Chinook salmon migrate up the Columbia River in Oregon. (Photo by Dave Alan/Getty Images)
Editor’s note: This is the second installment of a series on salmon originally published by the Idaho Capital Sun. Part One described the emergency effort to rescue Washington state’s last population of Snake River spring and summer Chinook salmon, in the Tucannon River.
The Nez Perce Tribe and its collaborators will try to eke out a few more years’ survival for Tucannon River Chinook.
“But,” Jay Hesse says, “we also had to ask: What about all the other populations? So in 2021, we started modeling quasi-extinction for all the Snake River spring/summer Chinook and steelhead populations listed under the Endangered Species Act. The results are giving us a better picture of real conditions, and a stronger case for the urgency of action.”
Some years ago, federal scientists at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries developed the “quasi-extinction threshold,” which the NOAA uses in planning.
For Snake River Chinook salmon and steelhead, the threshold is fewer than 50 adult fish in a population returning from the ocean for four consecutive years. Below that floor, the population’s continued existence can no longer be scientifically assumed or predicted. It is an emergency signal, flashing red and near black.
The Nez Perce Tribe is applying this science to management of populations below or near the extinction threshold, as well as to public education and long-term science.
Nez Perce Fisheries provided me two maps from its upcoming extinction threshold report for Snake River spring/summer Chinook, and steelhead, updated through 2024 fish returns. These maps show some of the findings, but much else in it will deserve attention.
Lump those red-orange shades together as you look at the maps. With a little imagination, you will see the near-term extinction trajectory for Snake River salmon and steelhead in geographic motion.
As updated through 2024 fish returns, the report shows six Snake River steelhead populations, 27% of the species’ total number, are on the critical list, below the extinction threshold or heading there soon. Ten Snake River spring/summer Chinook salmon populations, 29% of that species’ total, are on the critical list. The maps show their locations.
Populations colored yellowish are all those predicted to be above the 50 fish threshold in 2029. These are in motion too. Current rates of decline, if continued, will put a next batch on the critical list soon. The data underlying the maps suggests which and where those will be.
It is not scientific news that Snake River salmon and steelhead are going extinct. These findings further confirm the fact, by newly estimating the current rate and trend of decline at population level.
What’s new, for me, is how extinction threshold analysis, as mapped and made public yearly, allows fish managers, all stripes of salmon people, interested reporters, and Northwest governors and members of Congress to observe Snake River salmon extinction in motion.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife also conducts an extinction threshold analysis for these same Snake River populations, with some differences in methodology and data.
“ODFW’s quasi-extinction approach is a little more conservative than the Nez Perce Tribe’s,” says Tucker Jones, the agency’s Columbia River program manager. “Our two results so far are slightly different, but both analyses have arrived at largely the same conclusions and same trend. When you take different approaches, but come to nearly the same conclusions, that provides more certainty we’re on the right track.”
The department also plans to update its analysis this year.
The extinction threshold findings can be annually volatile, as one somewhat better bad return re-sets its stringent clock. Thus the main story is the trends, for individual populations and the aggregate species.
The 2024 Nez Perce Fisheries’ analysis estimates a 6% per-year decline is occurring across the Snake’s spring-summer Chinook populations, and 11% per-year decline across steelhead populations. The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s trend estimates will be known soon.
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Two distinctions between this scientific work, and my use of it here, should be made.
First, extinction in motion is my phrase, not Hesse’s or his Nez Perce Fisheries’ co-author Ryan Kinzer’s.
They are conducting a careful, annually-updated estimate, employing both raw fish counts and modeling, of the rates at which extirpation of individual populations are currently proceeding (or not, should the data show that), and thus extinction of the species continues to approach (or not).
The focus on rates of decline toward extirpation and extinction is a main value this science has now, as salmon scarcity and Tucannon River-like dilemmas multiply. The same science will track the pace and places of salmon recovery, should the actions necessary to produce recovery be taken.
My phrase combines two facts.
Second, except when quoting, I say extinction threshold, without the word quasi. This will not change the Nez Perce Tribe’s, Oregon’s or the NOAA Fisheries’ use of the full phrase in scientific, management and legal contexts where it is a defined, necessary term.
But for most of us that word just gets in the way. Good scientists have developed a last gasp check-point – 50 or fewer fish returning, four years in a row – to mark the entry, by a steelhead or salmon population, into an extinction momentum that will be very difficult to escape.
It is an extinction threshold. For the salmon, rivers, watersheds, communities and salmon people facing it, there is nothing quasi about it.
