Sockeye entered the Columbia River in recent weeks, beginning a 900-mile migration that very nearly ended 20 years ago.
Only four Snake River sockeye made their way through eight dams and past nets and predators in 1992, a year after the fish that makes its home in Idaho's Sawtooth Valley was listed as endangered. Only one male completed the final climb up the Snake and Salmon rivers to a weir on Redfish Lake Creek on Aug. 4....
Since 2008, more than 650 sockeye have returned annually to the Sawtooth Valley, peaking in 2010 with 1,355, the most since the 1950s, before four dams were built in Washington.
This year biologists predict 1,000 could return, and productivity of the natural fish that spawn in Redfish has increased to a point that they are replacing themselves, said Mike Peterson, an Idaho Department of Fish and Game research biologist.
This reversal could not have happened without the work of a coalition of federal, state and tribal teams throughout the Northwest. But it also needed the broad bipartisan support that came in part because of the story of Lonesome Larry.
Read the whole story. It's hard to imagine parts of it taking place today:
[The recovery program] required several state and federal hatcheries and also an expansion of the Eagle Hatchery, which is the center of the program today. But when it was up for funding in 2006, an independent science group recommended to the Northwest Power Planning Council that it turn down the request because of the low productivity of the population, which it attributed to the lack of genetic diversity.Jim Risch, now a U.S. senator, had just been appointed governor and he had the power to sway the council.
"I said don't pull the plug," Risch said. "Sometimes you have to temper (the science)." Later that spring, as Boise River floodwaters threatened to inundate the hatchery and kill thousands of sockeye, Risch rebuilt a structure to hold back the water over the objections of federal regulators.
"I told them if you want to arrest anyone you know where you can find me," Risch said.
A politician (Republican, no less) going out on a limb to preserve an endangered species? Print this story out, fold up the page and keep it nearby to sustain you during those stretches where you despair of anyone who can do anything for vulnerable lands, waters, or creatures doing it. If it happened once, it could again. I say we offer any pol doing the same a get-out-of-one-sex-scandal-unscathed card for each comparable action (no lifetime limit). (Risch actually has a crappy environmental record overall, but I'll give credit where due).
What followed from Larry's lonely final voyage shows what's possible when people are willing to put brains, hearts, and bucks into something that matters to them, even if the powers that be (and their data sets) block the path.
Larry himself, stuffed and mounted at the MK Nature Center in Boise, ID,
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