Ep. 829: Who Will Save the Columbia River's Salmon?

Steven Rinella https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella/?hl=en talks with Donella Miller https://critfc.org/staff/donella-miller/ and Doug Hatch https://critfc.org/staff/doug-hatch/ of the Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission (CRITFC) https://critfc.org/staff/doug-hatch/, Brody Henderson https://www.instagram.com/brodyjhenderson/?hl=en, Janis Putelis https://www.instagram.com/janis_putelis/?hl=en, Seth Morris https://www.instagram.com/sethmorris_45/?hl=en, Phil Taylor https://www.instagram.com/philtaylor25/?hl=en, and Corinne Schneider https://www.instagram.com/corinnesschneider/?hl=en. Topics discussed: The Six Sovereigns restoration initiative of the Columbia River basin; having a holistic philosophy and viewing fish as a forever fixture; salmon runs; steelhead reconditioning; chinook recovery; sockeye and coho reintroduction; lamprey restoration; the sea lion crisis; and more. Feel free to donate to the recovery effort here: https://critfc.org/donate/ Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:20Steven Rinella?

  All right. Welcome to the Meat Eater Podcast. Today, we're going to dig into something of great importance that we touched on a bunch of times in the past is, um, what in the world happened to and what is going on with the Columbia River and the salmon runs? I mean, this is a story that's played out over centuries. Historically, the Columbia, I pulled this from your guys' website, the guests I'm going to introduce in a minute. Um, I had always read that historically, the Columbia had runs, annual runs of 10 to 12 million salmon. Um, I was reading today, it could have been some years as high as 16 million salmon ran the Columbia.

• 3:07Steven Rinella?

  Our good old boys, Lewis and Clark, who come up every time you're trying to describe something from the old timey days, uh, described salmon in the Columbia as being inconceivable, the numbers. Uh, they had fish, salmon species running from March to October, steelhead in there all winter. And then, as we'll get into, just a never-ending series of mistakes,

• 3:34Steven Rinella?

  intentional actions, accidental actions have led it to be where it is just small fractions of that, small fractions of those numbers, running up and down the river. Um, and we're going to talk with a couple of guests today who have been involved in salmon recovery on the Columbia River from a intertribal perspective. So, the Columbia River flowed through, how, can you guys, uh, I'm leading up to my intro here of you guys, but can you remind me how many miles of river are in the Columbia Basin? I think it was, I was reading about, save, I can't remember the number.

• 4:18Speaker 06

  Well, the Columbia River itself, like where it's coming from Canada is about 750 miles from the ocean, but half of the Columbia is north of Canada. And then you've got all of the major tribes, you know, from the Yakima, the Wenatchee, the Snake, the Walamette, you know, just all up and down the river. So you're looking at even now, in the high water years, a half a million CFS have flowed down by Bonneville Dam.

• 4:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so half a million cubic feet per second.

• 4:51Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 4:52Steven Rinella?

  Of water flowing through there. And the folks we're going to talk to today about tribal efforts to recover fish. The tribes acknowledging that the states just aren't doing it at the speed they would like and with the vision that they would like them to have. The feds aren't doing it at the speed they would like and they're not pursuing the vision they would like them to pursue. So increasingly, the tribes, Native American tribes have been getting involved in this. And we're going to speak today with Doug Hatch, who's the deputy manager of the Fishery Science Department of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission.

• 5:32Steven Rinella?

  And also, Donella, Donella, Donella Miller is the Fishery Science Manager. And, um, real quick before we dig in too much, can you, can you tell people what tribes are in the intertribal organization?

• 5:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, we're a consortia. We represent, we're a technical arm of, of course, the Yakima Nation, which I'm a tribal member of, and also the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yumatilla Indian Reservation, which my grandmother was from, so I'm also part Yumatilla as well, but also the Warm Springs Tribe in Oregon and the Nez Perce in Idaho.

• 6:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 6:15Speaker 07

  So, yeah, we work with those four tribes on Columbia Basin issues. And all four, you know, treaty tribes, we signed treaties with the government in 1855 to retain our. You know, hunting, fishing and gathering rights throughout our, our usual and accustomed areas. And that's really key because, you know, we ceded land to the, to the government in exchange for the, the set boundaries of the reservation and also to hunt, fish and gather in perpetuity throughout our, you know, our natural areas.

• 6:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And that, and then that right is infringed on by the fact that then the people you signed the treaty with went ahead and destroyed the fishery.

• 7:02Speaker 07

  Yeah. And that's really key. The work that we do is, you know, those rights mean nothing if there's no fish to catch. The, the right isn't just to dip our nets in empty waters. It's actual catch fish. And there's language in the treaty that talks about our ability to maintain a modest living. And people can't support themselves on, on it anymore. Our, our people unfortunately live in poverty up and down the, the Columbia River at treaty access sites that aren't meant to be lived in. It's more or less boat ramps and, you know, they don't have water, power, or just a bathroom, but it's not what, not

• 7:47Speaker 07

  definitely not what we signed up for.

• 7:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, yeah. So we're gonna tell that story. First I gotta, I wanna do, what, what day, when did the thing drop that we made in Texas? When is, I, cause I explained this all big time in Texas.

• 7:59Speaker 07

  It already dropped, but we're trying to hit it multiple times.

• 8:03Steven Rinella?

  Just being cognizant of the fact that, so we recorded a showdown in Texas. Talked about taint and meat, skunks, nuts on a cat. In that, we explained that there's, if you subscribe to the show, you're gonna see, if you subscribe to the podcast, you're gonna see some changes coming up in March 9. So, starting, is it March 9? That's what's gonna happen?

• 8:27Speaker 07

  The week of, yep.

• 8:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Starting in March 9, you're gonna start seeing, every week you're gonna see two Meat Eater Podcast drops. The-

• 8:37Steven Rinella?

  The regular Monday thing you subscribe to now stays the same and that's like the interview show. So that would be like what we're doing right here, right now. We're sitting around with fish tribal fisheries managers, having an interview with them about their area of expertise. That's like the interview portion of the show and that will always drop at the same time. In addition to that, um, there's going to be a weekly news show, news and commentary drop. As I explained, it's like Spencer's, uh, concept. We cover our news, your news and the news on the news show. Okay. Three kinds of news. That will drop sometime during the week. It'll, it'll vary to when it comes out. The, the, the, the, the folks you know and love and the kind of

• 9:17Steven Rinella?

  material you know and love from radio live. Um, that stuff will move on to this news show. Radio live won't be like a set. There won't be a live thing anymore and it won't occur at a set time anymore. It was, it'll be the news and commentary show, which comes out when it comes out. Um, stay tuned for all that. There'll be some new artwork. You'll know it happened because there'll be new artwork. That'll be the best way you'll know that it happened. You'll be like, oh, new artwork. Must mean this thing happened. And please subscribe on YouTube and wherever you listen to podcasts. That helps a lot. Uh, you know what word I learned today from you guys' website? I'm going to do a trivia test. Don't, don't, don't, you know, you guys know this, but don't tell anybody. I'm going to trivia test these guys. So I was on the Columbia River Inter Tribal Fish Commission

• 10:02Steven Rinella?

  site today. What is the word? I'm like Spencer here. What is the word for a fish that spawns once and dies? It's in the same vein of like anadrumus, catarrumus. It's like that flavor of a word, but it's me. You spawn once and die.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  I've heard this before.

• 10:25Steven Rinella?

  Like a scientific name? Diadrumus. Fun name. No. Die. Ha, ha, ha, Brody, is that a joke? No. Sorry. Yeah, you being clever, like die?

• 10:38Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:38Steven Rinella?

  Oh, I thought he was. I thought he was being clever, too. I didn't think, at first, I didn't think he was being clever, then I thought he was being clever.

• 10:43Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:45Steven Rinella?

  It's like, it's that flavor. What is that, Latin? I don't know, is it Latin?

• 10:50Steven Rinella?

  Diagenous, cataranous? Oh, no, I should look that up.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  Monodramus.

• 10:55Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 10:57Steven Rinella?

  No. I know I've heard it before, but I don't remember. Dude, I have never, I have never encountered the word. I didn't know there was a word. I've never encountered it. You ready? None of you guys got it. I've never even heard the damn word. Cataranus comes from Greek roots. Oh, it's Greek. This is probably Greek. Semmel Paris.

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Hmm. So it's not like those words really at all?

• 11:18Steven Rinella?

  How do you spell that? When I say same flavor, I mean like a foreign language sounding deal, you know? I guarantee it's Greek, Semmel Paris. I've never heard that word. In my note, you know, you got like a notes function on your phone. I keep words that I need to incorporate into my vocabulary on a little list. Like.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  So tho- but those are only the fish that die after they spawn. So not steelhead, not Atlantic salmon.

• 11:39Steven Rinella?

  Not steelhead, not ocean run cut. Semmel Paris, I should know this because I took Latin. It does have Latin roots. It combines semmel, meaning once or a single time, and pario, meaning to give birth or produce.

• 11:55Steven Rinella?

  Another thing I learned, we're gonna go way back deep before we get to this. Another thing I learned on your site that kind of blew my mind is those dams, the dams on the Columbia system, did a way to think about it when baby salmon, when smolts are coming back down the river. It's basically you lose seven to fifteen percent of them die at each dam.

• 12:18Steven Rinella?

  It's an incredible way to think about it.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:21Steven Rinella?

  Can you?

• 12:21Speaker 05

  And how many are there? How many dams are there?

• 12:23Steven Rinella?

  I have no idea.

• 12:25Speaker 07

  Well, there's four.

• 12:26Steven Rinella?

  Stay, stay up to close to your mic.

• 12:27Speaker 07

  Oh, there's four on the, um, the lower part of the main stem Columbia. And then you have the four in the Lower Snake River, and then there's also, um, privately owned dams that are owned by the mid Columbia public utility districts. So there's four, four right in the mid sea. So there's eight on the main stem Columbia before you get to, um...

• 12:51Speaker 07

  Roosevelt, right?

• 12:53Speaker 06

  Oh, the.

• 12:54Speaker 07

  Gran Cooley.

• 12:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, Chief Joseph is impassable and then Gran Cooley is upstream of that. But yeah, if you're going to the headwaters of the Columbia, which would be the Metow River, if you're up there, you're going to go over nine dams on the main stem. More if you go on up the tributaries. If you go up the Snake, you're going over eight dams before you ever get to the Salmon River, the Amaha, or any of those big rivers in the Snake.

• 13:21Steven Rinella?

  Eight times fifteen, that's a big number.

• 13:22Speaker 06

  It's big.

• 13:23Speaker 05

  I mean, then we can do the math.

• 13:24Steven Rinella?

  It's more than a hundred.

• 13:25Speaker 05

  Let's say, yeah.

• 13:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, therein is the deal.

• 13:29Speaker 06

  And then there's mortality coming upstream, too. You know, not just every adult, just because there's a fish ladder, you got to find that fish ladder and you got to negotiate it, you got to get over it, you got to avoid the predators, you've got lots of stuff.

• 13:42Steven Rinella?

  Can you guys lay out a little bit like?

• 13:46Steven Rinella?

  What did the system look like before the first major impact? Before the first major negative impact came to it, which I guess was the cannery, fish canneries? Like, what did, like, just try to help people visualize it. Like nowadays, people think about salmon runs. And it's like Alaska, right? When they think about salmon runs, it's Bristol Bay, right?

• 14:13Steven Rinella?

  This was a bigger salmon run than those. The biggest salmon run, the biggest salmon run in the country, the biggest salmon run in the world, was the Columbia.

• 14:24Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:25Steven Rinella?

  You wouldn't have been, you had to, you wouldn't go to Alaska to see big salmon runs. Like, the Columbia was the big salmon run. Like, what did that look like? Like, what fish were there?

• 14:35Steven Rinella?

  You know, to what quantity is it even possible? No, no one scientifically measured it, but like, what did it look like?

• 14:43Speaker 07

  It was, well, that's why Salilo Falls, right? That's, um, historically, that was the major trading hub of the Pacific Northwest. You know, that people came from, you know, the, the Midwest to trade buffalo and the ocean area to trade salt for, for salmon. We had, it was, and even obsidian and tool making and things like that. It was inconceivable. And that's why the over-exploitation happened because, you know, like you said, you read the old timey, um, descriptions and they thought it was an inexhaustible resource, that there was so much that people were able to gather what they needed.

• 15:22Speaker 07

  And, um, that's, that's what sustained life in our region for millennia. And it was just, um, you know, the, the trading and the tribal people living amongst the land is, you know, intrinsically is a part of nature. And, um, you know, it's just a, it was a completely different way of thinking of, you know, like, um, exploitation and things like that, but that, I don't know, that, that's why it seemed so, that thought process was different from the way that we lived as, you know, taking and being a part of the system versus coming in, like how you said, the first major negative impact would have been the, the fish wheels and the, um, and even the

• 16:07Speaker 07

  saning and things like that. And, um, so those types of things happened and, um, you know, when you look at different, everything is always viewed as, um, a resource and how can that benefit man? And, you know, you hear about the salmon, but even further down the road, the, the salmon kind of became a problem to development in the, of the Columbia River system when they were looking at the, the placement of the hydro system. Because then they would have to incorporate fish ladders and deal with the salmon. It would have been easier if they did away from, with all these natural runs and we could retain salmon, but you retain it in the lower river below the dams. So they didn't have to do all these extra steps to, to maintain the stocks. That's why you see a lot.

• 16:52Speaker 07

  A lot of those hatcheries are below Bonneville Dam and it's unnatural. You know, Spring Chinook and Coho and things like that and those hatcheries still operate. But the tribes have been working to try to restore and bring them back into their natal areas throughout. And even to me, I think those numbers that you read are actually kind of low.

• 17:15Steven Rinella?

  The ten to sixteen million estimates.

• 17:17Speaker 07

  Because even today you could get, um, you know, there's been a lot of work in the Okanagan Basin and Lake Okanagan in Canada where they've, we've seen, um, Sauk returns up to eight hundred thousand adult Sauk returning past Bonneville. And just to think, that's just one lake and there's all these other blocked areas in the tributaries. And if today we could get back almost a million of just one stock. That, and a lot of that work was done, it was exhaustive estimate and they looked at a lot of the cannery. The records and what they were able to process. But I think there was more waste than there were fish actually processed. You see those old pictures where, you know, you have salmon four feet deep and they're just working those cannery lines.

• 18:02Speaker 07

  Well, when that obviously went bad, every day they'd just shove it out and bring in more. So there was.

• 18:09Steven Rinella?

  Cause you'd never run out.

• 18:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, that's the way it was viewed. And just kind of going back to what you, what we were talking about, the fifteen percent at every project. That's only the impact of what that dam itself causes, like fish going through the turbines or, you know, like in the spillway, they get disoriented and things like that. But that's not adding in all of the other factors that, that those dams create. The reservoirs and the slack water and the water quality and the predation and all those types of things. So the impacts are huge and you're right, you, you add it up, there shouldn't be any more fish left. It's just amazing that, that we still have fish coming back.

• 18:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I should clarify on that percentage. I was making a joke about fifteen times eight, but the, the estimate is seven to fifteen percent. So it's not all, you know, fifteen percent is the high end of what the estimated loss is.

• 18:59Speaker 06

  Just direct ram dam mortality, but that doesn't. Take into account this the slack water it creates, the habitat that creates for for paciforous predators to to eat the fish. They get disoriented when they go through the dam. Birds pick them off. So all of that predation part isn't part of that damn mortality. That's just the direct mortality from the dam. And and kind of quickly, I guess, historically by the numbers. It was right now. You've got a spring Chinook run, right? That's like eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand fish. And then it drops way off for the summers down to ten or twenty thousand. And then in the fall, that's the big run now, and it's gonna run a couple hundred thousand fish. You know, in in our really good years, half million or something.

• 19:44Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 19:45Speaker 06

  And historically, it was it was a big curve. It was a big mountain. That summer Chinook run that's so low. That was the peak.

• 19:53Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 19:54Speaker 06

  So Harvard, all of these impacts have split it into these three different groups of Chinook. And so you've got the fall Chinook, which seems like which is the biggest now, but historically that was the tail. You know, it was those summer run. And so they and and that's what they were going after. The early canneries and stuff was the the most abundant. You know, group. And so they they they made those big impacts on that. And that was the June hogs. That included all of the really big fish that went up, you know, into the lower Snake River, up in the upper Columbia. Though, you know, the fish that were one hundred and thirty, one hundred and forty pounds.

• 20:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man.

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Jeez. That's a big fish.

• 20:35Steven Rinella?

  Dude, it's like, yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, we catch those like eight, ten pounders in in southeast.

• 20:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, they gotta be twenty eight. Where we fish, they gotta be twenty eight inches. You're always like, sweet, he's twenty eight.

• 20:48Steven Rinella?

  And like you go into the bars, you know, you go into old bars, you know, and you always see these kings. You know, from whatever.

• 20:54Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 20:55Steven Rinella?

  Half century ago. And you're like, dude, are they, you know, are they there anymore? These hundred plus pound fish, but just like. There's not, and it's fewer and fewer and fewer and fewer.

• 21:08Speaker 06

  Fewer and fewer. We do, we do sampling at Bonneville Dam, so we, we sample all of the fish runs coming through Bonneville. And we'll get a, a text from, from, from the texts that are sampling. It's like, here's a really big one. And, and a big one now is, you know, sixty, seventy pounder.

• 21:25Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, those are pretty rare. And it used to not be, even, you know, mere thirty-five years ago when I started, it was, we'd get a lot more of those than we do now. So definitely the size of maturity or the size of the adult fish has gone down.

• 21:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. The largest I've caught was sixty-three pounds and that seemed like a monster.

• 21:47Speaker 06

  Well, that is a monster.

• 21:49Steven Rinella?

  How did you catch that?

• 21:50Speaker 07

  Um, gill netting.

• 21:51Steven Rinella?

  Gill netting?

• 21:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, in our fall fishery.

