ACTION ALERT

The Fish & Wildlife Commission will adopt the Coastal Management Plan for salmon & steelhead at their meeting on June 6 in Salem (Note that DOFW has a new location in Salem, 4034 Fairview Industrial Drive; map and driving directions on ODFW’s website http://www.dfw.state.or.us/agency/directions/).  

Although it’s not included in the CMP, we expect a large vocal contingent to attend requesting the plan be amended to include harvest of wild winter steelhead.


Please attend if you can to support the current no-kill regulation. If you can’t attend, please send an email odfw.commission@state.or.us or letter to the Commission opposing any harvest of wild steelhead on the Umpqua River.

Your message can be very simple. You can also include any of the following issues to support your position, but it’s important to get the basic message across: No harvest of wild steelhead in the Umpqua Basin.

1. This is the last, best wild steelhead run in the United States, a world-famous fishery characterized by uniquely large fish as recognized in the CMP. Sound management requires caution with such a resource.

2. ODFW relies on their 2004 Biological Assessment to support harvest. Based on admittedly sketchy data, they estimate a run of 30,000 - 35,000 wild steelhead with over half coming from mainstem Umpqua River tributaries. Neither ODFW nor BLM can identify the tributaries with sufficient high quality rearing habitat to produce the half-million smolts needed for this estimated return (and it likely doesn’t exist).

3. Pending Federal legislation would transfer management of O&C lands currently administered by BLM to state control, under the provisions of Oregon's Forest Practices Act. This will result in additional deterioration of fish habitat in mainstem Umpqua River tributaries

4. Climate change will have a disproportionately high impact on the upper Umpqua Basin for both flow levels and temperatures. As the only Cascade Mountains rivers in the CMP, the Umpqua headwaters depend on snowpack for summer flows, and snowpack is diminishing - note the recent news articles about record low snowpack in Crater Lake, the source for much of the North Umpqua summertime flows.

5. Given the budgetary problems ODFW is facing, they cannot identify the current state of wild steelhead or adequately monitor impacts from harvest combined with these other factors. This isn't the time to increase pressure on the best wild run in the US.


Thanks For Your Support!


Mark