Bob Otis, a retired Ripon College professor from Wisconsin, monitors the Southern Residents closely every summer, along with a team of volunteers, from the perfect locale: the scenic lighthouse at Lime Kiln State Park, a place famous for whale sightings (indeed, the orcas come right up to the rocks there and play in the kelp and also seem fond of forming superpods in the waters in front of the prominent overlook, breaching and playing for the benefit of tourists). Otis keeps track of each day’s sightings on a whiteboard calendar that can be viewed by the public so that people can know how many pods have been past each day. By the time he called it a wrap in mid-August in 2013, he had a board full of zeroes. Otis was shaking his head: “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Whale-watching boats, among the most popular tourist activities for the San Juan Islands, Vancouver, and Victoria, were relegated to either spending their time with the lonely three L-pod whales, or they went looking for other wildlife. As it happened, it was a good year in the Salish Sea for minke whales and humpbacks, who turned up in large numbers. There were other oddities that summer: a seventeen-foot, deep-diving sixgill shark, a fish no one in those parts had ever seen, washed up at Argyle Bay in Friday Harbor; the scientists who performed the necropsy found an empty stomach but no apparent cause of death.
No one is ever really certain about orca behavior, but the prevailing theory among the islands’ whale scientists about their seeming disappearance was that the numbers of Chinook were probably down. The big king salmon comprise over 80 percent of the orcas’ summer diet, and over 90 percent of the Southern Residents’ summer Chinook typically come from the run that is heading up to the Fraser River in British Columbia, the mouth of which is just south of Vancouver. Sure enough, it soon emerged, as the fish counts arrived from the Canadian biologists who monitor these things, that the Fraser Chinook run was down in 2013 (along with the far more endangered sockeye runs in the river, victims of rising river temperatures).
However, it wasn’t a terrible salmon run, just mediocre. Pretty soon it became clear that it just couldn’t compete, because out on the continental shelf, west of Vancouver Island and the Washington and Oregon coasts, an incredible run of Chinook from the Columbia River—over a million fish, as it soon turned out—were gathering.
If there is anything we have learned about orcas from observing them over the years, it is that they go where the salmon are. Especially the Chinook salmon. A bounty that large, food that readily available, has become rare enough in recent years that it only made sense that they would descend upon it intently, remaining out on the Shelf until the salmon started to actually run up the Columbia. Indeed, when the orcas finally returned to solid Chinook runs in the Salish Sea in mid-August, they looked healthy and well-fed. So the conclusion was that the huge Columbia run had kept the orcas out of the islands for much of the summer. At least, that was the prevailing theory. Or maybe it was just the orcas being orcas: wily and unpredictable.
It also could have been boat noise; the numbers of whale-watching and private boats have been soaring in recent years, making for near-constant flotillas around the orcas during daytime appearances in the San Juan Islands. There has also been a steady increase in shipping traffic through Haro Strait, with more to come, adding to the overall roar of noise they must endure while hunting. Some have theorized that maybe the whales had just gotten tired of the fuss and decided to go eat where it would be nice and quiet.
Both of these factors—salmon plenitude and vessel traffic—are, as it happens, considered the two most important components of population recovery for these 81 endangered Southern Resident orcas, who were listed under the federal Endangered Species Act in 2005. The abundance of salmon is an obvious issue; if the orcas aren’t getting enough to eat, they won’t survive long. Vessel traffic is more complex, posing a kind of multi-level threat. The noise they create interferes with intrapod communication, which is critical for hunting, as well as with their ability to echolocate. The simple presence of all vessels, from kayaks to giant freighters and everything in between, alters the course that orcas travel and thus affects their ability to hunt and probably requires them to expend energy needlessly. Some of these vessels also carry real pollution risks. Pollution itself is considered the third major threat to recovering the Southern Resident population and getting them off the endangered list. It takes many forms, the most pernicious being the heavy metals and other toxins that accrue in the fish the whales eat and then in the whales’ blubber.