• 21:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:53Speaker 07

  But I had a, really had a aha moment back when, so I think I was eighteen as a technician working in the Metow River. We're doing, um, spring Chinook spawning ground surveys and it was getting later in the season. And so there was this, uh, portion of the main stem that would float on the, on the Metow River and there's, it runs into a wall. There's a big pool. And we floated our raft down and it was just, there was a group of probably about thirty big June hogs, summer Chinook. They were huge. Of course you get the magnification of the water, but they were still huge and we just floated around in there and watched them. They were just holding up, waiting to head up to spawn. But it's just so amazing to see those things. And you were talking about, um,

• 22:36Speaker 07

  how many miles inland? Also, when I worked up in the Metow, we're, I think I looked at it. I looked on the map to see, it was like eight hundred and forty miles or

• 22:46Steven Rinella?

  Well, they had come that far.

• 22:47Speaker 07

  In this little bitty, uh, tributary to the Metow where we were doing a spawning ground survey. And I was like, just like, cause we had to hike in and then walk down the creek is like, how did this fish even make it back here? It's amazing. And then we were walking down another section and there's portions that get dewatered in the fall. And we found a, a couple of spring Chinook in this pocket by this boulder. And so my coworker, he takes off one side. Of his hip waiter and then we fill it with water and put that fish in there and we just ran it like

• 23:21Speaker 07

  He was stranded, yeah.

• 23:22Steven Rinella?

  Cause pulling out, cause irrigation draw.

• 23:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we ran it back to so he could reconnect with the river. It's like you can't make it this far and not live.

• 23:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man, really?

• 23:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the, the things you run into being out there, it's just that, that's what really helps people's connection to understand and, you know, just thinking and realizing how much they've gone through to get back.

• 23:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

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• 24:20Steven Rinella?

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  Dot com slash Meat Eater and get an AG1 Pro Yeti Shaker in your AG1 Pro Welcome Kit. Again, that's drink AG1.com slash Meat Eater. Grab yours now. Timeout in the field is not free. Okay. Every time you go on the woods, there's a trade off happening. Like you leave work early, you miss your kid's game, whatever. You forego some family gathering. If that applies to you, what you gotta do is you gotta learn how to spend the right time out in the woods, the right time in the tree. An OnX Hunt's deer movement forecast tells you when deer are most likely to be on their feet based on real conditions. So you're not missing the kid's game or burning paid time off on a day that's not going to produce.

• 26:08Steven Rinella?

  The deer movement forecast means missing fewer of the moments that matter, whether in the stand or back at home. Try it today in OnX Hunt. Can you a little bit explain the process? Or I guess just the evolved thinking that led to the creation of a tribal organization that would get involved in fisheries management? I know like in some notes, Corinne had from pre-interviews, she talked about that there was a growing frustration that the states and the feds weren't moving the way, weren't moving this the way you wanted to move.

• 26:49Steven Rinella?

  And that the goal was set in a way that, that the tribes weren't comfortable with the goal. Like say, like basically the goal being, let's save the fish from genetic extinction.

• 27:01Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 27:02Steven Rinella?

  And, and that wasn't, that doesn't satisfy native peoples on the river.

• 27:07Speaker 07

  No, unfortunately, the, a lot of the fish are managed on ESA levels, right? That's holding things on the brink of extinction. And that's one of the issues with the ESA itself. Well, for one, it's not proactive and two, they have protections when things get really bad to save them from extinction, but there's nothing in the act that's binding. It's recommendations towards recovery.

• 27:34Speaker 07

  There's no requirements to recover a species. So it's just the minimal amount possible that you could do to keep this from this species from going extinct. And, you know, that that's not acceptable, you know, as a society, not just with tribes of allowing species to go extinct or, you know, we don't want museum relics that in the river that we look at, you know, we want to be able to enjoy the bounty and continue our way of life. Um, and, you know, kind of getting what we signed up for in the treaties and that's where the really, um, you know, sustainable, healthy and sustainable populations that we're able to to harvest. Because, you know, we've talked about treaty rights and our ability to harvest, but that's

• 28:19Speaker 07

  a shared right that we have with, you know, with the public, right? The the treaties, there's been two, two big court cases that kind of led to the formation of our organization and really the formation of the tribes taking a leading role. Um, first was, um, USP Oregon. And that was, um, really the tribes being established as a co-manager of the resource. So because it was a treaty right, so it's our, you know, we have the obligation to ensure that it persists for future generations. And then several years later, we had USP Washington that, um, made the determination

• 29:00Speaker 07

  that the tribes were, um, entitled to 50% of the the harvestable run, not just 50% of the total, the 50% of the harvestable run. And so we have the, um, you know, that unfortunately, you know, I've heard others, you know, um, what I've learned is unfortunately, we oper- operate in gavel to gavel fish management.

• 29:24Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 29:25Speaker 07

  Because you talk about gravel to gravel, like, right? You're inclusive of the entire life cycle, but unfortunately, we work in gavel to gavel because it's the-

• 29:33Steven Rinella?

  It's court ruling to court ruling.

• 29:35Speaker 07

  Yeah. And that's, um, um, I saw that you have a show out that talks about the recent litigation on the hydro operations of the, on the Snake River Dam. And that's kind of been pulled in really kind of- Unfortunately, it became just a breach campaign. But it's, to us, it's a lot more than that because with our, with our culture, everything, the importance, everything has a, a purpose, a place and a purpose. And so we really have that holistic management aspect. And, you know, we don't really have the silos that a lot of the state and federal agencies work, work under. That's why, you know, we have people that want to work for tribes that really care

• 30:18Speaker 07

  about, you know, the resource and things like that because everything that we do is so broad and, you know, like I'm wearing the sturgeon hat and, you know, like all species are important to us, not just the salmon, but sturgeon, lamprey, even, you know, trout and bridge lip suckers and all of those things that are a part of nature. But, you know, we hold all of those things sacred as our first foods. And so that's the way we, what we bring to the table in our management aspect because, you know, we're not about ESA level. We don't want museum relics. We want healthy and sustainable. And we would love more than to have, work ourselves out of a job.

• 31:02Speaker 07

  That's what I've heard one of my other bosses say.

• 31:07Speaker 07

  But just, you know, the tools that we have to work with along the way, like, you know, hatchery production. I know there's a big, a lot of issues between hatchery versus wild. And the tribes do do a lot of supplementation hatchery production, but we try to bring in non-conventional methods. It's not just fish factories pumping out numbers. We're, you know, using, we have a genetics lab, a state of the art genetics lab that we have in cooperation with the University of Idaho. That's located in southern Idaho in Hagerman. So we're kind of leading the way on the genetic side. And then also the way we implement our hatcheries is not just releasing them all directly from

• 31:49Speaker 07

  the hatchery, but taking them out to acclimation sites so they could return to areas that have suitable spawning habitat and things like that. And as Doug mentioned, we do all of the monitoring at Bonneville Dam of all the stocks that are coming through. So we're able to take that information and, which also aids in harvest management and...

• 32:10Speaker 07

  Just our, our work is so broad and diverse. We have um, uh, ocean, you know, estuary program that we've acquired about five years ago now. So we're really looking, you know, like I said, gravel to gravel in bringing in all aspects and um, you know, the, the tribes have um, I'd say we're a lot less uh, risk averse, I think, because we take that approach to, to be careful to do things. It's like, we don't wanna study things to death. You know, things get wrapped up in ten, ten plus year studies before you could actually even do anything. It's like, and you know, myself being the fish science manager, that, that was kinda,

• 32:56Speaker 07

  um, I kinda thought twice about taking this job. It's like, I don't wanna be just a research scientist, but the, the approach that the tribes have been taking is like, applied research. You're taking actionable measures and measuring the success of those actions. And, you know, you use what's working and advance that. And um, yeah, I think that's the, the biggest thing. And, you know, we've really grown a lot. Like I mentioned, those two court cases, USP Washington, USP Oregon, where, you know, the tribes sued the states over, over harvest and, you know, co-management and things like that. But we've uh, came a lot, a long ways in even just recently, um,

• 33:39Speaker 07

  during that um, litigation on the Snake River, the, the hydro operations litigation and formed the six sovereigns. That's with our four tribes and the states of Washington and Oregon and come together. And that's how we entered into a stay in litigation. It was meant to be a ten year stay with a, a set of commitments um, over the first five years. Then there was a check in and then it could have rolled over to another five years. And we were just getting started rolling in that. And it was bringing commitments to the basin and um, also giving us a voice to look for um, appropriations. It's not like we weren't trying to

• 34:20Speaker 07

  Upend energy prices or anything like that. It's just like, okay, can you pay the true cost of the cheap electricity that you're benefiting from? And it's not really grandma's electricity or the common person. It's corporate, right? It's industrial customers that have really the huge benefit of our cheap power in the region. And that's why, like, we're talking about fish in the Columbia Basin, but really, it's a global, a global thing, right? Because of all of the industry that our, our region attracts because of the cheap power, like, back in the eighties and whatnot, we had the, all of the big aluminum smelters,

• 35:01Speaker 07

  where we have none of the natural resources to, to make aluminum, but they were all there because it was so cheap to process because of that, that cheap power. And then now we're seeing the new onslaught of that is data centers. We have data centers a lot.

• 35:17Steven Rinella?

  Wanting that electricity.

• 35:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, and, and water. That's, that's the bad thing is like, there's always extraction. And then we're already, like, operating in a deficit, but yet we're planning for a future that we don't even have the resources for. And that's why the tribes really bring that to the table of, like, who's looking out for the resource and what's best for the environment? And that's why we talk about salmon being a keystone species, because it's, it's good for everyone. What's, what's good for the salmon is good for the environment and for the people and us looking out for that in that holistic manner.

• 35:54Steven Rinella?

  I got three observations I want to hit you with. One is, you don't need to take this on, but you know, like, people like to look at sort of singular things that had global impacts. And there's this argument that the reason we won World War II is because the dams on the Columbia system, because we could out, we could produce aircraft. We had enough power to, to smelt enough aluminum and we out-aircraft the Germans. And so, you know, whether that's true or not, it always, like, sticks in my head, like, thinking about what a mistake those, ultimately what a mistake those dams were. And I think about that question and it always, like, it's just a complication in there.

• 36:39Steven Rinella?

  We had on, second observation is we had on RFK Junior when he was running for president in.

• 36:48Steven Rinella?

  He went and took over Health and Human Services under the Trump administration. But when he was, he was on, he was talking about his career and litigate, environmental litigation. And he said, when you look at these big, these big corporations,

• 37:04Steven Rinella?

  and they think that there are these like free enterprise organizations, he says, they never, ever pay the cost.

• 37:16Steven Rinella?

  They don't acknowledge that they don't pay the cost. But in, in May, in producing that electricity or producing those metals, they never had to account to the American people of what they took from you to make those things. Like, no one's ever billed them

• 37:34Steven Rinella?

  for the cost of an annual run of 12 million salmon. No one's paid that. You know, he's like, he's like, they don't admit it, but they're subsidized. They're subsidized by what they take from everybody in terms of fish or in terms of anything, clean water. Like, has anyone ever billed them for?

• 37:54Steven Rinella?

  Do you know what I mean? Has anyone billed them for what their clean water should be worth? They'll, they'll never pay that shit.

• 37:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, we have mitigation goals of the impacts of the hydro system that have never been met. Fifty, sixty years, and they've never met them by millions. I think we're barely even at half of what we should have been getting sixty years ago. Imagine how much that would add up to what the tab is. The, the, the way that gets wiped clean is they're working toward interim goals. Fifty years later, we're still just working towards interim goals. And even today, the interim goals that we're working towards, towards restoration that we actually have the teeth to push on is five to eight million. And that was determined by the Northwest Power and Planning Council

• 38:41Speaker 07

  of that is the direct impacts of this hydro system is the five to eight million. And then that's when you, then the, the other, the other losses are due to like irrigation and the tributaries and other types of urbanization and things like that. So we're, we'll never get, fully get back what we had, but you know, I know we could do better. Because, and a lot of that too is just, um. People's resistance to change and you know that that's the way we've always done things and the status quo continues and until they I don't know it's hard and like you said you will never get back um we don't pay the truth cost for power and a lot of

• 39:25Speaker 07

  this stuff is for export foreign companies that come in and exploit our resources and you still have communities that you know they were promised jobs but that's only during the construction and what's ongoing is minimal like even with uh Google and the city of the Dalles um you know they came in and updated their um their waste waste treatment plant but then they built a data center and then two more data centers and now they're overwhelming that infrastructure that they promised and they were taking groundwater um and so they have communities um just south of town that are coming up with dry wells

• 40:06Speaker 07

  and things like that and now they want to buy land in um in the national forest to be able to um like create a reservoir to extract more water.

• 40:16Steven Rinella?

  And then like Sam Altman and Elon Musk they'll never they'll you know he'll emerge as the world's first trillionaire and there will never be a reckoning there will never be a reckoning for the cost of what they did never.

• 40:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was funny. We applied for a grant from Google because they have this. They want to be green by 2030 or something and then we have a a Delta project where the Clickitat River comes into the Columbia that needs some major work. It's never had any maintenance like you could practically walk halfway across the Columbia because that sandbar is so big because you don't have the fresh it's that that flush it out and that's one of our big issues that that we'll work on. It's predation hotspots and warm water and things like that but we applied for that Google grant. It's just downstream just across the river. We didn't even make it past the pre-proposal phase and when we asked why like why wouldn't this qualify it has good merit and everything they gave

• 41:15Speaker 07

  us AI response.

• 41:17Steven Rinella?

  Oh, man.

• 41:18Speaker 07

  It's just generic.

• 41:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so you paid for your own response.

• 41:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:25Steven Rinella?

  I I want to get in like.

• 41:30Steven Rinella?

  One of the things that I want to talk about, we want to talk about is like, what can like, what are things that can be done, you know, and I want to get into that like, like sea lions and all that, but there's, there's a thing I want to, there's a third thing I wanted to bring up and I'm almost, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but all these guys here can vouch for me on this. It's like, I was raised in the Great Lakes. Okay. And I was raised to know that like, the real villains in fisheries management, it's always the natives. Cause people can't reconcile. They're like, they're like, how could it be that they're conducting commercial fishing? You know? So they run like, in the Great Lakes, natives will run fish traps for white fish, which white people don't, I mean, like, generally

• 42:15Steven Rinella?

  speaking, white people don't fish white fish. Generally, some do, but it's not like a top tier fish. People don't travel like, to go there to fish white fish. People want the non-native shut or like, like large miles of native fish, all the salmon, introduced salmon, but you'll go and be like, the reason you didn't catch anything today is because of natives. Right? And you'll hear it so much from guys in the Pacific Northwest, where they'll be like, you mentioned earlier, having a gill net. They'll be like, that's the problem with the fishery. And it's like, but, but that's what you're, you're raised to believe that because it's always like a blame game. And you look at, but Bahamut,

• 42:55Steven Rinella?

  they fished here for 20,000, 10,000, 16, like thousands of years, supported the people on the fishery. Then European culture, like Euro-American culture came in and destroyed the fishery, the things we did destroyed the fishery. But now you look and there's some native people catching some fish in a net and that's who's like, that's who's to blame. It's pervade. I don't even know if you realize how pervasive that thinking is. Cause it's like, they can't click like, how could they be commercial fishing? When I can only keep one fish, or I can't keep any fish, but they can commercial fish. That's who killed all the fish. It's, it's out there. Like that perspective is just out there.

• 43:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I've, I've lived it. You know, like, growing up, fishing on the Columbia, you do get a lot of, a lot of hate. People come out and yell at you and, and things like that. And we've been shot at. At night, in the dark, we were out and I called the cops. The cops didn't even show up. You could see the muzzle flash. It sounded like a, a 22 and we were like, what the heck? We're, good thing we were ways from shore in that kind of, like a bay area and the 911 operator. Well, can you see what they're wearing? And I'm like, no, it's dark. I see a muzzle flash and, well, can you let us know? And it's like, we got down and had to drive out of there. And another time I always remember there was a, a older gentleman. He followed us because, you know, we're tied off of the bank.

• 44:26Speaker 07

  It was two and a half hours. He stood on the shore and yelled and cussed at us. Like, I called the cops, like, I think you might need to, I don't want this guy to have a heart attack.

• 44:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 07

  That's how worked up he was and, you know, like chucking rocks at us and things like that.

• 44:42Steven Rinella?

  Because people can't picture the long history. They, they, they like, they look through the dam. They look through the dam or past the dam and they see you. And that's the problem. Do you know what I mean? They're like, they can't picture what happened.

• 44:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 44:59Steven Rinella?

  You know?

• 45:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, I guess we're so visible, right? There's, there's plenty of non-native gill net fisheries that are happening in the lower river and a lot in the ocean. But it's just, we're visible and that's.

• 45:13Steven Rinella?

  Like, if it wasn't for that little handful of fish, everything would be better. It's like, no, dude. It wouldn't be better. The, the, you're not talking about the problem. You don't want to talk about the real problem.

• 45:23Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 45:24Steven Rinella?

  You don't want to talk about the real problem.

• 45:26Speaker 07

  Yeah, the, the glass half full thing is, I think it's awesome that people are starting to realize, like, you know, the work that we do, it benefits everybody, not just the tribes. It's everybody. And so, like, I've been at places like, um, um, like a trade show or whatever. And then, you know, somebody will come up, look at my tag like, I want to shake your hand. You know, they're, you know, part of the. They're a fishing guide or something like that and they'll say, "We wouldn't have salmon if it weren't for the Indians." And, you know.

• 45:56Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so people do see that connection.

• 45:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, a little bit of that. So they're, you know, we're starting to realize it and, you know, just the outreach and the partnerships that we have and that the benefits that we bring is for all and not just us.

• 46:10Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Speaker 07

  So.

• 46:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's crazy. I mean, we have commissioners that had spent time in federal prison for fishing, exercising their right to, their treaty reserved right to fish and they were arrested, sentenced, spent time in prison for, for fishing. So it's, it's a crazy deal. I'm from Idaho. I, I saw this, the same thing you're talking about, Steve, uh, with the salmon, uh, what happened in, in the salmon fisheries in the Columbia. But, you know, that led to those court decisions and then that formed, uh, you know, out of that, that, that tribal co-management, that formed the Columbia River Intertribal Fish

• 46:53Speaker 06

  Commission in 1977. And so this, the tribe started building staff from then. And now we're like at 150 to 170 people at Critvic in Portland. Each of the four member tribes, the, the, the Akama, Warm Springs, Umatilla, and Nez Perce, combined, we have like 750 people working on fish recovery. And I think that's where we get our, the tribes get their power, is that their co-managers and they get that a singular focus on, it's the Fish Commission, right? It's not the, it's not the Fish and Irrigation Commission. It's not, we don't have the things that the, the states are, you know, they've got to look after all

• 47:37Speaker 06

  these other interests and this is singularly focused on, on fish recovery. So we're not...

