The
Oregonian
06/25/03
In a state where good news seems about as rare as gray wolves, there ought to be
more enthusiasm about an environmental success story: the resurgence of coho
salmon.
Coho
are bouncing back, if not yet in historic terms, at least in numbers strong
enough to allow fishing and to suggest that Oregon is on the right track in
restoring the region's signature fish. Saturday's opening of the restored coho
season looked a little like the good old days, with busy charter boats and
limits of hatchery fish laid out on docks from Garibaldi to Winchester Bay.
President Bush's top environmental adviser came to Oregon 10 days ago to discuss
with Gov. Ted Kulongoski a possible agreement that could remove the coastal coho
from the federal endangered species list. By year's end, Oregon could again have
full responsibility for protecting the salmon so precious to coastal
communities.
Of course, it's far too soon to declare victory in Oregon's effort to restore
coho. Returns of wild coho that spawn naturally in Oregon's coastal streams are
still perilously low in some river systems. It's clear that ocean conditions,
more than any other factor, are responsible for the surge in coho numbers.
Yet the fish are coming back strong. This year fisheries regulators will allow
anglers to fill a quota of 88,000 coho off the central Oregon coast. That's
worth celebrating in a place where salmon numbers so completely collapsed that
ocean coho fishing was prohibited entirely from 1994 to 1998 -- nearly wiping
out charter fishing businesses up and down the coast.
The coho's steady resurgence from the grim years of the mid-1990s should provide
even more momentum to the Oregon Salmon Plan, the recovery effort set in motion
by Gov. John Kitzhaber and other leaders, and carried out by thousands of
property owners, watershed boards and volunteers in river basins throughout
Western Oregon.
The National Marine Fisheries Service will spend the next six months determining
if the Oregon Plan is sufficient to conditionally remove the coho salmon's
threatened status under the Endangered Species Act. If it does come off the
list, the coho would be the first of 26 Northwest salmon runs to be removed from
the ESA.
Coho runs in Oregon have increased from just 22,000 in 1997 to more than 268,000
last year. That's a credit not just to the prime ocean conditions, but also to
the hard work on the ground in river basins throughout Oregon, and the lottery
money that voters set aside in 1998 for stream restoration and salmon recovery.
There's still a rollicking debate in Oregon about whether strict limits on
streamside logging and other land uses to protect coho are necessary. There are
still questions about whether Oregon is committed not just to producing more and
more hatchery coho, but to the hard work necessary to restore wild, naturally
reproducing fish. There are moves afoot in the Legislature to strip some funding
from salmon recovery, and divert millions of dollars dedicated to stream
restoration to a hatchery research facility.
There should be no letup, no backsliding, in coho salmon restoration in Oregon.
This is a bright, encouraging moment in Northwest salmon recovery. It is by no
means the end.
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