Coho restored to Oregon river
LOSTINE, Oregon — These speckled, rosetinted fish haven’t been spotted in this bubbling river in remote northeastern Oregon for more than 30 years — until now.
But this week, the waters of the Lostine River suddenly came alive as hundreds of the juvenile coho salmon, between 10 and 13 centimetres long, shot from a long white hose attached to a water tanker truck and into the frigid current. The fish jumped and splashed and some, momentarily shell-shocked, hid along the bank as onlookers crowded in for photos.
“All of us are speaking from the heart and our gladness for these fish coming back into this river, bringing something that has vanished, but has come back,” Nez Perce tribal elder Charles Axtell said.
The cohos’ baptism in this far-flung river marks the end of one journey and the beginning of another — an attempt to restore a lost species to a tribe and to a region.
The fish, raised by state wildlife officials in a hatchery outside Portland, were trucked 480 kilometres inland in nine water-tanker trucks equipped with highly sensitive oxygen and temperature sensors and a bubbling system that mimics a river’s current.
Now in the Lostine River, they must turn around and swim 960 km to the Pacific Ocean over the next month and then swim home after a year and a half in the Pacific Ocean, feeding and growing.
Coho salmon once numbered 20,000 here each year and were part of a rich tribal tradition for the Nez Perce. The tribe was driven from this part of Oregon by the U.S. government more than a century ago, but its members consider the species critical to their history and have fought for years to bring back the reddish, hook-nosed fish.
Numbers of coho declined throughout the 20th century due to pollution, human impacts on their habitat, overfishing and the construction of hydroelectric dams that impeded their progress upstream.