• 47:44Speaker 06

  What we want to do will will provide more fish to our constituents, our, you know, the tribal fishermen that are out there exercising their tree, right? And they're entitled to half of that harvestable fish.

• 47:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  And however they take them, they they decide how they're going to take them. You know, states decide how much they're going to split their 50% into sport fishing versus commercial fishing, however they want to divide it. And the tribes don't, you know, they're party to that, but they don't tell the states how they're going to allocate their fisheries. And, you know, it kind of should go the same way for the tribes. This is this is a big conservation effort, and they run hatcheries, about 10 hatcheries that are run by the tribes to get the money for it. And they don't catch all those fish. I mean, those fish are going out to the public.

• 48:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:37Speaker 06

  Everybody's catching them from here to to the Gulf of Alaska.

• 48:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 48:43Speaker 07

  And we're we're kind of the end users on some of that. There's some stocks of fish, like the clickatat, the majority of those are caught in in Alaska and by, you know, the the other ocean fisheries along the west coast. And, you know, we have a pie chart, and then it shows all of the take. And the tribal harvest is just this little bitty sliver.

• 49:04Steven Rinella?

  But that's the people putting them in.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 49:05Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:06Speaker 07

  And doing all the work to the habitat restoration, because the work that we do goes beyond just fish. And that's what, you know, like, being in management now of like, getting people to understand, like, the the things that we do, like, you know, energy production is fish issues because of the the hydro system and habitat restoration and even roads. Like, we have our habitat staff that they've worked with the DOT to, like, move a move a highway and and, you know, putting in better fish passage and just, you know, reconnecting rivers, which helps, you know, floods and flood management, flood risk. And and then also, especially in the face of climate change and how things are changing,

• 49:49Speaker 07

  like you were just talking about the weather here, you know, we're seeing that we're, you know, potentially in our three years of drought, and this year isn't isn't looking much better. And so it we we had definitely have our work cut out for us, and it goes a long ways. And

• 50:07Speaker 07

  Like Doug was saying about how the tribes choose to allocate, the other thing that our jobs are so great to me and why it means so much is on the the cultural side. You know, how much that that these things are natural resources and salmon, we refer to ourselves as salmon people. You know, and it it's cultural preservation. And that that's really what, because I I grew up in a traditional home with, you know, like my my mother and my grandparents and practicing our, you know, hunting, fishing, gathering and, you know, our our tribal religion and all of the things that go along with that, all of our ceremonies

• 50:48Speaker 07

  are are centered around our natural resources around the salmon and and things like that. And, you know, sadly, we're losing that. And then that's how, you know, people get led astray, you know, you have, you know, the the effects of drugs and alcohol and stuff. But if we really had those things that for us to be able to continue, I I think would be better off. And, well, I know we would. Because, you know, living in those communities and it's it's like we're lost, we're still lost because we were displaced by the construction of the dams on the river. We weren't relocated or subsidized or anything. It's just

• 51:28Speaker 07

  they came and spray painted on the on the houses like at Salilo Falls, took inventory and that was it. We've never, we've never received our Columbia River housing in, you know, for the villages that were flooded. It's just like, your house is gone.

• 51:45Steven Rinella?

  They painted the ones that were going to be underwater.

• 51:47Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Yeah, just took inventory and then people had no choice but to to move to the reservation.

• 51:54Steven Rinella?

  Or drown.

• 51:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's funny, even me realizing that now, like, you know, I was born on the reservation in Toponish and I lived at my grandparents' house, but I was even as just as an adult, a couple of years ago, I realized like, that wasn't my grandpa's home. My grandpa was born, born and raised in at Salilo. And he went to the war. It's so funny, like. Um, my, my grandpa's older sister, she used to tell us this story and even as an older lady, she would cry about it, still gets to me. She, she was born with cataracts, so she was legally blind. And so she couldn't help do all the, the work, so she took care of my grandpa.

• 52:38Speaker 07

  And she said, one day, uh, Salilo, um, the government, the military, police, everything, they just pulled in with cattle trucks. And they took the children by force and took them to a boarding school. And she said, people were beaten, arrested. And she said that she held on to him and was dragged across the ground crying, no, don't take him, he's just a baby. And, um, she, she cried as an, as, as an adult that she said, if I could have just held him a little longer, maybe they would have gave up.

• 53:12Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm. But. Then he went on to fight in the war?

• 53:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, he was four years old, taken to, um, the boarding school in Warm Springs, Oregon. He didn't get to come home for two years. And, and that was only because they were moving them to, um, the boarding school at Fort Simcoe, which is on the Yakima Reservation.

• 53:34Steven Rinella?

  Uh huh.

• 53:35Speaker 07

  And then he was there through like elementary school and then he got shipped to Chumawa, which is in Oregon, that's a, a high school, you know, boarding school, high school. He graduated from there when he was 17. And then he enlisted in the Navy and fought in World War II.

• 53:51Steven Rinella?

  You kidding me?

• 53:52Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 53:53Steven Rinella?

  And his home now sits underwater?

• 53:55Speaker 07

  That's the home that he came back to from the war.

• 53:58Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 53:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

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• 55:46Steven Rinella?

  You know, when I was talking about the conflict between like, white dudes that fish and the perspective that native peoples are taking fish. It's like everybody's fighting over crumbs. In some regions, everybody's fighting over crumbs. And they don't even know what happened, like if it's breadcrumbs, they don't know what happened to the loaf of bread. There's, you know what I mean? It's just gone and now they're just gonna like, fight for crumbs. And one of the ways that that like fighting for crumbs, and it's, I guess it's important because if, once those crumbs are gone, everything's gone, you know? To think of it like in terms of fish, right? If they, if we lose the fish, if you lose all the memory of the fish and all the runs

• 56:28Steven Rinella?

  and all the historic areas, it's less that you can build up someday when you get it back together. But what turned me on to even wanting to talk to you guys is this idea, and Heather, my friend Heather DuVille sent me some links about it, was, was like, the sea lion issue.

• 56:45Steven Rinella?

  And I want to talk about that for a minute, or have you guys explain the sea lion issue for a minute? Just to sort of demonstrate this idea of that to fix the problem is like impossible or seemingly impossible. Dam removal is so hard. And so you gotta look like, well, that's what would like, there's these huge things that would occur and you could slowly rebuild the whole thing, but in the meantime, you gotta like fight for crumbs. And it's even gotten to what we're fighting for crumbs with with sea lions. Can you talk about that, that issue a bit, like how sea lions play into this thing?

• 57:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. So, um, sea lions were were heavily managed in the late 1800s. And then from like 1915 or so to 1970 into Columbia, there's bounty on sea lions.

• 57:38Steven Rinella?

  Bounty?

• 57:38Speaker 06

  And a sea lion hunter. So the the Oregon Fish Commission hired a guy that would shoot sea lions and cut their ears off and then get paid by how many sea lions he took care of.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  And that was specifically to protect the salmon run?

• 57:52Speaker 06

  Protect the salmon. Exactly. So that was the management that went on and and in that era, the early 70s, when all of the environmental laws got passed, you know, you had the Environmental Protection Act, the Clean Air Act.

• 58:07Steven Rinella?

  Marine Mammal.

• 58:08Speaker 06

  Marine Mammal Protection Act is passed in 72 and marine mammals were in terrible shape. I mean, it was really necessary. Uh, California sea lions were around 20, 25,000 coast wide. So it's managed as a single stock. It it ranges from Baja, California up to, uh, lower B.C.

• 58:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 58:29Speaker 06

  And so, uh, that stock was 20 or 25,000 animals. Now there's close to 300,000 animals and it's at carrying capacity.

• 58:39Speaker 06

  So the Marine Mammal Protection Act protected marine mammals. If you were a marine mammal.

• 58:44Steven Rinella?

  In that case, very effectively, man.

• 58:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, and super successful, right?

• 58:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 58:48Speaker 06

  But what wasn't part of the, all in, in, you know, you had, uh, uh, sea otters, whales, all kind, polar bears, all kinds of things that are super depressed. And there wasn't any thought put into management. You know, it's like, we're gonna lose them. We need to protect them. And it worked really, really well on, on some populations like California sea lions. I mean, they're way past recovered. They're at carrying capacity. It's the classic S curve. It's plateaued. We're at, at carrying capacity for sea lions coast wide.

• 59:25Steven Rinella?

  Is there, is there any talk of delisting?

• 59:27Speaker 06

  Oh, they're not, that, well, see, it's different.

• 59:30Steven Rinella?

  Oh, because it's under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, not USA.

• 59:32Speaker 06

  Exactly. So if you're a marine mammal, you're protected. Period. With no, with no management. There's no management provision at all.

• 59:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. We've talked about this a bunch of times in different management things. We're talking about this here today. I can't remember what, in what context, but ways in which something gets so bad, you can't picture it getting better. And then you draft regulation, like, like the wild, I always point out the Wild Horse and Borough Protection Act. Things get so bad, you draft regulation because you can't picture,

• 1:00:05Steven Rinella?

  the future ramifications. And then you wind up laying, you're like, damn, man, we should have thought of that.

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like, it's like the sea otters up on POW that have exploded.

• 1:00:17Steven Rinella?

  People are like, well, they'll never be abundant. Why even make a provision for abundance?

• 1:00:21Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I mean, it's just hard to see over the horizon, right? I mean, you see what's there and it's like, it couldn't happen. It gives you hope though for salmon, right? Maybe, maybe we can do this. But then what happened.

• 1:00:32Steven Rinella?

  Good point, man.

• 1:00:33Speaker 06

  With the Ballard locks, uh, you know, the, the, the inlet or the outlet of Lake Washington, um, in the, in the eighties, all of a sudden sea lions started showing up at the Ballard locks there in Herschel. If you remember that, there's these particular. Uh, California sea lion started preying on this, the steelhead run going into the Ballard locks.

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  And Like they figured it out?

• 1:00:56Speaker 06

  They figured it out. Yeah. And you've got this growing population. They're expanding, right? To, to different places where they, where they really haven't been in, in years and years because there's no management. And, uh, they, they're decimating the, the winter steelhead run in, in Lake Washington. Well, that triggered legislation then to finally amend the marine animal protection act and, and they finally got that done in 94. And it was section 120 that they put into the act. So this was management. It's only on sea lions and it's that they have to be individually identifiable. They, and they have to be shown to have a significant negative impact on listed salmon populations.

• 1:01:41Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  And if you can meet that criteria, uh, and you have a permit, you can remove that sea lion.

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  So it was like, we know this one's a bad egg. We gotta get rid of him.

• 1:01:51Speaker 06

  Right. And how do you know?

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  How do you know what that sea lion is? Well, you gotta catch him and you gotta put a brand on him. And you gotta have an observer there that sees him eating a fish. Then you gotta get, then you gotta trap him again and euthanize him, you know? And so it's very tough. And that was, the 120 was not successful at the Ballard locks. The, the, the still population went extinct before, uh, really before the legislation was passed.

• 1:02:21Steven Rinella?

  Extinct.

• 1:02:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're gone. And so then Bonneville Dam.

• 1:02:27Steven Rinella?

  Like that run of fish is kaput.

• 1:02:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. It's gone. And now there's actually a current problem, another problem, which is sockeye run in Lake Washington. And it's going down that same, that same route. And, and the only thing to manage there is this section 120. So they would have to, to get, you know, uh, they'd have to submit an application to, to national marine fishery service to get a permit through this 120.

• 1:02:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And that's all to do with the Ballard locks.

• 1:02:54Speaker 06

  That's Ballard locks.

• 1:02:55Steven Rinella?

  Not even the Columbia system.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  That's not Columbia.

• 1:02:56Steven Rinella?

  Cause in the Columbia system, I don't know if this is true. I was reading that sea lions take more fish than humans.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  Where are they doing that? Cause I mean, they're not getting past dams.

• 1:03:11Speaker 06

  Right. So what happened in about 2000, uh, we started seeing sea lions at Bonneville Dam at the tail race of Bonneville Dam and it was just a few.

• 1:03:22Steven Rinella?

  And how far up the river is that?

• 1:03:23Speaker 06

  Hundred and forty-five miles.

• 1:03:25Steven Rinella?

  Wow. Those sons of bitches swim that far out of the ocean?

• 1:03:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I've got all kinds of stories. We've tracked, we've radio tracked them and they will, they'll go back to Astoria and back upstream two or three times in a year. It takes them just a couple of days.

• 1:03:39Steven Rinella?

  Jeez. Are you serious?

• 1:03:41Speaker 06

  They're, they are, they're, they're pretty remarkable animals.

• 1:03:45Steven Rinella?

  Hundred and forty miles up the river?

• 1:03:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Steven Rinella?

  Dude ain't a lick of salt.

• 1:03:49Speaker 06

  Yeah. No, no. Well, then this problem, once these animals saw, hey, this is, this is the buffet, right? Cause you've got this concentration of fish at the tail race. They're trying to find the sea ladder or the fish ladder entrances. And so they're congregating, you get a, a collection of fish and the sea lions find that. And it's like, this is great. They come back every year. They bring their buddies. They become habituated with it and they start taking out a, a, you know, a whole bunch of fish. So then the Corps of Engineers who runs the dam.

• 1:04:24Steven Rinella?

  I gotta, I gotta back up on that. I do, cause

• 1:04:28Steven Rinella?

  you, this is an unanswerable question.

• 1:04:31Steven Rinella?

  A sea lion, like, a sea lion goes way the hell up the river. Like a pioneer sea lion. Cause way up the river, he's like, holy smokes, this is the promised land. Right?

• 1:04:43Steven Rinella?

  And he goes back down at some point. No one will know, no one can answer this. How, how is it conveyed? Like, how does it convey to another sea lion?

• 1:04:56Steven Rinella?

  Could it be?

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  Like wherever Billy was, he's looking good.

• 1:04:59Steven Rinella?

  Like honeybees have that deal, honeybees have that deal where they come back and they have, uh, they have like a, a thing they do. People call it a dance and they don't, you know, they don't perceive it as a dance, I'm sure. But honeybees come back and they, they have a movement pattern that says, I'm into it. Heavy duty piling that way.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  Couldn't it just be like a? Generation, like it's like generational learning, like offspring.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, you bring your mate. Then you bring your offspring.

• 1:05:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, cuz your mate's like, what are they doing? I can follow them. Yeah, just like it's so hard to like imagine by the mechanism by which. You come back and then there's more, but yeah, like you just bring your offspring, then some generations down the road. Everybody knows.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  Well, these, these sea lions that go to Bonneville Dam are like the biggest sea lions that, that have been recorded. So a California sea lion and, and it's only males. So the biology of it is the females stay. They stay down in the rookeries that are mainly in the, in the Channel Islands in California, so you know, off Santa Barbara. So that's where the females stay and they don't venture out of there. They stay very close to those islands.

• 1:06:13Steven Rinella?

  The, the, the, the males that are going a hundred and forty miles up the Columbia are breeding with females in the Channel Islands.

• 1:06:19Speaker 06

  Amazing, huh?

• 1:06:22Speaker 05

  So what it is, is it's like me telling, I found this really good hunting spot. You wanna come and check it out with me?

• 1:06:28Steven Rinella?

  You can't, but you can't talk though.

• 1:06:30Speaker 05

  But obviously they talk.

• 1:06:34Speaker 06

  So there's photos of them at the rookeries, like on San McGill Island where it, there's a, a male sea lion, male sea lion, and then all of a sudden there's this gigantic male sea lion. Oh, the brand on him, he was at Bonneville.

• 1:06:47Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:06:48Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. We have animals that we had captured, branded, and then recaptured two months. I think it was two months later, a month and a half later, and it gained four hundred pounds.

• 1:06:59Speaker 05

  Whoa, that's a lot of salmon.

• 1:07:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a lot of fish. And, and they do have, so this is the spring of the year, Colum- or California sea lions arrive at Bonneville early April, and then by the end of May, they leave and they go, because then it's, it's time to go to the breeding grounds. So they leave the system and the stellar sea lions that are there now, which is a newer story, they also leave the system by the, by the end of May. And then the California sea lions show up back up the next, the next April.

• 1:07:28Steven Rinella?

  Okay, what are they, what are they feeding on specifically when they get there, that time of year?

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  At Bonneville, spring Chinook.

• 1:07:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, spring Chinook is the big, that's the big one. Uh, and a little bit of, there's probably some steelhead around as well, but it's primarily, uh, primarily spring Chinook. They also eat sturgeon, um, that lower, the Columbia River, the lower Columbia sturgeon population has really gone down. And a lot of those would come up and a big congregating area would be the tail race of Bonneville. And they just got decimated by sea lions.

• 1:08:01Speaker 05

  So they don't.

• 1:08:02Steven Rinella?

  Oh, no, no.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  This is like a two-part question. Those sea lions don't have any impact on like non-native game fish that are in there now, like walleye and smallmouth. And then what kind of impact are the walleye and smallmouth bass having on salmon as well?

• 1:08:20Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, uh,

• 1:08:23Speaker 06

  they're opportunistic feeders, right? So whatever's the most abundant, that's what they're gonna eat. And a sea lion that's at the ocean is gonna have a really diverse diet. And then the further up river they go, the more salmon centric their, their diet is. And when they get to Bonneville, it's, they're eating, depending on time, they're eating salmon, steelhead primarily. They're eating sturgeon now and then, and then they're eating some lamprey as well. And that's really it. We, we see a few other things. You'll see sucker, maybe an occasional walleye or whatever, but.

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  Do you, do you guys view that like walleye and smallmouth as a big problem for salmon? Or is it more like larger predators like sea lions?

• 1:09:05Speaker 06

  Walleye and smallmouth are a problem for sure. And it's probably a bigger problem upstream of Bonneville.

• 1:09:12Speaker 07

  In the reservoirs.

• 1:09:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. You know, the, the thing with the, the sea lion issue that I hadn't really put, thought of before, but I mean, that's almost, that's almost a dam. Problem. Like the dam is creating the fishery for the sea lions.

