This is the fourth of a four-part series looking at the Lone Pine Native American treaty fishing in-lieu site, which overlooks The Dalles Dam. This final article reviews current maintenance levels at Lone Pine.
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To the editor: This newspaper’s recent insert, The Gorge Sportsman, included an article “Reeling in the Rulebreakers” about Oregon State Police’s sport fishery enforcement effort in the Columbia River Gorge.
Biologists earlier this month released seven fishers into Washington’s south Cascade Mountains, where the reclusive, cat-sized mammal hasn’t been seen for more than 70 years.
GRANTS PASS — Citing a threat from rat poison used on illegal marijuana plantations, federal biologists on Monday proposed Endangered Species Act protection for West Coast populations of the fisher, a larger cousin of the weasel. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published notice in the Federal Register that it wants to list the fisher as a threatened species in Oregon, California and Washington.
The fishers from the Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Yakama tribes are taking to the Columbia River for the fall commercial fishing season while the anticipated record-breaking fall chinook return is heading up the Columbia. The first of five tribal commercial gillnet openings started Aug. 18.
Fishery experts’ calculations of threatened eulachon (smelt) spawner returns to the Columbia River and lower river tributaries in 2014 are very much works in progress with test fishery sampling mostly completed. But ask almost any sea lion or seal, sea gull or human fisher and they’ll likely tell you the tiny, fat-filled fish species is having a rebound year.
SALEM — Gov. John Kitzhaber’s effort to move commercial gillnet fishers off the Columbia River took a big step forward in the final hours of Oregon’s legislative session this week.
The Nez Perce, Umatilla, Warm Springs and Yakama tribes opened the first of three commercial gillnet fishing periods for the 2012 fall commercial season today. During the fall fishery, tribal fishers will harvest approximately 160,000 fish or an estimated 2 million pounds. The tribal sales allow the public to purchase salmon, steelhead and coho directly from tribal fishers.