Please look again at the maps.
Most of these geographies hold from 50 to 150 miles of identified habitat for one or both fish. Thus, at the official 50 fish extinction threshold, one female or male Chinook, out of 25, must find a partner, also out of 25, in 50 to 150 miles of water.
“That is just a terribly low number of salmon in so much river,” Jay Hesse says.
A landslide or flood scour could destroy a few salmon redds (nests) and their overwintering eggs, when a few are all that exist. Some eagles, bears and humans will find some returning fish before the fish find each other to spawn.
Such local events, of little harm to healthy populations, are major risks to those so near extinction. More destructive are recurring large-scale events – poor ocean conditions, low flows through reservoirs and dams, extended hot water during their long, obstructed upstream migration – that do outsized damage to populations already scraped so low.
The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, and NOAA Fisheries, both make the main scientific point.
The department: The 50 fish or less threshold “is not a milestone on a linear path to extinction.” It is “a tipping point into accelerated extinction risk,” with a “higher likelihood populations will no longer be able to respond favorably to improved conditions.”
The NOAA: “Quasi-Extinction Thresholds represent tipping points for population collapse, where the actual extinction potential may not be predictable or, in some cases, avoidable … The result can be an extinction vortex …”
An extinction vortex operates something like your sink’s drain operates on the last remaining water. It’s too late.
Hesse always reminds his audiences of the contexts for this extinction analysis.
“Keep in mind that salmon ecology is based on abundance,” he says. “Numbers of returning salmon are not just about salmon. Salmon drive the whole ecology of that population’s geographic area. Fifty or fewer fish signals a total break in that watershed’s ecology, with effects that go well beyond the fish.”
Some breakage is visible to us; many fewer bears, eagles and people hunt the rivers and creeks in season. Much is still invisible to most of us, though nutrient loss is being documented. Salmon nutrition for the waters, lands and life of the territories on the maps above has been close to nothing for 60 years.
“And the harvest cycle, the cultural cycle, which is based on abundance, is also broken,” Hesse says. “That is important to all salmon people, but particularly to tribes that cultural connection is absolutely necessary.”
Hesse and Kinzer use another map to add more context: past extirpations.
Of an estimated 70 abundant populations of Snake River spring/summer Chinook prior to invasion and settlement, 30 are now extirpated. Of 40 steelhead populations pre-settlement, 16 are now extirpated.
The scales of what once was, and what now remains, are so disparate it is hard to put both on one graph or graphic.
In his presentations to public and agency audiences, Hesse experiments with visual ways to relate that not-so-long-ago abundance with today’s plunge to extinction. (Two to six million salmon and steelhead annually is one pre-Caucasian estimate for the Snake River alone.) His most effective way so far is a 16-ounce Starbucks’ Grande cup – the past salmon abundance when filled, today a couple disconnected damp spots on the bottom of the cup.
“We cannot lose sight that salmon abundance is our goal,” Hesse says.
Eastern Oregon’s tributary watersheds to the Snake River are too varied and distinctive for this stranger to ably summarize, ecologically or humanly. The mountain, valley and canyon topography does intricate wonders with cold mountain waters that birth the Grande Ronde River, and then steadily refresh it on its long course to the Snake River. (The Grande Ronde has crossed into Washington when it reaches the Snake; 92% of the watershed is in Oregon.)
Some echoed Kevin March, a retired acupuncturist in La Grande: “One thing here is that many of these rivers and stretches are hard to get to. In canyon country, you can always leave people behind.”
Or John Milbert, a veteran fisherman, gatherer of foods, and writer: “I like to get high in the little tributaries. I enjoy fishing these tributaries because I get to know them intimately from walking and wading them. You get surprises.”
The extinction threshold data led me first to the upper Grande Ronde River, and its large tributary Catherine Creek. (The upper Grande Ronde is roughly the river’s watershed above the town of Elgin.)
In both, significant damage to river function has occurred in headwater areas, from past logging, roading and grazing, and, in both, the salmon nurseries in and passages through the big valleys are now mostly disconnected and ditched.
In the early 1990s, scientists identified eight populations of Snake River spring and summer Chinook in northeast Oregon. Two are deemed extirpated since then: the Lookingglass and Big Sheep populations, in the lower Grande Ronde and Imnaha respectively. Washington’s Asotin population, upstream of the Tucannon, is also extirpated.
“Though extirpated for now, the Tribe does not want any of these taken off the Endangered Species list,” Hesse says. “We don’t want them forgotten, and over time we want them back.”