• 1:09:28Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:09:29Steven Rinella?

  Cause it's creating a holding pen for them where they can't get passed.

• 1:09:32Speaker 06

  Right, right. And, and like you brought up Lewis and Clark, when they went through Salilo, they, they talk about seen Foca. Well, they'd never seen a sea lion. So they thought it was a seal. That was what they called seals.

• 1:09:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so they were run, okay, they ran into him way up the hill.

• 1:09:46Speaker 06

  So they ran into him there and they were there in October, right? Late September, early October at, at Salilo. And, uh, they shot one, um, but they weren't, but they weren't able to collect it. So they were trying to, to document it and stuff, but.

• 1:10:02Steven Rinella?

  So they had historically used the resource.

• 1:10:04Speaker 06

  Yeah. So our tribal members are certain that they came up there in the fishery. They took care of the, of the problem. The sea lions didn't stay long as a competitor there. Through the archaeological stuff that they've done, um, they do find sea lion bones, uh, but not in huge numbers. So they probably had hunts that would go down to get sea lions occasionally.

• 1:10:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:10:30Speaker 06

  Or trade or something, but there isn't, it isn't like salmon bones that you just see everywhere. So it wasn't a, you know, nowhere near as important as salmon or something like that.

• 1:10:41Speaker 05

  The competition factor would, when you've got 15 million salmon, like there's room for the sea lions to take.

• 1:10:47Speaker 06

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 1:10:48Speaker 05

  You know?

• 1:10:49Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:50Steven Rinella?

  You say the stellers are coming up there too. They're coming from the north.

• 1:10:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, so as, as the plot thickens and the story goes on by the states of Oregon and Washington put in for this 120 permit to remove animals at Bonneville.

• 1:11:04Steven Rinella?

  I bet the animal rights people love that shit.

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, it was a challenge. Yeah. And they got it. They got the permit in oh eight. Um, and that was after documenting the presence of these animals for a long time and their, how many animals are there? How many fish are they eating? How many days are they staying there? All of that stuff, all of that information was necessary to get the permit. As soon as they got the permit, then, uh, stellar sea, so they got a permit to remove California sea lions. And then two years later, stellar sea lions are in bigger numbers at Bonneville than California sea lions. And what had happened.

• 1:11:41Steven Rinella?

  Who's bigger out of a stellar?

• 1:11:42Speaker 06

  Stellers are gigantic. Stellar male, and again, it's males only, and they'll go, they'll go a ton.

• 1:11:48Speaker 05

  Can you, for people who don't know the difference, can you explain like where the stellers are coming from and versus the California ones?

• 1:11:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, so California sea lions range from British Columbia to southern part of Baja.

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  And the rookeries are primarily in Baja and along California. And then you got a couple of little places at California or along Oregon coast, but that's it. Stellar sea lions are more northern, so they will range down into California, but they'll go up into British Columbia, probably up into, into Alaska. And you have them.

• 1:12:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, southeast Alaska.

• 1:12:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you have them broke into two stocks. This is the eastern stock, which is like the 144th latitude. Anything that's east of the 144th degree latitude is the eastern stock of stellar sea lions, and those are the ones that we're getting at Bonneville. To the west of that are the ones that are up in, in southeast Alaska, off the Aleutians and, and then further up.

• 1:12:47Steven Rinella?

  So those dudes aren't calling all the way down to the Columbia?

• 1:12:49Speaker 06

  No, they're not, and they're not in very good shape. They're, they're listed, they're a listed species, those western stock. The eastern.

• 1:12:58Steven Rinella?

  Dude, I know a rock that would beg to differ.

• 1:13:00Speaker 06

  The eastern stock.

• 1:13:02Steven Rinella?

  I was just thinking of that rock.

• 1:13:04Speaker 06

  The eastern stock was listed as threatened and then were delisted by 2013, 2012, 2013.

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  So that was why they, you couldn't, even if, even if they'd have been showing up at Bonneville and it would have been on the permit, we never, the states never would have got a permit to remove them because they were listed. Now they're, now they're unlisted and they are part of the removal program now.

• 1:13:28Steven Rinella?

  I want to get to that program. I got one little technical question. You mentioned earlier catching them and branding them.

• 1:13:33Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:13:34Steven Rinella?

  Can you explain that catching them how and branding them how?

• 1:13:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, so the way we catch them is a trap that's a dock. It's like a sixteen by sixteen square foot dock with chain link fence around it. A big chain link fence and then like a gate that's on a guillotine type thing. And you can hold it up with an electronic device to trigger it so we can remotely drop that gate. You wait for sea lions to get on that trap.

• 1:14:03Steven Rinella?

  You baiting them or just letting them haul out?

• 1:14:04Speaker 06

  No, no, so they just haul out. So they they want a place to rest and so you're looking for places for them to haul out. And so that's the

• 1:14:11Steven Rinella?

  Live trapping them.

• 1:14:12Speaker 06

  That's part of the trip.

• 1:14:13Steven Rinella?

  Like a big old have a heart.

• 1:14:14Speaker 06

  Is you gotta you gotta set these traps where they've been hauling out where you think you can get them to to use. And then they get accustomed to it and they'll haul out and then you'll drop the drop the trap. And then we have a barge with these transfer cages. You go up against it against that trap, open the doors, run them into that transfer cage.

• 1:14:34Steven Rinella?

  He just pissed probably.

• 1:14:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, how do they react when you walk up to them?

• 1:14:38Speaker 06

  So stellar sea lions can be pretty ornery. They they don't, yeah, they don't take to it very well. Uh, California sea lions are pretty, pretty docile. They will, they'll move around. You could get in there with a piece of plywood in front and you could kind of hurt them. Uh, but nobody would do that with a stellar sea lion, right? They're they're big. I mean, it's a two thousand pound animal that's pissed. In fact, we're now we put these arrays. So we we take these sixteen by sixteen traps. We put three of them together. Uh, a couple of times we had single traps and you'd get three or four or five stellar sea lions in there. And then they'd start doing the WWF and they'd roll the trap over.

• 1:15:21Speaker 06

  So, yeah, they're they're big.

• 1:15:25Steven Rinella?

  And then you branding them with a cattle brand?

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Steven Rinella?

  What's the brand?

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Uh, so a ladder up there at sea and then a number. Uh, different locations, they, there's branding programs at different places. The states use, the state of Oregon used to brand at Astoria. So there's, there's animals from there. There's, you know, all these different places where studies have been done. They have kind of a coding system.

• 1:15:49Steven Rinella?

  Where do you hit them on the hip?

• 1:15:50Speaker 06

  Right on the back.

• 1:15:51Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:52Speaker 06

  Across the back.

• 1:15:54Speaker 05

  Huh. How long do they live? Like, are you seeing the same ones year after year after year after?

• 1:15:58Speaker 06

  Right, so adult, these are, these are mature adults that we see primarily. We do see occasionally a few smaller sea lions now, but, uh, they'll live. They can live, you know, like in captivity, they might live to be in their twenties, but they'll probably in the wild. Maybe fifteen.

• 1:16:17Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And how many, like, at peak spring Chinook run? How many are in that dam or at the foot of that dam? How many sea lions?

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  So from the observation program that the Corps of Engineers does, the highest, uh, observed consumption was ten thousand fish that they saw, that they documented being eaten there in a tail race. And

• 1:16:41Steven Rinella?

  What does that mean, over how much time?

• 1:16:43Speaker 06

  That's over the spring, so that's April through mid, mid May to late May.

• 1:16:47Steven Rinella?

  So they'll see ten thousand Chinook get eaten by sea lions?

• 1:16:49Speaker 06

  And that's cherry picking, that's the top, that's the top number, but that represented almost five percent of the spring Chinook run that was going over the dam.

• 1:16:59Steven Rinella?

  Okay, so you're losing five percent to sea lions?

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, that's within this quarter of a mile that you can see from the face of the dam and do the observations. Uh, National Marine Fisheries Service has done studies in the lower river where they put pit tags in them. So that's, you know, that's the way we track salmon in the Columbia. And it's basically the same thing that you get in your dog, uh, to, to track them. And there's a, a huge program in the Columbia where they, these pit tags go over antennas. It activates the antenna and records the number, so they're all individually numbered. So we know any, any salmon that we put a tag in, we know by, by individual. And at all of the dam ladders, like at Bonneville, we get, have pit tag detectors.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  So when they cross the dam, we, we know it. So they captured these by gill netting in the lower river down by Astoria, uh, National Marine Fisheries Service would capture these fish, put pit tags in them, this was spring Chinook, and then release those fish. It also took genetic samples. And with the genetic samples, we could figure out what their origin was. So you could subtract off any fish that were going to lower river tributaries. Also, harvest is highly regulated, and we know what the harvest estimates are for each week. So subtract off harvest, and then you have the number of fish that you tagged that should go over Bonneville. And in the biggest year, which was 2015, the biggest loss, 50% of the spring Chinook

• 1:18:30Speaker 06

  run was lost between Astoria and Bonneville. And that's peer-reviewed publication, 50% attributed to sea lions. And so we had a 200,000 fish were eaten by sea lions, 200,000 fish crossed Bonneville. And that's the largest spring Chinook run we've seen in decades.

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• 1:19:23Steven Rinella?

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• 1:20:51Speaker 05

  Going back to what Steve said, how many sea lions are consuming 200,000 salmon?

• 1:21:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 1:21:04Steven Rinella?

  You can ballpark it.

• 1:21:05Speaker 06

  It's not that many.

• 1:21:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:21:07Speaker 06

  You know, that are at Bonneville. It's like, I think a couple of years, we've maybe seen 200, a little over 200 individuals.

• 1:21:16Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:21:16Speaker 06

  So it isn't huge. And, and the animals that have been from the, this group of branded animals, there's a big haul outside at Astoria called the East Moring Basin. And we'll sight animals there. And then the ones that you'll see at Bonneville or at Willamette Falls, another place where, where they congregate, similar situation with sea lions. It's only about 7% of that branded population go that far up. But that seven come back every year, just like you're talking about. They habituate.

• 1:21:47Steven Rinella?

  They're as faithful as the salmon, man.

• 1:21:48Speaker 06

  Yeah. Once they've locked into it, they come back. And we'll see them multiple years, three, four, five years.

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  But, so the tribal rights.

• 1:21:59Speaker 05

  Because it seems like sometimes they can trump other laws and rules and regs. But I'm guessing that doesn't work in this case to trump the Marine uh protect Mammal Protection Act.

• 1:22:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, because of the act and that's what I've been talking about is like.

• 1:22:15Steven Rinella?

  You guys don't have harvest rights on sea lions.

• 1:22:17Speaker 07

  No, because historically they didn't come back in those those numbers and they're not coming above Bonneville. Well, we have a few that come above Bonneville Dam that where where our our gill net fisheries are only above Bonneville Dam in the Zone Six fishing area and so we don't we don't harvest them. They like the big numbers are the lower river and how you said the sea lions are a damn problem. Well, it goes beyond just the damn problem when they're using that entire stretch of the lower river from Astoria. One year at Astoria, what he was talking about that East Moring Basin, I think there were, was it 10,000? 8,000?

• 1:22:58Speaker 06

  Uh it was right around 4,000. Yeah, at the East Moring Basin, in the East Moring Basin, it's not very big. You know, it went from the early 2000s, there would be a couple of hundred a year and they'd do counts every day on these and they'd haul out on the docks. The East Moring Basin is not used anymore. Used to be commercial vessels there as well as recreational and it was taken over by sea lions, basically.

• 1:23:23Steven Rinella?

  Well, I think what I think, but I think what Yanni is asking is like, picture that, like, for instance.

• 1:23:32Steven Rinella?

  I have more familiarity with regulatory structure in Alaska, but but there are cases where you have NOAA

• 1:23:41Steven Rinella?

  administered species, you have like US and Fish and Wildlife Service administered species, whatever, but you have like tribal harvest rights. Where where like, you know, they can harvest um they they can harvest walrus, they can harvest whale species, right? The things that would be off to often as everybody else. If if you're if the intertribal group on the Columbia, like if you wanted to, you wouldn't have the authority of just saying, we're gonna do sea lion control on our own.

• 1:24:17Steven Rinella?

  Because we're not beholden to, we're not beholden to ESA, we're not beholden to Marine Mammal Protection Act. Like, you don't have that ability, that, you don't have that legal ability, just to take it into your own hands.

• 1:24:29Speaker 07

  Yeah, we actually have, I know Yakma has written their own resolution, right? Which is a tribal law that, the taking of sea lions to protect life and property. And it was funny, I actually ended up in that situation where I fish by the city of the Dalles. There was an animal, there was a boat basin, right? Where people have houseboats and whatnot. Well, there was one that was actually living on a dock in there. And those people were feeding it, it was there for a couple of years. Right, it wouldn't leave and it was, I'd be running my nets and it would be swimming back and forth right next to me. And, you know, they had passed that resolution and my supervisor at the time was like, you could shoot it. And I was like, yeah, that would be real good optics, Yakma Nation Fish Biologist.

• 1:25:11Speaker 07

  And I don't want to end up in court for the next 10 years. I didn't want to be the test case on it, but in hindsight, maybe I should have.

• 1:25:19Steven Rinella?

  Like, you could have.

• 1:25:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, I could have, but that, those types of things are happening. But like I said, the animals aren't up where we gill net. They're down below, so it would be hard for us to, and we still have those laws in place. But, you know, and a lot of it is just being good co-managers, right? We don't want to, you know, we want to work together with.

• 1:25:39Steven Rinella?

  You don't want to go rogue and on that kind of thing.

• 1:25:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, because there's so many other issues, like we talk about death by a thousand cuts, right? This predation, the sea lion is a huge impact, but there's tons of other things that we work together on.

• 1:25:53Steven Rinella?

  No, I got you.

• 1:25:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so we're just pushing.

• 1:25:55Steven Rinella?

  If you make too much smoke around the sea lion issue and you, and you create like a bad optic situation, it could impact you addressing all of the other issues that are making the problem.

• 1:26:05Speaker 07

  And funding as well, just because you get the permit, doesn't mean that you, you're getting any funding. That comes from appropriations and things like that. And so this, the program that we have, like how Doug's explaining the trapping, and it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian and things like that. So it's really inefficient, like, um, because there's, um, that's in the act, right? That it has to be chemically euthanized by a licensed veterinarian. Like, it would be so much easier if you had it and you could just shoot it. You know, that's humane as well, like, rather than dragging them through all of that.

• 1:26:47Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:26:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, like torture before leading them to their death. And, you know, it's really inefficient, the, the, the laws that are put upon us to be able to, to do this work, like, we could be doing a lot more, like, darting. You could dart to euthanize, but then you have to be able to recover the animal as well. So it's, like, you have no choice but to trap. And, you know, like you said, you see the same animals. And as I was mentioning too, like, it's not just a damn problem anymore. That's why I brought up how many come to the mouth at Astoria. There's thousands there, but they're, they're learning traits, like, um, when we have smelt runs returning, when we have sizable smelt runs coming up.

• 1:27:31Speaker 07

  And, you know, historically, they were in the lower tributaries and a lot come back to the Cowlets River. Well, the sea lions follow the smelt up to the Cowlets River and there'll be hundreds, like, five hundred plus sea lions at the mouth of the Cowlets, feeding on the smelt, which are also threatened as well. And, um, there was-

• 1:27:52Steven Rinella?

  So they'll narrow down on something that small? I didn't know that.

• 1:27:54Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm, and so they follow up the smelt, they hang around there. When the smelt run trickles off, then they can move upstream, like, to the Lewis River and eat, um, you know, juvenile salmonids, leaving the system. And then by then, it's time to head up to Bonneville because you have Spring Schnook coming. So they're exploiting that whole stretch of the lower river. And the, the, the removal program starts at the I two oh five bridge up to McNary Dam. So it's really site-specific. We don't have the ability or the flexibility to address to these changing needs. For one, we don't have funding, it's largely underfunded. There's so much red tape in how you do things.

• 1:28:37Speaker 07

  It's inefficient and we don't have the ability to react and take action where it's necessary, like Doug said about that, that steelhead population in Ballard Locks going extinct, you know, the same thing could happen with their sockeye, same thing could happen with ours and there's no hierarchy, there's no act amongst the act about how the MMPA plays into the ESA and another whole can of worms is the migratory bird treaty act, right? You have huge avian impacts of gulls and things like that that are eating like up to seventy percent of juveniles, steelhead leaving the system.

• 1:29:15Steven Rinella?

  Are getting eaten by gulls.

• 1:29:17Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:29:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, gulls, cormorants.

• 1:29:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, and then now we have pelicans too that are feeding on adult sockeye. Like I mentioned, that year that we had the eight hundred thousand returning past Bonneville, the majority going to Lake Okanagan, half of them died because that year there was also a heat dome, warm lethal temperatures, there were swimming zombies and pelicans just eating them like crazy. We have pelicans that are resident in, in the Columbia there. It's like a couple thousand breeding pairs, right? It's, it's a ton. They don't leave the system anymore.

• 1:29:57Steven Rinella?

  And you can't just go out and start doing control measures, I know. Like I guess cormorants were delisted, at least some of them.

• 1:30:03Speaker 06

  They're, they're all protected.

• 1:30:05Speaker 07

  They're all protected under the migratory.

• 1:30:06Speaker 06

  Migratory bird act.

• 1:30:07Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but they, but there's places where they're doing cormorant, like they're squishing the nests and shit, you know?

• 1:30:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, true.

• 1:30:13Speaker 07

  It takes so much to get that, to that, like you wouldn't even think the seagulls you see everywhere at dumps and at places eating french fries, right? How protected they are, there's a, uh, rocks like by island in the, the mid Columbia, right? It's called Miller Island and it's just the outcropping of rocks where there's this gull colony that I think it was like, they were attributed to eat, eating mid Columbia steelhead, thirty-one percent of the juveniles out migrating from that one colony and we're still working in that process. Like you have to do so much effort of non lethal hazing. Where we're using like boom cannons and and the next year we used a falcon and then.

• 1:30:58Speaker 07

  Finally, we were able to do some lethal take and able to oil like some eggs and things like that. But when you do those things, you're just playing whack a mole. You're just moving.

