Dam Stupid

No less outrageous was the NMFS directive that because the dams were in place before the fish were listed, they were natural features like waterfalls (See "Removing Dams from Consideration," FR&R March 2005).

Under court orders, NMFS now admits that the dams jeopardize salmonids and that the structures aren't part of the natural environment after all. But it proclaims that "reasonable and prudent alternatives" mandated by the Endangered Species Act "will not only prevent harm to threatened and endangered salmon, but will ultimately move the species towards recovery."

As "reasonable and prudent alternatives" it has trotted out all the bells, whistles and hydro-system tweaks that have failed to reverse the crash of wild fish and in some cases facilitated it: increasing hatchery production, spilling water over the dams (less water, in fact, than called for in the 2004 plan), killing and moving predators, barging smolts, screening smolts from turbines and restoring terrestrial habitat (pretty much intact in the Snake watershed anyway).

Predator control is just one of the extremes to which the federal government goes in its profligate, obsessive-compulsive quest to make the world safe for obsolete dams. To a state fisheries biologist working to boost next year's run, knocking off a few salmonid-eaters might seem "reasonable and prudent," but it is not, as the Bush administration states, an "alternative" to jeopardizing the existence of 13 threatened and endangered salmonid stocks with four obsolete dams.

Consider the attempted control of squawfish (renamed "pikeminnow" by the PC fish police, a moniker rejected by curmudgeonly fish advocates over 50). These are not the Colorado squawfish endangered by dams and other river manipulations, but the northern squawfish that have exploded in tepid, dam-made dead water. Don't consider solving the problem by breaching the dams; try to fool the public and the courts by declaring war on squawfish with an old-fashioned bounty system funded by the Bonneville Power Administration and administered by the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission and the fish-and-wildlife departments of Washington and Oregon.

The bounty may have marginally increased runs of summer Chinook (whose smolts migrate in summer when squawfish are active), but Dr. Behnke tells me this: "Effectiveness was likely overrated because most of the salmonids consumed were impaired after passing through turbines -- wounded minnow effect -- and probably would have had low survival if not taken by predators."

And such 1920s-style manipulation teaches politicians and the public bad lessons while distracting them from biological realities.

"The pitch is that the bounty is really important for recovering fish, which isn't true at all," says Bert Bowler. "It's another ruse from the federal side in its effort to protect the status quo of the hydro system."

The amount of money pumped out annually to squawfish bounty hunters is obscene, particularly when one considers all the other ways it could be spent. For your first 100 squawfish you get $4 each; then $5 each; after 400, you get $8 each. Catch a tagged squawfish and you collect $500. In 2006 (the most recent year for which I could obtain data), squawfish bounty hunters raked in $1,568,722. High rod, David Vasilchuk of Vancouver, killed 5,714, including eight that were tagged, thereby earning $48,348.

"How can YOU save a salmon? Go fishing!" proclaims the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife on its squawfish-bounty Website, calling to mind the equally brainless and incorrect bumper-stickers one encounters in the Rocky Mountain West: "Save a Deer Kill a Wolf."