The Upper Grande Ronde and Catherine Creek host two of northeast Oregon’s six remaining Chinook populations.
Retired lawyer David Baum remembers fishing for salmon long ago, far up the Grande Ronde, at Tony Vey Meadows. And as a boy in the 1950s, he made a spearing platform on a bridge across Catherine Creek at his grandmother’s home.
“A salmon would come up every few minutes in season,” he said. “I had no success, but I saw a lot of salmon going up Catherine Creek.”
No longer. I will offer some numbers, which need not be retained. Their scale and trend is what matters.
Upper Grande Ronde Chinook, returning to 144 miles of identified Chinook habitat, had an estimated return, 2016 through 2022, of 43, 19, 39, 7, 57, 24, 98 and 19 fish. (The Nez Perce update should include the 2024 estimate.) At 20 returning fish, a Chinook must find at least one of 10 possible mates in 144 miles of stream habitat to secure a next generation.
The Nez Perce Fisheries’ map projects that, at current rates of decline, this Chinook population will be at or below the extinction threshold, joining the critical list, by 2029.
In Catherine Creek’s 89 miles of Chinook habitat, the estimated range of adult returns, 2016-2023, is 31 to 190 fish. For now, the Catherine Creek population remains among those not projected at or below 50 fish within five years, but it is uncomfortably close.
The Upper Grande Ronde and Catherine Creek share one steelhead population, with 808 miles of identified habitat. Its return was last above 1,000 in 2016. The 2017-2023 range is 247 to 874. Northeast Oregon wild steelhead are generally in better shape than its Chinook, but are also in decline. Four digit returns become three digit become … is the trendline.
“If not extinct in Upper Grande Ronde, Chinook must be perilously close,” says John Milbert. “The last carcass I saw was probably 15 years ago.”
Kevin March is a steelhead fisherman: “I don’t fish the upper Grande Ronde, because those are wild fish and the stocks are too low. And I don’t fish for salmon anywhere in eastern Oregon. There are too few.”
John Appleton and his wife Anieta own Alpine Archery and Sport, La Grande’s fishing shop.
“Wild salmon are very low in the upper Grande Ronde; steelhead are better but not good,” Appleton told me.
As for fishing, “in all of northeast Oregon, Chinook fishing any more is really minimal,” he continued. “There is some hatchery-based coho fishing in the fall.”
Fall steelhead fishing, on hatchery stocks, attracts people, though that fishery too can be uncertain.
Kyle Bratcher is district fish biologist for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. His district includes the lower Grande Ronde from the Wallowa River down, and the Imnaha River.
“In my territory, the salmon in most trouble are Wallowa/Lostine spring Chinook, and Imnaha spring Chinook,” Bratcher said. “They’re not as bad as in the Tucannon, but it’s clear we need to do more for them.”
This Wallowa population was last estimated above 1,000 in 2014, its 2015-20 range is 189 to 750 (the Nez Perce and Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife reports should include more recent data), and it has 137 miles of habitat.
Bratcher and Hesse confirmed the department and Nez Perce Tribe have begun discussion of interim “safety net” actions for Wallowa/Lostine Chinook. Decisions will not be simple.
“Steelhead are depressed in my territory, far below recovery goals, but they are a bit more stable than salmon,” Bratcher added. “Steelhead can use more of our wilderness and inaccessible habitat.”
The fishing people I spoke with generally have more hope for steelhead in the Grande Ronde and Imnaha than for salmon.
“Steelhead range more, they can go up the small streams and creeks, to many more places,” Kevin March said. “I know a farmer who sees them in his little creek.”
Biologist Rick George, now retired from the Confederated Umatilla Tribes, lives in Troy, Oregon, on the lower Grande Ronde. “The Umatilla Tribes are doing some excellent habitat restoration in the Upper Grande Ronde – the McCoy Creek project, for example,” he said. “But I can’t see much hope for salmon in the Grande Ronde with eight dams on the lower Snake and Columbia. We’ve put billions into increasing salmon over several generations of salmon now. I don’t see even a blip of recovery. The systems are pretty empty of salmon, and, without that ocean nutrient freight train, the rivers are more sterile. We have large rivers that look beautiful, but without salmon that is deceiving.”
“I’ve been on the Imnaha for 30 years,” Joe McCormack told me. “Watching the natural processes, what I see over those 30 years is less and less naturally spawning salmon and steelhead.”
Idaho Capital Sun originally published this article. Like the Alaska Beacon, the Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.