Around the world, even among populations that are not endangered, a number of similar threats persist. In the much less densely human-populated home waters of British Columbia, the Northern Residents face similar threats, although on a much lower level, reflected in the considerably healthier population numbers they have been demonstrating for the past twenty years. A far more salient threat to this population has been the proliferation in their waters in the past couple of decades of salmon farming operations, an industry that brings pollution and predation problems with it, threatening a number of native salmon populations on which the orcas depend for their diet.
In the Crozet Islands, the population is threatened by its own tendency to steal fish from the longlines of fishermen who frequent their waters; these fishermen often kill orcas in retaliation. In Alaska, the resident killer whale population of Prince William Sound is still slowly recovering from the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, and one transient pod, the AT1s, is now believed to be doomed, having lost over half of its members as a result of exposure to the spill.
However, the Southern Resident orcas of the Salish Sea are the only officially endangered orca population in the world. There has been little doubt for some time that, while boats and pollution are important contributors to the problem, far and away the biggest threat to their well-being has been the decline of salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest—not just in their home waters, but throughout the region, particularly on the Columbia River, whose massive runs of salmon historically were a major source of food for these orcas, notably during the winter and spring months, when Chinook runs are in decline inshore and (usually) abundant offshore.
So the massive Columbia River run of Chinook in 2013 was the best possible news for the whales’ long-term recovery, even if one of its consequences was a reduced presence of the whales in the Salish Sea. In the end, everyone knows that saving the orcas means, first and above all, saving the salmon. What matters is that the whales stay well fed and, consequently, healthy.
“It sucks that we aren’t able to see them more,” observed longtime orca watcher Monika Wieland at her blog, “but really what’s most important is that they’re finding enough to eat.”
Salmon biologists have credited the recovery on cooling waters and abundant food for the salmon in the Pacific Ocean for the past four years, and perhaps most significantly, a string of court-ordered improvements in salmon-recovery efforts throughout the Columbia River system that began over a decade ago and were finally proving to be effective. Biologists counted a million fish up the river by December. It was the largest Chinook run on official record, ever since the Bonneville Dam was built on the Columbia in 1938 (when they began keeping track), an event that inalterably transformed the river’s ecosystem. Even for all that improvement, the run was still a shadow of the historic salmon abundance before the arrival of whites in the 19th century, when runs of salmon ran into the tens of millions. That was true not merely of the Columbia, but all of the Pacific Northwest, including the river basins throughout the Puget Sound/Salish Sea region.
It was the first positive sign of the real effectiveness of decades’ worth of conservation efforts, an uptick that could mean a shift in the long downward trend of human effects on the natural environment of the Pacific Northwest, not just on killer whales and salmon, but on all the creatures tied up in the biological web that is the region’s ecosystem. Or it might just have been a burp. What everyone involved understood was that, good news notwithstanding, the ec
osystem’s problems, embodied in the threats to its numerous endangered species, will not be solved overnight and that is because they have been a long time in the making.
• • •
The spirit of wanton extermination is rife; and it has been well remarked, it really seems as though the man would be loudly applauded who was discovered to have killed the last salmon.
—LIEUTENANT CAMPBELL HARDY, British Royal Artillery, commenting on wanton wildlife management in New Brunswick, 1855
Americans tend to think of wild salmon now as a West Coast phenomenon—reasonably, since there are no remaining wild runs of Atlantic salmon on the East Coast or in Europe and very little memory of them. In fact, salmon was once as abundant in Europe as it is today in Alaska. The sad history of what became of Europe’s salmon was replicated on the East Coast of the Americas as well, and much of the fight over Pacific salmon today is part of a desperate attempt to not repeat that history one final and fatal time.