• 1:31:07Steven Rinella?

  That's what it sounds like.

• 1:31:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, somewhere else. So there's really are no ability to manage even on that. And so.

• 1:31:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that river would flow with blood, man, if you just needed to get rid of everything that was eaten.

• 1:31:22Speaker 06

  Fish always kind of get the short straw when it comes like you can't be shooting. Birds that people like to watch or sea lions that people like to, you know.

• 1:31:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, so that's the the biggest thing. There's no act amongst the acts. There's no hierarchy. How do we? We have these species, these fish that are on the brink of extinction and these sea lions that are. Exceeding carrying capacity. That's why they're moving to find other food sources and like looking at the future with. Sea level rise and change and everything. That was what Doug's been working on with. Uh, NOAA, National Marine Fisheries Service as well, looking at impacts to the juvenile outmigration. That's what he. He says they eat a lot more french fries than we ever imagined.

• 1:32:14Steven Rinella?

  Are you guys involved in the I my my, I have an older brother. Um, he's in his early eighties. He's been turning in his, he fishes the Columbia every day in the summer.

• 1:32:27Steven Rinella?

  He's been turning in, you know, he's been doing a lot of bounty hunting on northern, uh, on the Pike Minnows.

• 1:32:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:32:32Steven Rinella?

  What's the story with that? Are you guys involved in that?

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  We're we're not peripherally, but I mean, Washington, uh. State of Washington is the one that that's runs that program.

• 1:32:44Steven Rinella?

  Is that is that like productive or is that just like tiddlywinks like is that?

• 1:32:50Steven Rinella?

  You think it's just pissing in the wind or?

• 1:32:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, because when you have a bounty like that, you have people exploiting it, right? And I think there was somebody that was growing some, you know.

• 1:33:00Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh.

• 1:33:02Steven Rinella?

  Cause some dudes are clearing a hundred thousand bucks a year on that bounty. He's not.

• 1:33:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:06Steven Rinella?

  He was telling me he recently had a check for seventy something dollars.

• 1:33:12Speaker 05

  Covered his gas.

• 1:33:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:33:14Steven Rinella?

  Well, he's primarily a smallmouth fisherman, but he likes to make a little side.

• 1:33:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, and with that being actual native species, just the, you know, the change in the reservoir system, but I think we're getting a lot bigger issue on the predation from the warm water fish, the bass and walleye.

• 1:33:34Steven Rinella?

  Oh, like there's more, that's doing more damage than northern pipe minnows.

• 1:33:38Speaker 05

  Probably.

• 1:33:38Steven Rinella?

  And then I got buddies, like, God bless them, I got buddies that like to fish those, like to fish smallmouth there. They're all up in arms about people pointing the finger at smallmouth.

• 1:33:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I was getting at earlier.

• 1:33:51Steven Rinella?

  The crumb fight, dude, the crumb fight is a complex crumb fight.

• 1:33:55Speaker 05

  Why would you want to get rid of this beautiful game fish?

• 1:33:58Speaker 06

  Yep, exactly, and then you have these gigantic walleye that they're catching up there around Yumitila area, right? And so it's attracting people to come there to catch these big walleye. Well, a big walleye eats a lot of smolts.

• 1:34:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, there's probably some group like walleye fishermen of the Columbia and all that's like fighting to like preserve the walleye or whatever, you know?

• 1:34:18Speaker 07

  Up and down it is, and that's a big issue, like, and then you have the fishing guides, right? They say, well, that's our, that's our off season from salmon. It's like restore the salmon, then you'd have a lot more salmon openings, like they show those big walleye and they cut them open and there's like tons of smolts in them and multiply that.

• 1:34:38Steven Rinella?

  This guy down here, big walleye guy.

• 1:34:42Speaker 05

  Guilty.

• 1:34:44Speaker 07

  You could have them, come get them, all you want.

• 1:34:46Steven Rinella?

  You know what shows that mind frame is like totally different water system, but you familiar, here we have the Yellowstone Park, you know, Yellowstone Lake had a. At some point in time, they put lake trout in there, which real detrimental of the cut throats. And so a- at one point, they like made it that I think it was mandatory retention. You know, if you caught it, you had to kill it. I had a buddy, he lived here in town years ago. He would love that to go up there and fish. And I remember I was asking him about it and he's like, yeah, I like to hit it, but I'm always conscious to not damage the resource.

• 1:35:25Steven Rinella?

  Cause like people just get, that's just how people's minds work, you know? Like you go out and you can, you catch some big old small mouth and then it's just,

• 1:35:34Steven Rinella?

  you know, I, there's like a certain human adaptability, I guess, man, like people.

• 1:35:39Steven Rinella?

  Maybe you get where you get where you get fatalistic or pessimistic or something. And you get where we're not going to, the salmon thing's not going to get fixed. And I love the fish. And they're not going to fix that, so I'm, I'm here for small mouth. I'm here for walleye and that'll have to, that'll do, that'll do for me.

• 1:36:02Speaker 05

  No, I'd much rather see the hundred pound Chinook.

• 1:36:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, for sure. But I'm saying, I'm just trying to get into the, like, you know, I mean, like, that's probably without even thinking about it, that's where people arrive.

• 1:36:12Speaker 05

  Plus you're like, like you've created a recreational fishery that never existed before. So people jump on it, you know?

• 1:36:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:20Speaker 05

  Do we know how, and stop me if I'm going to jump ahead too much, but I, I gotta get this question.

• 1:36:25Steven Rinella?

  Are you gonna ask what, why can't we just get rid of all the dams?

• 1:36:28Speaker 05

  No, but it is damn related, but do we know how now with all of our knowledge to do hydroelectric power and salmon simultaneously?

• 1:36:39Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  Is there, it, has someone, yeah, has someone figured out how to do it, but we just don't have the funds to do it? Like, is there a way to make these things not be part of the central, you know, system of the river where like the, nature could still do its thing, but offset from that, you'd have hydroelectric power?

• 1:36:58Speaker 07

  We keep, it's, it's ever-changing goalposts, right? There's no limit, or there's no oversight of carrying capacity. It's always more. Like, we could be, we could have, there's room for salmon in the Northwest, you know, in the environment with this amount of electricity, and that spill, right? Having spill, keeping the river a river, and not just, you know, the way they want to operate it for the grid stability, is to turn it off and on like a, like a battery, like a light switch, and which is unnatural, you know, like you have, you know, your peak loading and things like that for, to support industry and, and things like that. So, that, that's what's really damaging.

• 1:37:43Speaker 07

  You don't have the spill to flush out the, the juvenile salmon, because that's when-

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  You mean a spring runoff?

• 1:37:49Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:37:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:37:50Speaker 07

  And then even in the, even in the summertime, right? Like, like late spring, when, when fish are moving out, like, the, the journey that used to take two weeks now takes two months, and they've expend, expended so many of their resources before they even get to the ocean, that survival decreases. And the same thing when adults are returning. You have, you know, the, the temperature of the, the Columbia is warming earlier and earlier every year, so that, you know, you have, it's reaching sixty-eight degrees, like, days earlier. We have a chart that, that I could share with you over time of when you're reaching these lethal temperatures, and that's why we have dying sockeye now.

• 1:38:31Speaker 07

  Before, we used to be seeing those getting up to the lethal temperatures in the fall, but then you'd get fall rains that would cool it back down, but you're not seeing that anymore. So, it's just a lot, that's why the litigation has been there for so many years, is because its hydro operations is the huge factor in survival.

• 1:38:51Steven Rinella?

  But is, but is there a, like, however you measure the amount of electricity? Okay, like, take any particular dam, and you measure how much? What, what do they measure it as? What, what is a dam measured as? It puts off blank?

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  Mega watts, I think, yeah.

• 1:39:07Steven Rinella?

  To Yanni's point, it'd be like, if you take a dam and it produces 100 megawatts, I don't know what the hell, 100 megawatts, would you, would an engineer now look and go like, oh, man, nowadays, I could give you 100 megawatts without all that, or I could give you 100 megawatts with a much better fish passage system, were we to start from scratch? Do you know what I mean? Like, is there ways in which there's an engineering solution? And I always say like, the, the, they're constantly asking for more and more and more megawatts, but if there weren't, just theoretically, if they weren't asking for more megawatts, could you get it all in a way that wasn't so damaging to the fish now that we have

• 1:39:52Steven Rinella?

  all these technological advancements that have occurred since 1950? You know?

• 1:39:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, it's, that's tough to do. So, and all of them are different, right? Wells Dam, which is one of the highest, the highest passable dam on the Columbia, has what they call a hydro combine. So the spillway is, it sits, and then underneath it is the pin stocks for the powerhouse. Well, there, the, at a traction flow, uh, for the pins is all in one place, and you can kind of direct your fish up into the spillway and get them over. Other places, you've got the spillway a quarter of a mile away from where the powerhouse is. Some of them are, are built at an L, you know, I mean, they're, every one of them is a different place because they had to be to, to put them in, in those locations.

• 1:40:39Speaker 06

  And so I think it would be like the complete tear down and rebuild. So the infrastructure cost would be huge. And unless, unless Nerf starts making turbines, there isn't really a way to do it, you know?

• 1:40:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. So there's not like retrofitting and things. It's just, they built them and that's what they are.

• 1:40:56Speaker 06

  They're better and better.

• 1:40:57Speaker 07

  They're, they're updating, um, we just visited, I toured John Day Dam recently, which is I think the third largest power producer. We have Grand Cooley, Bonneville, and then John Day. And the size of the turbines are huge. Like, you go in there, like, the dam design- Doesn't look that big when you're driving, but the width of it, those turbines in there, I think they're like sixty or ninety foot diameter.

• 1:41:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:41:23Speaker 07

  Like, that's how big and they're like thirty feet tall. Like, there's one that's needed repairs. They had it lifted. You could see it. They've been doing repairs on it for ten years. And they were saying that that one's the next one scheduled to be updated with this newer turbine that they have at Bonneville. And that's supposed to be, you know, more fish safe and water efficient.

• 1:41:46Steven Rinella?

  Cause these are literally kill, they're, they're literally hitting fish and killing them.

• 1:41:49Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Yeah.

• 1:41:50Speaker 05

  What, um?

• 1:41:51Speaker 07

  But that, but just going on the scale is like, I, I had to physically see it to understand like, my God, these things are massive in the amount of money. Like, they're scheduled, that project schedules to start in, I think he said, twenty thirty, costs several billion dollars and take twenty years to complete. So.

• 1:42:15Steven Rinella?

  And that's fixing, that's fixing existing stuff.

• 1:42:17Speaker 07

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:19Steven Rinella?

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• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  There's like, has to be, these power companies are like, have to be under some pressure to at least, on the face of things, show that they're doing things to, to help these runs, like, what kind of partners are they to work with? Like, is it just, like, do you feel like it's just lip service or is there like,

• 1:44:27Speaker 05

  like a bona fide effort to help out or like, what's the, what's the relationship with these power companies?

• 1:44:34Speaker 07

  Well, the, the hardest thing is because it's not a power company, it's the federal government, right? So they could more or less do what they want on the time scale that they want and how things get done with, you know, 10 years of studies and appropriations, five years out and it's not even sufficient for today's dollar, let alone in five years.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  So the dams are managed by the federal government?

• 1:45:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, they're operated.

• 1:45:01Steven Rinella?

  Corps of Engineers?

• 1:45:02Speaker 07

  Corps of Engineers and the, the business end, um, the marketing end of the power is, uh, Bonneville Power Administration. And that's 100% of business focused on money, not looking at mitigation. They have the Fish and Wildlife Program, like there's been years of, um, like unanticipated revenues, like they've made like.

• 1:45:28Speaker 07

  Millions and millions more than they anticipated. Okay, so the Fish and Wildlife Program is X amount. They have all this unanticipated revenue. There's a cap on how much goes to the Fish and Wildlife Program. The rest of it, they go back to pay down their debt with the feds. And they also give breaks. They give money back to their industrial users. Like, what, what company does that?

• 1:45:52Speaker 05

  Do they just kind of view you guys as like a fly buzzing in their ear?

• 1:45:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Steven Rinella?

  Really?

• 1:45:57Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:45:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the solutions are, aren't new. I mean, basically, it's running a river more like a natural river. The more you could do that, the better it is for fish. But.

• 1:46:08Steven Rinella?

  You mean, like, even with the dams?

• 1:46:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:10Steven Rinella?

  There's like, even with the dams in place. I guess that's kind of like, I guess I'll, I'll jump to what would be

• 1:46:18Steven Rinella?

  sort of a version of my last, my last question would be.

• 1:46:23Steven Rinella?

  Years ago, we had Mike Simpson on. And, and, and Idaho representative, House Representatives. He came on and, and, and he was at the time, I don't think it went anywhere. He was pitching a plan on, on a dam removal plan.

• 1:46:38Steven Rinella?

  Which had so many facets around agricultural production, shipping and all that. And it came with this, it came with this stipulation that were they to do this, this removal project, all the litigants, all the environmental groups, imagine tribes, would agree to sort of this, this like cease, they would, they would stop lawsuits for some period of time on, on fisheries. That dam's still standing, right?

• 1:47:07Steven Rinella?

  So like, a, a sort of like broad ultimate question would be, what are the odds that dams come out?

• 1:47:16Steven Rinella?

  Like, if you had to crystal ball a century in, into the future, do we have fewer dams then? And then the offshoot of the question is if, is if no, the dams will never, it's not real, the major dams will never go away. Then it's, it's.

• 1:47:33Steven Rinella?

  What could be done differently? And you're kind of getting at, I guess, like you could, the dams could still be there, but there are other things that are plausible that could help.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, you got to run it as close to a natural river as you can. It's priorities, right? If you prioritize fish passage higher than you do now, it's prioritized for dam or for power production.

• 1:47:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:55Speaker 06

  Right? And so it's maximize or optimize power production. And then whatever's left, it's the crumbs. Whatever's left, we could do what we can around the edges for fish. But if you raise that and made the fish more important, you know, you can look at papers from the 50s. They knew some of the solutions. These aren't new. But it's, it's always been that the money is from the dams and the power production. And that's, that's run the whole system.

• 1:48:24Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:48:24Speaker 06

  And it's all, it all operates and revolves around that.

• 1:48:28Steven Rinella?

  Did they, when they were conceptualizing those dams, I've asked other people this question. I don't know if I ever got like a great answer to it, but like, when they were pitching the dams, the engineers, right? Everybody's getting together on these dams. Did, was, did they realize? Do you think they knew? Do you think their discussions included, um, conversations about how catastrophic this would be for fish? Like, did they, they knew?

• 1:48:57Speaker 07

  There was actually, um, the, the memos were discovered by OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting recently. You did a, Tony Schick did a series, uh, um, Salmon Wars podcast. But yeah, he had the memos that talked about the kind of the cost benefit and analysis. Like I said, the salmon became a problem because then they'd have to put in fish passage. And they also labeled it as Indian problem. We get rid of the, the salmon. We, we don't have to deal with the Indian problem on, on the Mainstem River anymore. So that was in all of those, it was a choice, even on the upper.

• 1:49:34Steven Rinella?

  Like they were wide eyed about it.

• 1:49:36Speaker 07

  Mm hmm. Because they looked at building Bonneville without passage with or without. And thankfully with and, but you know, you look up in Hills Canyon, Hills Canyon Dam, there's no passage, but there could be. They could bore through the. The mountain to for their their turbines, you know, to make the turbines more efficient, but they couldn't provide passage. So all of those things, you visit them, it's it's it was a choice and all based on cost and also looking at long term maintenance. And you talked about like, will these be here forever? No, because there's there's lack of maintenance. Like Doug said, like, OK, every all the all the the money and the emphasis is put on

• 1:50:20Speaker 07

  power production and things get fixed really fast. But when there's an issue with the passage thing or especially monitoring, that's the first thing to get sliced off of the budget. Is that right? And and you were talking about, you know, litigation. We had that stay in litigation, which was going good. We were just getting started in but in June of twenty five, it was canceled, terminated by the by the current administration. So we lost all of that headway that we had made over those those couple of years with the Biden administration. So we're back to we still have the six sovereigns working together, pushing to advance those efforts and looking for appropriations, but we don't have the commitments from the the

• 1:51:03Speaker 07

  agencies of the federal government, the Bureau of Reclamation, Army Corps, and everything like that to address these problems. And, you know, when we started our advocacy, we were talking about the billion dollar backlog, the billion dollar backlog in in needs in the Columbia Basin. Well, once we started writing it down on paper, it actually came out to be like two billion dollars, like a billion dollars in passage at the dams and then like another billion in hatchery maintenance, because they built these hatcheries, they're so outdated and never reach full production. They have failing intakes, crumbling raceways, they're not efficient.

• 1:51:45Speaker 07

  And so the things that we advocate for isn't just for us. It's actually, can you appropriate the money for you to fund yourself to do the things that you should be doing? And then even, you know, looking at habitat restoration and, um, you know, the, the roads and culverts and irrigation intakes and everything, we're just like out there looking for everybody to do the right thing of what we all should be doing for our environment. And, you know, it's like a shared responsibility from all of us. And like, um, the Acumenation, they were, we were involved with a dam removal project that didn't get as much media attention

• 1:52:27Speaker 07

  as like Elwah Dam, but it's actually, it was actually a bigger project and it took, um, like 19 years for that dam removal. And the only reason it got done, it was because it was with a private company, it was Pacificor. And then it came down to the license for them to update the license, they had to either provide passage or take it down.

• 1:52:49Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:52:49Speaker 07

  And then they drug that out for five years. The tribes, Yakama and Kripfik, actually pitched in money together to fund the study, the cost benefit analysis that showed that removal would be cheaper. And then Pacificor finally breached it. But it's like, we have to hold their hand and walk them through everything and keep pushing all the time. It's just more like.

• 1:53:12Steven Rinella?

  Pushing and paying.

• 1:53:13Speaker 07

  Hmm. To hold them accountable of things that they should be doing and funding things appropriately. We could have these acts and permits and everything, but unless we have the resources to enact them, it, it's meaningless. So.

• 1:53:28Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna go out on a limb on this one, but I mean, the way the Trump administration's playing out with their like conservation record, I can't imagine they're of any help on salmon issues, huh? It's gotta be low priority to them.

