.4 million.
Suppose the Bush administration
prevails against squawfish, sea lions and terns. Is it then going
to pacify the rest of nature? Will it attack cormorants, which eat
more smolts than sea lions and terns combined? And what about orcas
and those smolt-swilling walleyes and coastal cutthroat trout?
One gets the impression that if seismic activity
threatened an obsolete dam, our federal government would try to
rearrange earth’s tectonic plates. On the Snake River, we can
save dams or salmon — not both. The administration knows this. Its
war on predators is based on deception. There can be no end and no
victory.
Ted Williams is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is conservation editor for Fly Rod
& Reel magazine and lives in Vermont.
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