A small world just got smaller in the most enjoyable way possible.
Fishing will do that; especially when it’s all about chums.
I met Yas Suzuki of Beaverton a couple years ago when we shared a boat and fishing trip with my son, Buzz Ramsey and Tony Amato.
I met — or heard anyway — Kelcee Smith of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife last month during her talk about research on the lower Columbia River, sponsored by the Clackamas River Basin Council (I’m a member and past chair).
Smith holds a doctorate in renewable natural resources and is the department’s chum salmon reintroduction coordinator for a required restoration effort on the lower Columbia River.
Our lives all came together this past week after Smith learned the DNA of a rare-in-this-area chum salmon had been officially detected for the first time in the Clackamas River, near the mouth of Eagle Creek.
Odds are strong it was the same chum salmon Suzuki caught and released last Nov. 3 a few bends upriver from Carver, while fishing with Dan Marston, who lives nearby.
The eDNA sample (“e” for environmental) was taken last November by Dave Bugni of Eagle Creek, another friend and current chair of the Basin Council. Smith sent the sample to a DNA lab to test specifically for chum salmon. Smith said the fish in his photo looked like a female.
How much smaller can it get?
Suzuki caught the unusual stray migrant with a spinning rod I sold him last year.
He badly wanted an orange rod. His email address includes “bleedorange.”
Yup, I’m also an Oregon State fan and had an extra orange rod I didn’t use; now it’s his.
That small.
Even more fascinating, though, is Smith’s demanding work. She and her team are charged with restoration of a sustaining lower-river population of chum salmon, once numbering a million fish per year. They’re federally listed as a threatened species.
In 1920, chums were the major canning species of Columbia salmon and historically made it into most tributaries up to Celilo Falls — including the Clackamas, Sandy and Hood rivers, including small tributaries below Willamette Falls. A few pass upriver each year over both the falls and Bonneville Dam.
Lingering spawning populations are found along the lower Columbia’s Washington shoreline. Oregon has worked hard for more than two decades to build a hatchery run into the department’s Big Creek Hatchery, east of Astoria.
Smith said chums prefer clean water, lower portions of rivers and streams and a lower gradient, without heavy rapids.
Oregon has more than two decades invested in lower Columbia chum restoration, based upon native Big Creek chum salmon.
The efforts have been successful and Smith now has enough fry to release into chum-friendly tributaries of both the Big Creek and Clatskanie River systems.
Chum fry seem more loyal to their natal waters than other salmon, which tend to stray. The tiny fish don’t tarry and ready-to-scoot-to-sea fry were released in 2022 and 2023.
Chums remain in the ocean nearly as long as chinook, so it’s too soon to assess the program’s fry-to-adult success.
However, Smith’s team continues to sample many large and small drainages for the presence of chum eDNA.
Basically, water samples are taken from rivers and streams, filtered to capture particles sloughed off fish, animals, flora, etc., and sent to labs to test for specific DNA.
Testing is extensive throughout the lower Columbia River, including both the Clackamas and Sandy river systems.
Plans may ultimately expand hatchery releases into the Clackamas and Sandy rivers, but that’s likely far in the future. Smith said it will depend upon both the success of current release-to-adult programs and continued improvements in habitat.
While the heavily striped chum salmon may not appear as resplendent as their cousins, they’re important to river systems, Smith said.
Spawning adults help clean the gravel, then provide nutrients to dozens of species after they die. For that matter, so do hapless fry unable to scramble to sea quite quickly enough.
They’re also culturally important to Native Americans.
Perhaps, as Smith admits, they may not rebuild into cannery numbers of yore, but as Smith points out “It’s fine about not being tasty. ... They’re just so much fun to catch!”
Suzuki, the consummate orange-rod owner, agrees.
“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he recalls of his historic catch (move over Rudyard Kipling, who wrote about catching a Clackamas River salmon within eyesight of the Suzuki chum’s deep pool).
“It actually came to the boat like a hooked snag or branch; I don’t think it knew it was hooked, but then everything came undone and it exploded all over the place.”
-- Bill Monroe for The Oregonian/OregonLive
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