• 1:53:40Speaker 07

  It, it was actually the Trump administration that signed the permit for the, the Pinupet removal, right? During those first.

• 1:53:48Steven Rinella?

  Oh, so really?

• 1:53:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. But the thing that we get from congressional's and actually our, our supervisor, our executive director actually just testified in Congress last month on this Pinupet issue. Um, and we're a Republican witness because, and we have our.

• 1:54:08Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, I can see it be, that's, I was, I was thinking of that being like an interesting trade off is what the administration is gonna give you is probably greater latitude. Because like of a like of a general suspicion of some of these acts that were passed, greater latitude for some things like removal of species was sort of just like generally less sympathy about river flows and things, I would imagine.

• 1:54:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what we're after is that, you know, there's no management provision in the Marine Mammal Protection Act. We'd like an amendment to add management provisions. And so a way that you could analyze the problem and if it's river otters somewhere, if it's California sea lions or stallers or whatever the problem is, there would be a process you could go through to get some management in place and be able to do that. The, I guess, I get quickly back to the to the sea lion thing. What we talked about earlier was the the 120 removals. And then there was an amendment that was passed in 2018. It was signed by Trump in his first administration that did recognize the co-management of the

• 1:55:13Speaker 06

  tribes. So tribes, our four treaty tribes were able to be party to permits along with the states. And then our tribes could delegate to crit fic to do that. And we've been doing that since. But it's, you know, red tape is a killer because that was passed in December of 2018. We immediately applied for a permit and our joint permit was finally issued in August of 20. So two years, two years, and then we start implementing it. And then that provision, it's 120F, it allows area management. So that was the above the 205 bridge. If an animal's up there, he's individually identifiable and he's having a significant

• 1:55:56Speaker 06

  negative impact. So if you can collect that animal, you can euthanize it. But it's very restrictive. You can't go out and specifically, you can't shoot them. You have to trap, chemically euthanize. So there's still some burden to it, but it isn't the the level that we used to do when it was individual sea lion management. So it's a little better, but it only applies to the Columbia.

• 1:56:18Steven Rinella?

  So yeah, on the on the question about the different administrations, I don't want to put you in a rough spot. Maybe my assumption is wrong. But like, I just remember years ago.

• 1:56:27Steven Rinella?

  I can't remember if it was the first time Trump was running. He was kind of, he was in California and he was like ridiculing the Delta smelt, you know? Like, why would you ever sacrifice anything for some little fish? And I think there's just like, in that way, like sort of a dismissiveness about some fisheries issues. But have you guys found that, like, have you gotten more done during the Trump administrations than you do during the Biden administrations? Or is it not that simple?

• 1:56:53Speaker 07

  No, it's not that simple. A lot has to do with funding that's coming into the federal agencies. The federal agencies now that we work with have been gutted, right? So there's less, less people to do the same amount of work and with less money, which, which is a problem and...

• 1:57:12Steven Rinella?

  So you felt the impact of like some of the cuts to land management agencies?

• 1:57:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that, and like...

• 1:57:18Steven Rinella?

  But like also a red tape reduction, so less money and less red tape?

• 1:57:23Speaker 07

  No, it's still there. It's just the process is just take longer now, you know? Or you don't have somebody there to, you don't have that human there to process this permit, which we ran into last year on a tagging project. Like, we couldn't access that area because there was no, the person was dozed that did, wrote that permit for us.

• 1:57:43Steven Rinella?

  I see.

• 1:57:44Speaker 07

  And just things like that. I think the, around this predation thing is like the one crumb that we could actually get done during this time. And because like I said, we're a Republican witness and resistance to change. And we're mindful of, you know, ag and transportation and things like that. But we're looking for responsible ways to do things. There's beyond the status quo and, you know, there's a lot of interest in just protecting the dams. So they're quick to point at sea lions. They are a huge impact, but that's not the only impact. But if that's the only thing we could get right now,

• 1:58:23Steven Rinella?

  I understand.

• 1:58:24Speaker 07

  then we need to maximize our effort and jump on that and get these things done now while we have the, while we have the chance, while the focus is on, on that.

• 1:58:33Steven Rinella?

  That, that's a conservation gamble that...

• 1:58:40Steven Rinella?

  Just in the conservation movement at large, that is a gamble that causes, for people that like things simple, that's a gamble people have to live in that makes people uncomfortable, especially people that want things to be very cut and dried, good guy, bad guy, really simple. But that an organization, yourselves or any number of conservation organizations with a new administration comes in, and you're like, here's all the things we're not gonna get.

• 1:59:08Steven Rinella?

  But there's this, you know, and we can be friendly and try to get this one thing, or we can dig in our heels and spend four years with nothing. You know, I mean, and a lot of people want you just to dig in your heels and get nothing, rather than look like you're cooperating, you know? And then it flips, then four years later, it flips the other way around, and you're like, you know, killing sea lions is out.

• 1:59:32Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:59:33Steven Rinella?

  Right, but we might get some sympathy on this other issue, you know?

• 1:59:36Speaker 07

  It was really hard. We were, um, kind of a perfect storm we ran into was right. We had the, we've had this Accords Agreement since 2008. It's the Bonneville Fish Accords where, was a 10-year agreement, 2008 to 2018, where, um, there was a set program. We said, we won't sue you and you fund these programs. And the benefit in that is we weren't having to justify and fight every year for funding for, to do this or that. We're really micromanaged. Even now, today, we're still really micromanaged as fish managers, the expert, micromanaged by the funding agencies, of course, because they control the purse strings.

• 2:00:20Speaker 07

  And that's still a frustration for us, but the Accords gave us the ability to do non-ESA work and work on things like sturgeon and lamprey and, and things like that, kind of expand what we were doing. And we made a lot of progress. And since then, we, we never signed another long-term agreement. We went through two. Three-year extensions in eighteen to, and so we were just starting to negotiate that a new long-term agreement. Bonneville rolled the dice on the election and they won. We didn't get another agreement and they gave us another extension.

• 2:01:01Speaker 07

  But in that, and I mentioned the, the litigation on the hydro operations around ESA, the ESA litigation. And so we were in that state. We were living good, looking forward to a new, another, you know, favorable administration. And it flipped the opposite way. We, we lost that agreement. It was terminated. And then this Bonneville piece, they have no, the accord's ended. They have no written legal binding commitment to us, except this really hard, long process of, you know, the power council, the Northwest Power Act, their commitments to the Fish and Wildlife Program, their responsibilities, that's what's really tough.

• 2:01:44Speaker 07

  The, um, so the accord is ending. And then there was money left over from that, that was tied up in their years of red tape to build facilities or do certain projects. Well, when the tribes signed to take the litigation back into court, the stay was ended. Okay, let's re-initiate this litigation. Bonneville viewed that as a negative action towards them. And they said, we don't owe you that money anymore. You violated the accord. It was fifty million dollars to the tribes that they're still, our, our tribes are having

• 2:02:23Speaker 07

  to go to DC to lobby to get that money back to, like, we have projects we've been working on for fifteen years.

• 2:02:32Steven Rinella?

  And that would have been fifty million bucks towards salmon.

• 2:02:34Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:38Steven Rinella?

  Not like for people to walk home and put in their bank accounts.

• 2:02:40Speaker 07

  Oh, no, it was all earmarked for projects that we weren't able to get done on the ground because of their red tape.

• 2:02:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 07

  So.

• 2:02:52Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:54Speaker 05

  I got a question about, um, the Klamath. Like, the dams aren't coming down on the Columbia, right? At least not anytime soon. But the, you know, a year or two ago, when they took out the four dams on the Klamath, it's like now seen as a success for salmon. Is, like, I know you guys are focused on the Columbia, but is there, like, opportunities like the Klamath on other rivers besides the Columbia?

• 2:03:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, that one I mentioned on the, on the White Salmon, the one that we did with Pacificor, which is funny, that was the same company that owned the Klamath dams that removed them. And it was a lot because of, you know, reservoir succession and things were so bad in that system, they had no choice, which we're seeing in the Columbia every year by a degradation of water quality, sediment accumulation and things like that. We're not, we're not keeping up in the Columbia either. And like, like I mentioned, that, um, the, the dam on the Little White Salmon that was removed, but it took 19 years to do that.

• 2:03:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, they got the ones down on, on the Klamath pretty quick, it seemed like.

• 2:04:03Speaker 07

  No, they were, they were in the fight for decades as well. You just don't hear about it until, until like, things are happening.

• 2:04:11Speaker 05

  Oh, they're taking them down. It's like, oh, they're down.

• 2:04:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, and then always, like I mentioned, the only reason we got that dam removed is because of the licensing process that required fish, fish passage. It was the same thing on the Klamath. They could have done fixes to maintain the dams, but it was cheaper for them to take them out. Like how you were saying, it's like, things get costed out and it's never, it's not like, yay, we won, they did the right thing. It's like. They did what was cheapest for their pocket.

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:42Speaker 07

  That that's always the trade off. So I think.

• 2:04:44Steven Rinella?

  How quickly do you see, how quickly, when a dam comes down like that, like in the Klamath or whatever, how quickly do you see results in terms of fish passage?

• 2:04:53Speaker 07

  The next year. It was, it was like that in, um, in the white salmon when we removed that dam. Actually, a few years ago, I hosted the, we had a 10 years returning salmon celebration there because they thought it would take like several years to rebuild, but those fish have been coming back. Like you open the door, they're, they're gonna.

• 2:05:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were salmon that were running the Klamath this past fall, I think.

• 2:05:15Speaker 07

  Yeah. Yeah. So it was that very next year.

• 2:05:18Steven Rinella?

  They're going up there like, this place is sweet.

• 2:05:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:05:22Speaker 07

  This is the place my grandma was talking about.

• 2:05:26Speaker 07

  But yeah, it, it's just when you, when you reconnect, you know, have those openings, then they're going to find their resources and return to those, those areas. They find their niche.

• 2:05:37Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:05:40Speaker 07

  Yeah. I see Doug has some pretty cool pictures of sea lions at Astoria. I was bringing it out.

• 2:05:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, we'll have to show you those. I guess we don't have a great media for, for that, but yeah.

• 2:05:53Speaker 05

  Well, we can share it with Bill and he can put them on the.

• 2:05:56Speaker 06

  Okay. Yeah, yeah. Pretty astounding. These were from 2015 when that kind of been the peak of the sea lion issue, but they're just like all the docks in the East Moring Basin in Astoria are completely covered with sea lions and then they're patrolling in the water, trying to find a spot to get out.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

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• 2:06:43Steven Rinella?

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• 2:07:27Steven Rinella?

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• 2:08:04Steven Rinella?

  I keep sort of asking this and I think Brody asked too, but I just want to be clear on it.

• 2:08:09Steven Rinella?

  In a century, the big, like in a, in a hundred years, the big Columbia dams will still be there.

• 2:08:20Speaker 07

  It's hard to say because things are getting so bad now, like you're starting to have

• 2:08:27Speaker 07

  closures of parks and boat ramps and areas because of toxic algal blooms in the summer because of heat. And I know right there in the tri cities, there's been dogs that are dying, people, you know, the dogs are running around in the water. And so I think when it starts, it's gonna start impacting people and those types of resources because of the degradation of water quality and.

• 2:08:55Steven Rinella?

  We didn't do it for Sam and might do it for dogs.

• 2:08:57Speaker 07

  Oh yeah.

• 2:08:59Steven Rinella?

  That's buddy.

• 2:09:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, and cattle.

• 2:09:01Steven Rinella?

  The wrong suburbanites dog and they're gonna be like, this cannot stand.

• 2:09:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, and then, you know, like when cattle end up in those toxic algal bloom situations, it's like, well, if you would have just had this buffer from the stream to protect the nutrient loading in your creek, then your cattle wouldn't have died, but they're still up in arms about their cattle dying because of that.

• 2:09:24Steven Rinella?

  So it could be like a broader,

• 2:09:28Steven Rinella?

  like a broader litany of environmental degradations could bring up in the future more serious discussions about, like doing something really radical.

• 2:09:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that's the thing, you know, like I mentioned the six sovereigns and then we had that resilient Columbia Basin agreement, but our negotiating piece was the creation of the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. That's an initiative that's created and vetted by the six sovereigns. It's the tribes. Cause our tribes, we've had with Kripik, we've had the Waikana Shmewa Kishwit, you know, for 20 years, you know, that set these, these recovery plans and recovery goals. Well, this was taking that to the next step and coming together with our co-manager. It's our guiding North Star that we're still working towards.

• 2:10:22Speaker 07

  And so that's what we're looking at today about, you know, habitat restoration in the mid Columbia. And also, like I mentioned, the, it's cold water refugia, the, the, through the migration corridor of the Columbia where you have the tributary mouths, the deltas that are all full of sediment and, you know, have all the predation and water quality issues and things like that. So, um, we're able to like have this input of cold water to corral so that returning adults, they have respite as they travel these hundreds of miles upstream. And that's something that's doable today. You know, we just gotta break through the red tape and get the funding to actually do it.

• 2:11:06Speaker 07

  And that would be a, a, a huge benefit for Sam. Like we have all these recovery plans for the basins and you know habitat projects just waiting to be funded and then addressing these things, you know predation, I've been the squeaky wheel about predation over the the past few years, like the Pinna ped predation, but also the avian predation and the Pisine, the warm water predators, but there's also invasives that are heavily impacting our river system.

• 2:11:36Steven Rinella?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:11:37Speaker 07

  And that's American shad. Those were introduced in the eighteen hundreds and there was a very problematic, I saw article from the Seattle Times on the shad issue, that they're just becoming accepted. That was the title. There's a new top fish in the Columbia and it doesn't mind the warm water.

• 2:11:56Steven Rinella?

  Mm.

• 2:11:57Speaker 07

  Where you have, we've had years of eight million shad returning.

• 2:12:02Steven Rinella?

  Ro shad, yeah.

• 2:12:03Speaker 07

  And so that's totally unnatural and that's, that that feeds the predators when, you know, because their life cycle is opposite. So when these warm water predators, the salmonas are out, they're eating juvenile shad. And then you have all the pelicans that are feasting on on shad and they're spawning in the main stem, so it's a huge nutrient load. And so you have all this aquatic vegetation and algae growth because it's, it's not meant to be there, right? You have barren tributaries that don't get those marine nutrients, but they're all piled in the the main stem and why the main stem's green now and not.

• 2:12:44Steven Rinella?

  But dude, go ahead, Brendan.

• 2:12:46Speaker 05

  One more. You hinted at how far these salmon will go earlier. If those dams weren't there, like what would be the terminal point for these, these Chinook? Like how far would they go and where would they end up?

• 2:12:59Speaker 07

  Um, I know, like.

• 2:13:02Speaker 07

  Distance wise in the Snake Basin would be at Twin Falls because you have the the falls that was it's huge and then they went all the way up into the tributaries and the headwaters in in Canada, you know, that little piece of Montana where the Kootenay is and and you know, like you have the Wenatchee, the Metow, the the Antiat and the Yakima Basin. So all up into the Cascades up into Canada, around to Montana, how far it stretches, Idaho and even Nevada, right, too.

• 2:13:37Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's incredible, man.

• 2:13:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, Steelhead did go all the way up the the Oihei River there in the Nevada. You'd get them up the Salmon River, uh, up past Stanley, uh, almost to Galena Summit, right at the headwaters of the salmon, which is like forty miles north of Sun Valley.

• 2:13:52Speaker 05

  So like twice as far as where you you were seeing them.

• 2:13:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, and and even like the other species, like I always said, were, you know, comprehensive and holistic in our salmon recovery efforts, like lamprey. I think, you know, we put, you know, they're a sacred food source to us and they were also medicinal, you know, like because they're so oily, that that was your skin salve and your ear drops and stuff when, you know, before you could go to the drugstore and but the the benefit that they brought to the system and all of the nutrients in the forests and the animals and and, you know, like, um, forest habitat, like they're lacking those marine-driven nutrients to for the standing forests and then also like management.

• 2:14:38Speaker 07

  I think back to, I watched your your hunting show, Blue Mountain, Blue Mountain Bulls, and it was on fire, right? There was forest fire, we're seeing that more and more. It's forest management practices, but also, you know, like, we don't have the same nutrients coming into the forest to grow, but, you know, those, that's the other side of the aspects. We will touch all aspects of it and I think lamprey is a huge part of that. Doug showed me a picture, it's, um, the Bruno River that flows into Nevada. It's they de-watered this this dam or whatever they're standing on the cement. There's like thousands and thousands of lamprey and that's hundreds of miles from the ocean in this one little tributary.

• 2:15:23Speaker 07

  Imagine how many there were all throughout the basin, millions and millions, and all of that's gone now and you. There's an effect, it's a ripple effect through the entire ecosystem. And so us just to try to put all these building blocks back together to, to create that better tomorrow, because we can't restore the salmon back to barren streams, even looking at, you know, benthic organisms and things like that. So, you know, working with beavers and, and, and all of that stuff. So we're coming at it from all angles.

• 2:15:58Speaker 06

  And to bring it back to your Semmel Paris fish, see these fish died, right? They go up and they die and they brought all those nutrients from the ocean back to the forest.

• 2:16:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:09Speaker 06

  And they get hauled out by bears and otters and everything else and brought in. And so it's, the, the whole thing has been cut off. Those forests have lost all of that nutrient input for a hundred years, a hundred and fifty years.

• 2:16:23Steven Rinella?

  My brother's a fisheries biologist in Alaska and they've been tracking that by, with marine isotopes.

• 2:16:29Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:16:30Steven Rinella?

  So you have all these, these like traceable elements.

• 2:16:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, Strontium is one that they.

• 2:16:36Steven Rinella?

  That you know came from the ocean.

• 2:16:38Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:16:38Steven Rinella?

  And the way it got from the ocean into the mountains was on a fish.

• 2:16:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:16:43Steven Rinella?

  And then you look at how that stuff is used by vegetation and animals. And it's like marine, just a picture of like, that fish are a way of like wheel barrowing in nutrients into nutrient poor regions.

• 2:16:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And you pluck that out and it's like, you're not fertilizing it anymore.

• 2:17:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, you get up, like I said, in that upper part of the salmon, it's just granitic soil. There's no nutrients to speak of up there. Ultra clear water, it's gin clear, but the nutrients aren't coming from what's running on.