Salmon are a uniquely useful species for vibrant and healthy forest ecosystems. As young hatchlings and fry, they consume relatively little in the way of food resources in the waters of their birth or as they travel downstream to the ocean. Then, after spending years in the ocean, effectively gathering up proteins and becoming themselves large swimming bags of amino acids and other nutrients from the sea, they return with all those nutrients to the upper reaches of the rivers whence they came, where they die, bringing all those fresh proteins to regions where they become essential contributions to the food supply and the ecosystem.
In Europe, Atlantic salmon were historically abundant for most of recorded history, until the early 1700s, when human populations overfished, blocked rivers, and began destroying habitat for the many hundreds of salmon runs in France, Germany, the British Isles, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Scandinavia. By the 1800s, many runs were extinct, and fresh salmon became rare and expensive. Today, most European salmon runs are completely extinct, except for a handful of runs in the United Kingdom.
This story repeated itself when Europeans came to North America and began exploiting with wanton abandon both the salmon runs and the rivers in which the salmon swam. Indeed, as Lieutenant Hardy trenchantly observed at the time, the whole ethos of the settlers seemed at times to have been one of competitive eliminationism—the complete extirpation of anything deemed undesirable or dangerous or wild—all in the name of “conquering the wilderness.” This ethos was consigned not merely to salmon but to nearly every indigenous occupant of the landscape, including the Native American occupants, who were frequently viewed and treated as subhuman by the new arrivals.
The results were predictable: By 1896, salmon had been wiped out of Lake Ontario and soon most of the remaining Great Lakes. Hundreds of other runs became extinct after the rivers were dammed. By the 1950s, most of the remaining Atlantic salmon runs originated from rivers in Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia, but those soon crashed altogether when fishing operations began netting large numbers of salmon in the open sea of the North Atlantic.
Almost as soon as Europeans began settling on the West Coast in large numbers in the 1850s, that story began repeating itself once again. However, the salmon there were so abundant that it has taken longer for the runs to be destroyed altogether, which has given people enough time to reconsider the path they were heading down. In the Northwest particularly, salmon are deeply tied to the identity of the region, including those deep forest regions where the salmon used to make their runs. There is also a deep biological connection; scientists estimate that 137 other species of animals in the Northwest depend on the presence of salmon.
In central Idaho, in the upper reaches of the Salmon River, which eventually drains into the Columbia via the Snake, settlers in the mining district of the Yankee Fork used to see such immense salmon runs during spawning season that the banks of the river overflowed with reeking dead salmon, creating a stench that lasted for weeks. I can still remember seeing, as a child in the early 1960s, sockeye runs on these same headwaters. At the spawning grounds, the water boiled with thrashing red, huge, scarred fish with vicious-looking hook jaws, and they were so thick I thought I might have been able walk across them.
That was nothing, of course, compared to the runs that used to be seen on the main Columbia, the largest river on the West Coast. When Native Americans dwelled along the river, they would set up clever fish traps called seines and would feed their tribes throughout the year on the bounties they could easily gather there. With the arrival of Europeans in the 1870s, however, the seines became massive river-wide operations that caught every fish that came through, all for the benefit of canneries that set up operations next to the seines. At first, their catches were phenomenally large, drawing from runs that were estimated to be 16 million and more. However, the takes at the seines were so complete, and the wastefulness of the operations so wanton and common, that by the early 1900s, the runs were in serious decline, and in 1908, Oregon voters passed the first initiatives to limit salmon fishing on the Columbia River. Eventually, the seines were banned altogether.
The next blow to the salmon came in the form of the dams that, starting in 1938, began going up on the Columbia. The construction of the Bonneville Dam, a popular WPA project that brought electricity to much of the rural Northwest, had salmon ladders that migrating fish could travel through. In 1942, the Grand Coulee Dam in central Washington was completed, and it had no fish passages at all. That meant the extinction of all salmon runs from rivers north of it in Canada.
