Redd Counts: Good News, Bad News for Wild Salmon

Last summer's counts of wild salmon nests were better than the desperately low numbers seen in recent years, but Fish and Game biologists worry that this does not indicate a steady upward trend. With the spring and summer chinook run to the Snake River Basin in 2000 behind them and a forecast for a much larger run on the way, Idaho fisheries biologists are reviewing the number of redds, or salmon nests, that were counted this past summer. For Idaho's wild spring and summer chinook streams, a total of 675 redds were counted for a group of 10 populations during 2000. Biologists count these "index" populations in the same places each year to give them a reliable gauge of trends in Idaho's salmon. That is an improvement over counts that ranged from 49 to 547 redds during the period from 1995-1999. Yet, just 30 years agofrom 1965 to 1970the range was 1,624 to 2,709 redds counted for the same streams. Department biologists have been conducting redd counts in the index areas for wild salmon since 1957, providing one of the longest-running biological records in the Columbia Basin for truly wild spring and summer chinook salmon. Although the total number of redds increased, troubling to biologists is that 47 percent of the redds in the wild chinook streams were all counted in a single drainagethe Secesh/Lake Creek drainage in the South Fork of the Salmon River. Historically, this drainage would have accounted for less than 10 percent of the redd counts in the wild chinook streams. The 1999 redd counts for wild chinook streams are also receiving scrutiny as biologists review the upcoming smolt migration season, which is expected to be dismal because of poor runoff. The smolts that will swim to the ocean this spring are the progeny of the adult chinook that spawned in 1999, so the number of redds give biologists a clue as to whether there will be a lot of wild smolts in the outmigration or not. The 1999 redd count for the wild spring and summer chinook streams was the fourth lowest recorded (130), after 1995 (49 redds), 1980 (82 redds), and 1994 (88 redds). A smaller number of smolts going to the ocean, coupled with poor migration conditions, increases the risk of an extremely low adult return in 2003. This presents a dire risk to key populations such as the Marsh Creek drainage in the Frank Church wilderness, where no redds were counted in 1999,but counts regularly exceeded 200 redds during the 1970s.