• 2:17:15Steven Rinella?

  It used to get millions of pounds of natural fertilizer.

• 2:17:18Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:17:20Speaker 07

  And the other thing you were like, honest, you were asking, is there a way to operate the, the hydro system and still have salmon? But. Like I said, the ever-changing goalposts and maybe things that would help would be like, you know, bringing on renewables and also battery storage. So you're not depending on the river to be your battery that you turn off and on. But then there's impacts, there's trade-offs in everything you do. But that's where the tribes come in and advocate to do things in a responsible manner. Like all of our tribes have their own, you know, utilities. We're looking at different types of energy production. And that was part of the agreement in the litigation was funding for

• 2:18:02Speaker 07

  energy projects, you know, administered by the tribes like the Yakmin Nation. They're working on a solar over-irrigation project and also a dry pump storage project using rail, railroad cars that you lift up and down the hill. And they're working at pump storage at several places. One is a really big issue for our tribes and especially the Yakmin Nation is the Golden Dale Pump Storage Project. It's they want to withdraw, withdraw water from the Columbia, build the reservoir up on the hill and then, you know, they just pump it in a loop.

• 2:18:41Speaker 07

  You know, they generate power when, when they need it and then pump it back up off-peak when it's cheap. And then, so you have all these, for one, they're boring through the mountain. And then they want to tap into the John Day Power Line system to export that power. And then there's also a superfund site below from an abandoned aluminum smelter that's never been cleaned up. And it's one of our sacred sites. It's like Pushpum, it's like the mother of all roots. It's a place where we still go and gather. And they just like, okay, yeah, you move aside and we're going to do this here now. And it's literally drilling a 30-foot diameter tunnel through the mountain.

• 2:19:25Speaker 07

  And you'll see that also all in the surrounding area of the windmills, the wind generation, which like, why does it have to be all on our, on our, you know, native lands, open lands? Like, isn't there like low-value agriculture that they could incorporate agrivoltics and things like that? It's always looking at what's cheapest and easiest. And that's like these public lands that they get a 30-year lease from. And, you know, once they go in and Alter it, it's, you know, it's never the same and it impacts the, the withdrawals from the, the river for these things and even the solar um has huge impacts to the water

• 2:20:06Speaker 07

  table because they need water to clean the solar panels. So there's a huge water usage even with solar production. So what we're saying is we're not against all of these things, but like, let's not be in a rush to do it and let's do things right. And we can't put all of these burdens on the backs of the salmon and all the users who depend on them, the tribal people and the community members, because we're the ones that these resources are extracted and all the burden is placed on us and it's all goes outside. It's all international companies exporting power to um California into these industrial

• 2:20:47Speaker 07

  users and data centers and things like that. It's like again and again, the same story. So let's do things, slow down, do things better. Like, yeah, we can, we need to do better, find renewables, but let's do it right. So not just what's cheapest. What's cheapest today may not be in the long run.

• 2:21:07Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:21:07Speaker 07

  Because even if they, maybe they, they would have put more maintenance into the hydro system now, we wouldn't be, we wouldn't have these billion dollar backlogs and, and things like that. So.

• 2:21:18Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:20Steven Rinella?

  Man, I was hoping you guys were gonna tell me something that's gonna put me on a good mood.

• 2:21:24Speaker 05

  Well, have they got some success stories we could go over?

• 2:21:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, let's close out with some success stories.

• 2:21:30Speaker 04

  There's this too. There's like, speaking of boogeymen, like, I feel like we grew up and the lamprey was the devil of all devils.

• 2:21:39Steven Rinella?

  That's non-native.

• 2:21:40Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:21:40Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:40Speaker 04

  I know, but still.

• 2:21:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:43Speaker 04

  Like, I've never heard of a good lamprey and here you guys are trying to like promote it. So can we just touch on that a little bit? Yeah. Cause when we grew up in Michigan, it was like when you went to

• 2:21:52Speaker 05

  The hatchery, we had a, I can't remember the name of the hatchery now there in Kalamazoo, but like every year you'd go on a field trip there. And like, it would just be nothing but placards on the walls about how the lampreys is killing off.

• 2:22:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like a system, a system, it's like any, any invasive species story. It's a system that hadn't adapted with it. And then all of a sudden, ta-da, here's a bunch of lampreys and like every non-native species story, it just explodes. At great expense to native fish. And so then you hear like, oh, you know, where they are from.

• 2:22:29Speaker 05

  But in your neck of the woods, they coexist.

• 2:22:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, and they're, um, they have that relationship, right? They're parasitic, but not lethal. You could see, sometimes you catch salmon, it has a little round mark with the teeth.

• 2:22:43Steven Rinella?

  They were lethal lake trout.

• 2:22:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, but.

• 2:22:45Steven Rinella?

  The Great Lakes system, they were killing, yeah, because again, it was a fish that wasn't, hadn't adapted with the risk, you know?

• 2:22:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, so they do, they are parasitic, they, but they don't kill their hosts. Like they drop off and they can swim and migrate and everything. And then the benefit that they serve to the salmon is, you know, they're spawning in these tributaries as well. And then they're breaking down all the, the detritus and things like that. So, they're the filters and the cleaners of, in the tributaries and, and so, yeah, it's.

• 2:23:16Speaker 06

  And these are Pacific lamprey that we have. Those are sea lampreys in the Great Lakes.

• 2:23:20Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:23:21Speaker 06

  And you know, that's like you said, that's an invasive in the Great Lakes. These are, these are native fish.

• 2:23:26Speaker 05

  And where's the sea lamprey originally from?

• 2:23:29Speaker 06

  East coast and, and.

• 2:23:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, because what happened was sea lampreys couldn't get past Niagara Falls. And so then when they got moved, eventually, like that was a natural barrier. And so the upper systems never had them. And then eventually on ship ballast or whatever, lampreys got moved above a natural barrier and then, and just decimated lake trout, you know? And they started all those different programs of poisoning, spawning beds, and it still goes on. In fact, another, like you're talking about, like another Doge cut was there was a big, there was a big Doge cut around. Like all this work to try to get lampreys under control in the Great Lakes system. And then there were acts and the people that run the program.

• 2:24:13Steven Rinella?

  And that was when that was going on, I pointed out, like on the show, I pointed out that um, there's a little bit of a, like you said, like paying attention to what the ramifications are. We've spent millions and millions and millions of dollars getting them under control. And then you, and then you go to save a couple bucks by ditching some dudes that, you know, and then all of a sudden, the whole investment goes out the window, you know, because you're trying to save a couple dollars, right?

• 2:24:37Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:24:38Steven Rinella?

  But that's different watershed, different problems. Do people ever eat these Pacific lamprey?

• 2:24:43Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah, actually, I meant to bring some today, but I didn't get to meet up with my, with my friend that she had some that she had put away that um, it was, we dried them. You know, you eat them fresh, roast them, and they're really, really rich. It's, I'd say it's an acquired taste. I'll, I'll send some to you guys. You can taste it, some dried lamprey, but yeah, it's really oily fish and, you know, like, that was highly sought after, right? You need those calories too.

• 2:25:13Steven Rinella?

  They're in a Scoville's cookbook. One of the things that when I was doing uh, Scavengers Guide to Oak Cuisine, one of the things I bombed out on was getting lampreys, but that was in a Scoville's cookbook, it's like French, French prepara-, French lamprey preparation. Is it a bit like uh, mac, like mackerel or eel? Right. It's an eel. I mean, it's like, if you cut its head off, you think you're looking at an eel.

• 2:25:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:25:36Speaker 06

  And they're crazy, just the biology of them is pretty crazy. They're carlaginous fish, they're an ancient fish, jawless, they're 400 million years old. I mean, and they were here that long ago, and when that was when, you know, the continents were all connected.

• 2:25:51Steven Rinella?

  Yep.

• 2:25:52Speaker 06

  And they've been able to figure out how to survive until man put enough dams on the river that we've, you know, they went down to critically low numbers in the Columbia, probably down to 20,000 or so. It's, we've had lamprey programs going for a while now at the tribes, and it is coming back. And we've got lamprey that we've got coming back to Idaho and other higher tributaries. They're really, they're a weak swimmer, so getting over dams is a difficult thing. There's been a lot of technology stuff to try and figure out.

• 2:26:23Steven Rinella?

  How to get them moving.

• 2:26:24Speaker 06

  But it's getting better.

• 2:26:25Steven Rinella?

  You go up to like the Yukon, Cascoquim, Kowabak River, that's like an indigenous subsistence fishery, still with lampreys.

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:26:32Speaker 07

  It was fifty percent at each main stem project that you'd lose of adult lamprey returning. So that's why it was the tribes that took the initiative to start the lamprey translocation. So, collect that Bonneville Dam and then take them up to the tributaries and that's how we're starting to see fish returning. So we want to do more of that and also installing passage for lamprey, like a wedded wall, you know, for them to work their way up. Because they can't go up the fish ladders because there's, you know, perpendicular surfaces.

• 2:27:05Steven Rinella?

  They can't jump.

• 2:27:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, so they're trying to swim up. They can't make it, but they could go all the way up that wedded wall. And so we're looking at adult passage at the dams, translocation. Another hard thing is, a lot of the juveniles get sucked out into irrigation because, you know, it's like a little worm in the slots on a screen. You know, they would have to be outrageously small to keep the lamprey out.

• 2:27:32Steven Rinella?

  So they wind up going through sprinkler systems.

• 2:27:34Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm, end up in all the irrigation canals and whatnot. And we do salvages when they shut down the canal. We'll go in there and try to salvage as many of the juveniles.

• 2:27:44Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 2:27:44Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:27:45Speaker 06

  And they're super complicated, so the life history of them. And so everything you learned about salmon doesn't really apply. So it's trying to relearn all these things. They don't home. Like a salmon, if you get it in a particular area, they're going to come back to that spot to spawn. And lamprey don't. So it's...

• 2:28:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, they don't have like site fidelity. They just go wherever they go.

• 2:28:07Speaker 05

  They're like American eels, like they're just distributed by current.

• 2:28:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, to a degree. There is some that come back and they do have a pheromone that they give off. If there's juveniles there, they'll come back to that location. But it wouldn't necessarily be where they were born. So it's complicated to try and restore them. And really, it needs a broader coastwide effort then. If you need to improve it in a lot of streams, not just... You can't just do a stream like you do a salmon and expect that that homing is going to help you out and they'll come back. It isn't going to happen.

• 2:28:41Steven Rinella?

  And they're anadromous. But not the word I was saying earlier.

• 2:28:45Speaker 06

  They're not similar parras. They're interal parras. Yeah, they can repeat spawn, although not that much. And we don't know so much of it. We just don't know about it because it hasn't been a sexy fish to study.

• 2:28:57Steven Rinella?

  No.

• 2:28:57Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah.

• 2:28:58Speaker 07

  Well, there's a lot going on with them now. And what's crazy, it's funny, but it's not. We were at the dam, right Bonneville Dam where they have the fish viewing windows and that's where they count, right? Back in the nineties, the Corps actually used to have an air blast system, those damn lamprey getting in the way. They would air blast them off.

• 2:29:20Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 2:29:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, they look like a series of moss, you know, or they'd be attached to the window and it would obstruct the view to count salmon. So they blast them off every 10 or 15 minutes and they push them down the ladder.

• 2:29:33Steven Rinella?

  You know, my brother Danny was a salmon biologist in Alaska. He works on that stable isotope issues and a bunch of other stuff.

• 2:29:42Steven Rinella?

  A lot of like warm water issues and other things, but impacts warm water. One of his first, I think his first paid fisheries gig was he was in Walla Walla, Washington. And he was paid to sit there looking out that window.

• 2:29:57Speaker 06

  Counting fish.

• 2:29:58Steven Rinella?

  Counting fish. This is one of his first paid gigs, man. Yeah, sit, live, like living in, basically living inside the dam, counting fish in the window and writing it down.

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• 2:30:39Steven Rinella?

  Go and ask any serious whitetail hunter what the best time of the year is to be out in a tree. And it's not a holiday. Okay. The best time is not already on your calendar. It's the rut. It's the two or three week window that serious deer. hunters plan everything else around and on X hunts rut calendar does this for you and helps take the guesswork out of your planning it tracks the different phases of the rut as they move through your area so you know when to book the time off when to have the whole camp locked in and ready or conversely when it's still too early to burn out your best spots you only get so many rut hunts in your life so use the rut calendar within on X hunt

• 2:31:23Steven Rinella?

  to make the most of the whitetail rut this fall if you spend a lot of time outdoors you got dogs you got kids you know how hard it is to keep the floor of your rig clean a thing we do in our in our little fleet of vehicles that have at my household if you go look open the door on any one of them they all got weather tech we get a car we throw the mats out and put in weather tech that way when there's a mess it's like your kids fault your dogs fault is the weather's fault doesn't matter you take them suckers out and hose them off and you're back to being good as new I'm telling you if you got a vehicle put weather tech in there you're gonna be happy you did it and check this out American made floor liners and cargo liner okay they laugh in the face of all weather go take a look for yourself today at weather tech.com

• 2:32:07Steven Rinella?

  well man I feel like we go on all day but we didn't even hit success stories or more success stories well yeah who can conveniently give us some success stories

• 2:32:18Speaker 05

  well we can just read them off and have them give us the short version steelhead reconditioning

• 2:32:26Speaker 06

  yeah so that's a thing I've been working on for 25 years along with a really good group of people but basically so steelhead are eternal pears they repeat spawn there's their rainbow trout so they can spawn they can spawn again they'll go up to whatever river they're in and then they spawn and they try to go back downstream and go back to the ocean and in a totally natural system the number of repeat spawners that you have in your population will range anywhere from you know five to six percent up to maybe 30 or 40% it's kind of dependent on how close you are to the ocean closer to the ocean the higher you get of these repeat spawners

• 2:33:08Speaker 06

  Through the hydro system, they don't, they don't make it. I mean, it is definitely not set up for large fish to pass downstream. And a lot of them will go through the bypasses, the juvenile bypass system, and there they get screened off. And we collect those fish, collect them at Lower Granite, other places. We take those fish then into a hatchery, put them in, in tanks. We've got specialized fish culture, fish care. And we'll, we'll feed them to where they survive and then they'll remature. And this has been concentrated on wild fish. So this is a fish that successfully spawned. There were no eggs in it when we collected them.

• 2:33:48Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 2:33:48Speaker 06

  In the dam, they go up, we've, we've reconditioned them, release them either that fall or some of them will skip and they won't spawn again till the following fall. We'll hold them for 18 months. Keep feeding them. We let them go downstream of where we had collected them and then they go back upstream and spawn.

• 2:34:06Steven Rinella?

  And they skip their whole return to the ocean.

• 2:34:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:34:08Steven Rinella?

  You replicate, you replicate.

• 2:34:10Speaker 06

  Circumvented that, yeah.

• 2:34:11Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 2:34:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:13Steven Rinella?

  So you've cut out whatever mortality happens out on the open ocean.

• 2:34:16Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 2:34:17Speaker 07

  Our communications director, he made a, um, a little pamphlet and it shows like the steelhead spa where he's kicked back.

• 2:34:27Steven Rinella?

  No kidding, really?

• 2:34:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:28Steven Rinella?

  You just say like, we'll take care of everything, brother.

• 2:34:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:34:31Steven Rinella?

  And then when you're ready to go again, we'll let you go.

• 2:34:33Speaker 06

  And they home back to the same stream and we have.

• 2:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Well, how many fish can you actually do that with?

• 2:34:37Speaker 06

  Well, it's a, it's a, it's a safety net thing, right? I mean, you've got these low number, numbers of fish in certain populations and you can target it to those streams by having a weir or some way of collecting to that stream. And especially in a place where you're really worried about them blinking out. Or you get bigger collections, more generalized, like Lower Granite has the whole Snake River. We release them though, and the fish.

• 2:35:00Steven Rinella?

  How many fish?

• 2:35:01Speaker 06

  Uh, a hundred maybe, or a hundred and fifty. We've been concentrating, we've been doing it at a research scale.

• 2:35:06Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, I understand, I understand.

• 2:35:07Speaker 06

  This is now.

• 2:35:08Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I'm not trying to dog on it. I was just trying to get a sense of.

• 2:35:10Speaker 06

  Now we're gearing up to do this as a production scale. It's a first tribe project at a production scale.

• 2:35:15Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's cool.

• 2:35:16Speaker 06

  But there's fish that go back to the Amaha, the Upper Salmon River, the, the Grand Ron, the Clearwater, the Seash, everywhere.

• 2:35:25Steven Rinella?

  This is, but it'll, like, it's great.

• 2:35:28Speaker 06

  And it's wild fish.

• 2:35:29Steven Rinella?

  And I, and I know we're looking for positives. It's great, but it's like, that is sort of like definite, you know, the term conservation dependent? That is like. Like the poster child of conservation dependence.

• 2:35:39Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:35:40Steven Rinella?

  You know, I mean, we have the fish because we literally handle it and care for it, you know?

• 2:35:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:35:48Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's great. But, but, I mean, you know, I don't want to be Debbie Downer. It's great, but it's like, holy shit, has it come to that? Do you know what I mean?

• 2:35:59Speaker 06

  That's the problem is that wild steelhead recovery, nothing's really worked.

• 2:36:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:04Speaker 06

  You do supplementation, some things that have worked, we've been able to pull off with salmon. Hasn't worked for steelhead. We get hatchery fish, but getting more wild.

• 2:36:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, all this conversation about how do you get these big ass fish out of the ocean to their spawning grounds? And with steelhead, it's like, okay, let's get these big ass fish out of the ocean, up to their spawning grounds, back to the ocean. Right?

• 2:36:26Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:36:26Steven Rinella?

  And you're like, oh, that's tricky.

• 2:36:28Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:36:28Steven Rinella?

  Right? They're not going back down.

• 2:36:30Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 2:36:30Speaker 05

  What about, uh, like Snake River Fall Chinook and then Sockeye and Coho?

• 2:36:36Speaker 05

  We've got those on the list for your success stories.

• 2:36:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. So in about the early nineties, Snake River Fall Chinook were under a hundred fish at Lower Granite. And, uh, Nez Perce tribe had a, a hatchery program for Fall Chinook. And that stock has rebounded to where the peak was about 90,000 fish in the Snake River. Um, I think it's hovering now around anywhere from 30 to 50,000.