The runs up the Snake and Salmon rivers, which join the Columbia below Grand Coulee, remained more or less intact. However, over the ensuing years, three more dams were built on the Columbia along the route to the Snake, and four were built on the lower Snake. It was these latter that especially spelled the death knell for many of the river’s remaining salmon runs.
The four dams in question (Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite) were built starting in the 1960s and are located on the Snake River between Washington’s Tri-Cities and Lewiston, Idaho. They provide irrigation water for a handful of large farms along the river, but their far larger role is to provide navigation for barges that provide cheap transportation of goods downriver for the region’s farmers. The dams also generate 1,250 megawatts of power annually, enough for a city the size of Seattle.
However, they also drive salmon runs to the brink of extinction. The dams themselves are obstacle enough for migrating fish; the young smolt going downriver are chewed up in their turbines, and the returning spawners have to climb past them. In addition, the flatwater created behind the dams is even more problematic, especially for the smolt, who require fast-moving water to migrate effectively.
By the time I was a teenager in the 1970s, those massive salmon runs had almost vanished; there were only a handful. By 1992, only a single sockeye salmon, dubbed Lonesome Larry, managed to make it all the way to the Salmon River headwaters near Stanley Lake. In 1993, the government listed the entire Snake River sockeye run under the Endangered Species Act. In all, over a hundred Pacific salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest have gone extinct; another 200, representing over half of the total population, are considered “depressed” and at risk of extinction.
Spilling water over the dams’ gates at key times of year, so that the smolt can run downstream freely en route to the ocean, has proved effective as a remedial step, but that also conflicts with the dams’ power-generating mission. The solution of the Bonneville Power Administration, the lead government agency involved in the Columbia River salmon recovery, has been to gather the smolt as they head downriver and barge them around the dams. This is an exorbitantly expensive program that also has proved to be of questionable real value, since the runs have been slow to recover.
Salmon advocates like Save Our Wild Salmon have argued for tearing down the dams as the most sensible solution, since it would return that portion of the river to a free-flowing state and give both smolt and spawners a figh
ting chance of success. They argue that the economic costs can be overcome, pointing out that replacing the barges with a revamped rail transportation system and simply lowering the current irrigation pumps would cost a fraction of the current barging system. Moreover, they point to larger economic benefits for the region, particularly the economic boon that could be realized from recreation.
These arguments, however, have carried little weight with eastern Washingtonians, who have come to see the dams as emblematic of “their way of life” and thus to be defended at all costs. When the breaching was first proposed in 1999, pro-dam rallies were held in various communities at which the rhetoric became high-pitched. Leading the way were top Republican officials, including then-Senator Slade Gorton, who warned of various miseries that breaching would inflict.
“We are not going to allow a few Seattle ultraliberal environmental zealots to destroy what took generations to build,” said state Senator Dan McDonald, R-Bellevue, at a Richland gathering.
“In case you don’t understand the urgency of this, think about this: The bulldozers are coming,” said Representative Shirley Hankins, R-Richland. “The gun is at our heads, and we need to act right now before they pull the trigger.”
Since 2001, the federal government (first, the Bush administration, followed by a compliant Obama administration) has officially opposed any breaching program, reverting to a reliance on barging. A federal judge’s May 2005 ruling that the barging program is failing and demand that the government reexamine its salmon-recovery progress was greeted with warnings from the Dry Side that doing so had better not put dam removal back on the table: “Changes may need to be made, but the dams are going nowhere,” said Representative Doc Hastings, R-Wash.
In 2006, an accord was announced that required water to be spilled at critical times to aid salmon runs, while compensating farmers and finding ways to prepare for their water needs during those times. This tamped down the conflict by bolstering salmon runs semi-sufficiently without dam removal, and if the results six years (the typical life cycle of the salmon) after the accord took effect are anything to judge by, the plan is nothing short of a celebration-worthy success. A million Chinook are clear testament to what can happen if even modest conservation efforts are pursued and effectively maintained.
Of Orcas and Men Page 18