Tribe prepares fish revival

BONNERS FERRY, Idaho – The beds are made and lunch is nearly fixed. The Kootenai Tribe of Idaho is ready for their fish to come home again.

For the past three years, the tribe has been involved in an ambitious project to restore native kokanee salmon to the Kootenai River system.

Although the fish managed to endure an ice age, the species was wiped out of the watershed in less than a generation – the Libby Dam cut off their food supply and their spawning beds had been destroyed by cattle and bulldozers.

Kootenay Lake, a massive reservoir north of the border where the fish traditionally spent their adult life, is being fertilized to boost plankton production. And the tribe has been working with landowners to rehabilitate the kokanee’s ancient spawning beds. Next month, the tribe will plant three million salmon eggs in the washed gravel of the beds.

“Everything seems to be falling into place,” said Sue Ireland, the tribe’s fish and wildlife director. “We expect thick fall runs again in less than a decade.”

The fish could even become a tourist destination – the tribe hopes to work with local groups to construct a viewable spawning channel near the visitor center at the Kootenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Although the restoration effort has required the fitting together of numerous missing pieces from a vast ecological puzzle – healing the spawning beds, boosting nutrients in the reservoir and ensuring continued flow of clean water from the headwaters – the tribe has been mostly focused on fixing the spawning beds in Parker, Trout, Myrtle and Long Canyon creeks. The Kootenai River tributaries flow across the fertile floodplain between Bonners Ferry and the Canadian border.

On Tuesday, tribal officials and scientists visited the creeks and observed the changes.

In 2001, the banks of Trout Creek had been grazed to bare earth. The creek itself was wide, shallow and no longer cooled by the shade of trees and shrubs. The landowner, Bob Krause, approached the tribe and asked for help restoring the stream. Krause, an aging rancher, spent his life on the land and remembered days when there seemed to be no end to the kokanee, trout and burbot.

The tribe worked with Krause to develop a responsible grazing program, one in which cattle are kept away from the stream banks except for brief periods of “flash grazing” used to control certain weeds. Native trees and shrubs also were planted along the creeks to produce water-cooling shade and cover. Stumps, tree tops and logs were placed in the creeks to restore natural riffles and pools.

Solar-operated water pumps have been installed to give cows a source of water away from the edge of the creek. Krause died not long after the restoration work began, but in the years since, his creek has turned into prime kokanee reproductive real estate. The stream has narrowed. Some stretches are now shaded. Deep pools have developed. Instead of running in a dredged, straight line from the mountains to the Kootenai River, Trout Creek now meanders and twists.

“Right now, kokanee could definitely spawn there,” said Todd Reeve, watershed director for the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a group backing the work with a decade-long grant worth at least $250,000. “This is just a very rich, whole watershed approach. This is an exemplary model for us.”

The creek restoration program is strictly voluntary and works by handshake, not legal contract, said Gretchen Kruse, an independent fisheries biologist leading the project. The program was designed to ensure ranchers and farmers would benefit from improved water and land quality without the burdens of increased cost and restrictions.

“We can benefit the ranchers as well as keeping our water quality high,” Kruse said.

The action also is helping to ensure the fish will not need protection under the Endangered Species Act, Kruse said. “We’re being proactive.”

Canada has already succeeded in restoring kokanee runs on tributaries of the north and west arms of Kootenay Lake, Kruse said. Much of this is due to a program of fertilizing the lake to boost plankton production. Fall runs topping six million fish are now being observed in one of the major tributary creeks. Fertilizing in the south arm of the lake started in summer.

The kokanee eggs planted next month will incubate over the winter and the fry will head into Kootenay Lake in early spring where, with any luck, an abundance of plankton will be waiting. The first adult kokanee should return to spawn in three or four years.

Even with the improved spawning beds, the health of Kootenay Lake is key to the success of kokanee restoration, Kruse said. The fish have depended on the lake for thousands of years, since their passage from North Idaho to the Pacific was blocked by Bonnington Falls, near Nelson, B.C. Kootenay Lake became the new ocean for the landlocked salmon.

The 1974 completion of Libby Dam blocked the inflow of nutrients to the lake. Kokanee runs collapsed in the 1980s. Fertilizing the lake to ensure plankton production is just a quick fix, Kruse said. But it will have to suffice until larger questions about habitat and dams are sorted out.

The Kootenai Tribe has high hopes for the return of the fish, which was once a major food source, said Tribal Chairman Gary Aitken Sr.

“This is very important to us,” Aitken said. “We’re a river people.”

The tribe also caught burbot and white sturgeon at the mouth of the spawning creeks. The two species gorged on the annual outflow of kokanee carcasses. Otters, eagles and bears also depended on the fish. Aitken said even after the fish disappeared, the bears and eagles returned to the streams in the fall, looking for their old protein-filled friends. You can remove an entire species from the landscape, Aitken said, but you can’t wipe out nature’s memory overnight.

“This is something that we’ll all be able to see again,” Aitken said.

Lifelong resident Julien Bucher also is hoping for the kokanee’s return. Until recently, he grazed upwards of 90 head of cattle on his land along Long Canyon Creek. Since the late 1990s, he has been working on his own and with the tribe to restore the creek.

“I grew up here. I knew what it was like,” he said. “That stream was red with kokanee in the fall. As kids, you could just go out and catch them with your hand.”

About 30 or 40 kokanee swam up Long Canyon Creek late this summer – the results of a small egg-planting program conducted by the tribe in the 1990s. With the continued creek improvements and lake fertilization plan, Bucher clings to the belief that he might once again see his creek run red.

“I really would like to start seeing them come back,” Bucher said. “All you can do is hope a little bit.”