• 2:37:03Steven Rinella?

  With some natural reproduction?

• 2:37:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you get some natural, so the idea there is to, to collect the fish and then out, outplant those juveniles so that they'll return to the.

• 2:37:14Steven Rinella?

  So there you're helping them, you're helping them get back to the ocean.

• 2:37:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, kind of that hatch, it's integrated hatchery program. So you're taking in wild fish as well as the hatchery fish, trying to, to maintain the genetic, you know, your genetic integrity and stuff.

• 2:37:29Steven Rinella?

  And those are getting back home on their own fins. I mean, they're going back up to, they'll later make it up on their own.

• 2:37:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's fisheries now. There wasn't a Fall Chinook. When I was in college, there wasn't Fall Chinook fisheries in the, in the Snake River. There are.

• 2:37:41Speaker 05

  How big is the Fall Chinook?

• 2:37:43Steven Rinella?

  There on that river.

• 2:37:44Speaker 06

  Twenty-five, twenty, twenty-five pounds, twenty to thirty, yeah, yeah. And and it's fisheries all the way down as well as off the coast.

• 2:37:55Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, dudes, yeah, dudes are catching those fish all on the whole system.

• 2:37:59Speaker 05

  What about Saka and Coho? It says you had some reintroductions.

• 2:38:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, and that was a a tribally led effort, like how I had mentioned, a lot of the the hatchery production um being in the lower river, which was a natural, you're just feeding your your sport and commercial harvest and totally excluding the tribes and everybody inland. So it was um, we started the Coho reintroductions back in the nineties and taking um juveniles from the lower river and taking them back into their tributaries, like in the Metau and the Wenatchee, the Yakima. And that was highly successful, and so that was replicated by the Nez Perce tribe. Um, and it was actually um uh, the state of Idaho has a law against reintroduction programs.

• 2:38:48Speaker 07

  And it was by by night that actually, it's our tribal chairman now, Gerald Lewis. He he worked in fisheries for a number of years, and it was back when he was in fisheries, he drove the truck in the middle of the night of taking those Coho up to the Nez Perce tribe so that they could reintroduce them.

• 2:39:08Steven Rinella?

  Because those become illegal.

• 2:39:10Speaker 07

  It was illegally, yeah, so under threat of arrest by the state.

• 2:39:14Speaker 05

  Tribal land?

• 2:39:15Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm, in.

• 2:39:17Steven Rinella?

  Cause more they, cause they don't wanna then create like new ESA issues for themselves.

• 2:39:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, more responsibilities for maintaining and and all that type of thing, so.

• 2:39:28Steven Rinella?

  Cynicism, dude, is just unbelievable.

• 2:39:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, so.

• 2:39:32Steven Rinella?

  The level like, like, don't put some there, cause then we'll be obligated to like, do something to allow them to live.

• 2:39:38Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm, so that the Coho reintroductions were were highly successful. We brought we started out bringing in juveniles and we'd hold them in acclimation ponds for a month or so and then release them from there. And then as. They started returning, then we started building things out into a full supplementation program where we're getting getting our own brood to spawn and all these generations and and then we're still incorporating some of the lower river like as needed, but yeah, it's almost becoming a self-sufficient program and but also you have the the anti-hattery group, but we're leading on the genetic side where we're incorporating,

• 2:40:21Speaker 07

  you know, trying to have that genetic diversity and we use stocks that were like similar to this area and distance and things like that, but you know, we're just being mindful of the work that we do, so um, there wouldn't be, there wouldn't be Coho above Bonneville Dam if it wasn't for the efforts of the tribes and I always credit our senior most biologist, Tom Scribner with Yakima and he hates that I I call him out all the time, but that was his life's work. He did years and years of advocacy and then also fighting with our state co-managers because they were against it because there was worries because

• 2:41:01Speaker 07

  you know, Coho are more voracious eaters and they were worried about them eating the spring Chinook. It's like these things coexisted for millions of years. It's like we just need to get them back and they'll work out their areas and where they live and you know, like it took us to mess them up, let's help them recover. And the same thing with the Sauk I reintroduction, um, you know, we we're working with the Okanagan Nation Alliance in Canada collecting fish at um Wanapum Dam, which is just upstream of the Snake River because the Snake River Sauk I are listed, so that's what that has all the ESA restrictions and concerns, so we're collecting above the Snake

• 2:41:46Speaker 07

  and then so we're did reintroduction programs into the Yakima into Lake Klielum.

• 2:41:54Speaker 07

  And we just completed a passage project at Lake Clealum because that was used as an irrigation reservoir. You know, it was checked up and so there was no passage and that's how that's how the Sauk I were extirpated in the tributaries was from irrigation.

• 2:42:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:10Speaker 07

  The river reclamation, you know, these dams, these diversions without passage, no fish screens and de-watering events and things like that. So, you know, the tribes have really been working together with BOR and the local irrigation districts to be able to to get fish. Um, like, how can we work together? The Yakima Basin Integrated Plan is a great success story of that. They got this like thirty million dollar fish passage structure at Lake Clealum for juveniles to outmigrate. They'll still have to truck the adults over the dam, but they could go up into the tributaries and spawn rear in the lake and have access to get out. So

• 2:42:50Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:51Speaker 07

  That's been a huge success story and we've been talking, working with the Nez Perce tribe. Uh, they wanna do reintroductions into Lake Walaua for Sauk I as well.

• 2:43:01Steven Rinella?

  Wow, man.

• 2:43:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, but that's really complicated because, you know, like with the ESA listings and what poor shape the the Snake River Sauk I are in. So they're collecting at Bonneville Dam and they actually utilize our genetic technology. They collect that Bonneville Dam and then they screen out and, you know, they could see.

• 2:43:22Steven Rinella?

  You're kidding me? You can screen out the ESA ones from the non?

• 2:43:25Speaker 07

  Yeah. GSI, right?

• 2:43:27Steven Rinella?

  So like you, we can move, you buddy, you gotta stay put.

• 2:43:30Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:43:30Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 2:43:31Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:43:32Speaker 06

  And I think that's one of the the big success stories too is collaboration. I mean, through the the Six Sovereigns, uh, stuff that that Donella was talking about with the other with states of Oregon, Washington, the treaty tribes. Um, we work great with, uh, and at Bonneville Dam, that's an integrated crew that we have with the Sea Lion Project. It's got people from state of Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and, uh, Kritvik that we have the all working together. It's under the same permit and It's all jointly done. So from the dark times that you talked about earlier, it's it's we're not all the way there, but it's better.

• 2:44:13Speaker 06

  It's looking, it's a lot better than when I started. It's it's it's improving and it gives you a hope that I think, you know, it can get better.

• 2:44:21Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, that that man, one of the things I appreciate about the conversations, I've always looked at the whole issue being that like. I always looked at it like binary to be that the dams stay. And the fish go or the dams go and the fish stay and it's encouraging to think that there could be. I mean, as much as it is like becomes like very conservation dependent, very expensive, but you could see some level of progress. You know, and like at least hang on and wait for like a better day, you know, like just to have something to save, right?

• 2:44:59Steven Rinella?

  I don't know if I've mentioned a couple of towns already, but my brother is the fisheries guy in Alaska. He had this really interesting perspective about Alaska versus. Alaska versus the lower forty eight. He'd said that.

• 2:45:12Steven Rinella?

  Conservation, the lower forty eight is it's all recovery.

• 2:45:16Steven Rinella?

  Do you mean we're like, we're in recovery mode up there. They're still in. Almost like a classification mode. They're still trying to go like, what's here? Right? Like, what is here? Trying to count things, describe things, get a sense of what's there. And down here, it's like, we just look at like, what's gone? You know what I mean? How do we try to fix our mistakes?

• 2:45:41Speaker 07

  So hard because it's salmon, our international issue, right? Even the harvest of salmon, because that's why we have the. Pacific Salmon Commission, Pacific Salmon Treaty, looking, you know, when. Things really tanked back in the eighties and the the numbers were in dire straits and in the Columbia Basin and. That's when, you know, those court cases were happening and our tribal fisheries programs were really being established and. The tribes started their supplementation efforts. That's when you could see the rebound in the. In the the curve on the graph of when our tribe started doing that, that work to get us here.

• 2:46:19Steven Rinella?

  We haven't even gotten into all that stuff with like high seas, drift nets and dudes out. And almost an international waters peeling off American salmon, man, like we didn't even get into that stuff.

• 2:46:28Speaker 07

  And, and the bycatch of salmon in other fisheries is huge.

• 2:46:32Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, and then they go digging into cans of salmon and it's full of canned steelhead that they're catching out on the high seas, you know, it's just like unbelievable, man.

• 2:46:40Speaker 06

  Big, the year, the odd years with the high pink numbers, that's being seen, we're seeing decreased signal in Chinook and other lower forty-eight fish. And, you know, those are Alaska as well as, as Japan and, and some of those Asian countries that are putting out a lot of pinks.

• 2:46:58Steven Rinella?

  No one's sorting through those nets, man.

• 2:47:01Speaker 07

  And, and that's all, it's done just for corporate interest, right? It's not anything natural, it's not a natural population, it's not a public service, it's these groups putting out all this pink catch reproduction just for this commercial fishery, low value commercial fishery in comparison to what they could be having in sockeye.

• 2:47:24Steven Rinella?

  I sent Yanni the other day, do you have that text message? Pull up that text message. I sent Yanni some fish price stuff, we'll close out, we'll almost close out with this.

• 2:47:33Speaker 00

  And we can't forget about where to go if you want to donate.

• 2:47:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but, uh, we're talking about just relative value here, when you're talking about like pink, like the, the pink industry, do you have that?

• 2:47:45Speaker 06

  Nickel?

• 2:47:47Steven Rinella?

  This is paid at the dock, yeah.

• 2:47:49Speaker 04

  Steve and I exchanged at times a lot of texts, so it's taken just a second.

• 2:47:55Steven Rinella?

  I think it was six cents?

• 2:47:56Speaker 06

  Six, yeah.

• 2:47:57Steven Rinella?

  And then compared to like a sockeye or a king, hopefully Yanni can find it.

• 2:48:02Speaker 07

  There's, there's been years that when I grew up fishing, we were getting two and a half cents a pound for thuleys on the, on the clambi. It, it's the, it's a different stock of fish like that runs in the, the lower river. You have upriver brights that were farther upstream.

• 2:48:21Steven Rinella?

  Oh, truly like T H U L.

• 2:48:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:48:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 2:48:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, but two and a half cents a pound.

• 2:48:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, these were overall average prices, uh, paid to fishermen in twenty twenty-five. This is the Alaska Fishing Game Department. Uh, Chinook took six forty a pound. Uh, next down.

• 2:48:40Steven Rinella?

  This is paid to fishermen at the docks, six forty a pound.

• 2:48:43Speaker 04

  Next down the line was Coho at one forty-one, Sockeye at one seventeen. Surprisingly to me, chums were eighty cents and then the pinks came in at thirty.

• 2:48:54Steven Rinella?

  Oh, thirty cents, okay. But like, just a relative picture, the, the way that the values on these fish are perceived, you know, and then like the amount of like, yeah. The other thing about the, man, this is such a rich subject, you go on and on, but like, the hat, the pink hatchery stuff. Is you think, like, you think when you're running cattle, when you're running cattle and you want to graze cattle on public land, you pay a grazing fee. You have a contract to pay a grazing fee. A cannery runs a pink hatch, they're grazing for free. That stuff goes out in the open ocean and grazes for free. And then it comes back and you sell it for thirty cents, you know what I mean? You sell it for thirty cents a pound, dude, it's competing with wild fish.

• 2:49:40Speaker 06

  And then compared to the market, I was looking at just Pike Place fish prices as of yesterday, and of course, it's probably going to be more expensive, but thirty to forty pounds for wild.

• 2:49:52Speaker 04

  Dollars.

• 2:49:52Speaker 06

  Chinook.

• 2:49:53Steven Rinella?

  Thirty to forty bucks for wild pounds, a pound of wild chinook.

• 2:49:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, and then, that's, that was an average, then Pike Place was fifty-five for filets. Um, Sockeye is about fifty dollars a pound for filets and Coho is, uh, twenty-eight.

• 2:50:10Steven Rinella?

  Are pinks on there?

• 2:50:11Speaker 06

  Uh, nope. Sturgeon, white sturgeon was like, average ten to thirty, depending upon, you know.

• 2:50:18Steven Rinella?

  You know who else we didn't get to? We didn't get to bitching about killer whales.

• 2:50:24Steven Rinella?

  Who I guess could go into a school of pinks, if there's a king in there, they go into that school, it could be thousands of pinks and they're gonna grab the king.

• 2:50:32Steven Rinella?

  Dude, they know.

• 2:50:33Speaker 06

  They know the price.

• 2:50:36Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, isn't that wild? They'll, they, they'll sort through, they'll sort through and find kings. Cause like, that's the good one, that's the fanny one right there.

• 2:50:45Speaker 07

  Well, that's like with sea lions, right? Doug was talking about the stellers that eat, uh, sturgeon, they were primarily going after the big females and eating out the bellies.

• 2:50:55Steven Rinella?

  Cause they wanted to row.

• 2:50:55Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:50:57Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Animals.

• 2:50:59Speaker 04

  Well, it gives me hope, like your, your aha moment story of seeing those giant fish in that pool. I feel like the stuff you guys are doing, if at the minimum, you're giving the opportunity for future generations to have that moment. Hopefully, we can keep the whole thing going. And then to think that we could have like what Alaska has, like literally right here, or within a half a day's drive where we're sitting right now, and that we don't, and that we're not putting more effort into doing it.

• 2:51:28Steven Rinella?

  Could've walked across the river on them.

• 2:51:30Speaker 04

  It's kinda crazy.

• 2:51:31Speaker 07

  It's the, the resistance to change and moving beyond the status quo of that's the way we've always done things like, you have this old car that's all beat up and I'm barely keeping it running, but I refuse to, to trade it in.

• 2:51:47Speaker 04

  Well, it's the baseline syndrome too, right? None of us here in this room have ever, would ever know, see, have seen or would know what it was like to have those kind of fisheries right here.

• 2:51:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, like my little kids, like if things, if we don't turn things around on salmon, my little kids would be like, man, 2025 was bitchin', dude, we got three kings.

• 2:52:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:52:09Steven Rinella?

  You'd never see that now.

• 2:52:11Speaker 07

  Well, there's a lot of miscon-

• 2:52:12Steven Rinella?

  That was the good old days, dude.

• 2:52:14Speaker 07

  There's a lot of misconceptions too. People don't understand that, like, what are they complaining about? Like, they see those reels and those videos of all those fish coming back to those pink catcheries, you know, and that, that's what they're showing. The, that, that's not what's going on in the, in reality and having fish coming back to the rivers and the spawning grounds and, and things like that. That's more natural, but they see these, these outrageous things and think that's not a big deal. And there's also a lot of misconception and we call it the numbers game, right? They're looking at the total number of salmon that passed Bonneville Dam. That's kinda what the outsider's view is success of the health of the river.

• 2:52:59Speaker 07

  Like, you know, we're around two million now, but a lot of that is still lower river hatcheries. You have a little white salmon and, and spring chinook catcheries where, where they're not, whereas wild, wild chinook, wild spring chinook in the, the upper and mid Columbia, you're only getting like a thousand.

• 2:53:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I got you.

• 2:53:20Speaker 07

  Of that, so.

• 2:53:21Steven Rinella?

  You can kind of cook the numbers, you make them, you can show what you want to show with the numbers.

• 2:53:25Speaker 07

  Mm-hmm, and then also, um, understanding that harvest is limited by those weaker stocks. Because you have ESA restrictions on, on spring chinook all throughout the basin. So you have very little access to harvest spring chinook. And, you know, the numbers are so low, well, sea lions are eating most of them before they get to us. And then we fight over the, what, seventeen percent harvest that's shared between the, the states and the tribes.

• 2:53:56Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:53:56Speaker 07

  And, um, and then also in the summer, because of the ESA listed sockeye concerns. And, um, we, we can't, we can't access, we can't fish those, um, on, on the successful Okanagan fish or, you know, upper Columbia fish because of ESA restrictions. And the same thing happens in our fall fisheries. Uh, we have, um, mesh restriction sizes because of, um, B-run steelhead limitations.

• 2:54:25Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:54:26Speaker 07

  So, it's like, things are great, but like, no, it's not. You have to look at the real picture of what's going on throughout the basin.

• 2:54:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Well, that's it, man, we go on all day, but this has been great talking to you guys about, I've learned a ton.

• 2:54:42Speaker 07

  And I'm just one person, we have a ton of great experts on any subject you want to touch on. And it would be really awesome to, you know, like, focus more on the CBRI, the Columbia Basin Restoration Initiative. And, you know, that's what we're continuing to work for, towards and advocate for, to get, get these actions done, to continue the success. And also, you know, looking for partnerships of, you know, how we could work together. Because, you know, the only time we make actionable change is when we set aside our differences to focus on our commonalities.

• 2:55:17Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 2:55:18Speaker 07

  And that's when we connect. And also connecting as people, like how I said about, you know, salmon, it's the heart of our culture. It's cultural, it's spiritual, you know, like, and even.

• 2:55:30Speaker 07

  Things don't have to be religious to be spiritual. It could be that way for you or anybody else. Like I talked to a lot of our staff. I shared my aha moment of that seeing that fish 800 miles away. And they've talked about sitting alongside the stream bank and seeing that fish jumping to get over this barrier, things like that. Like, we can all feel that connection. We get out there and it's, there's, you can't put a value on that. So. Take a first step, audience members. If you want to donate, can you guys plug your website?

• 2:56:05Speaker 07

  I know there's a donate tab there, yep. Yeah, on our, on our webpage, the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission. It's at www.critfc.org. So C-R-I-T-F-C.org.

• 2:56:22Steven Rinella?

  Yep. All you non-Indian fellers out here, these are the fish. Same old fish.

• 2:56:30Steven Rinella?

  Thanks for coming on, guys.

• 2:56:32Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 2:56:33Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:57:00Steven Rinella?

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• 2:57:40Speaker 05

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