The Idaho Statesman published an article on Saturday June 28 that professed great surprise at a larger than expected return of sockeye salmon to the Columbia River. The article quoted NOAA fisheries spokesman Brian Gorman saying, “It’s a mystery. This is nothing like what was predicted.”

The story then compared the sockeye count at Bonneville Dam east of Portland as “157,486 fish through Thursday compared with 15,427 at the same time last year. Last year’s entire run was 26,700 sockeye at Bonneville Dam.” The article goes on to describe this year’s abundant return as a head-scratcher that biologists often credit or blame enigmatic “ocean conditions” for small and large salmon runs, and that salmon spend one to four years in the ocean before returning to their native rivers to spawn.

If one gazes at the graph on the front page (a graph using similar data is reproduced above) it shows the 2008 year class (adult fish returning to spawn) is the largest since 2004. Not coincidentally, the fish that returned in 2004 were the parents of this year’s run. And that’s important because since sockeye are generally a four year old fish when they return, one should compare salmon numbers to the previous generation (not the previous year like the article did) to get a sense of whether a population is increasing or declining.

The improvement over 2004, from roughly 130,000 to 200,000, is about 55 percent, which is definitely good, but not unprecedented.

When the article compares this year’s return to last year’s, which shows a 10 fold increase, it repeats a mistake of comparing different year classes with one another. It is also surprising that no biologist would have pointed out that the 2008 adult sockeye salmon returning to the Columbia River is based on the large return from 2004.

The article also downplayed the role of the favorable river flows and spill over the dams in 2006 which is the year these sockeye left their natal waters in Washington (as well as those from Idaho’s Stanley Basin) and migrated seaward. Because of the heavy-handed politics of the hydropower industry and Bush Administration control of Federal agencies in recent years, talk is muzzled about the role of river flows and spill at the Columbia River dams in the conservation on salmon. The ocean has become a convenient diversionary tactic of the Federal hydropower managers.  They like to talk about the role of ocean survival, of habitat in the headwaters, of Indians fishing, and of commercial fishing and sport anglers. All of those factors have their place, but they are more often used as a diversion from discussion about the role of the river conditions and the hydropower operations.  Unfortunately the Feds have developed a case of amnesia when it comes to the role of river flows and spill at dams.

So when you hear about this great sockeye salmon return in 2008, remember that the rate of return was about 55 percent higher than the previous generation, not ten times that of the previous year.  And remember that river flows and spill two and three years prior have a role in determing the fate of salmon when they return to spawn.