Have You Seen This Salmon Run

Now's the time for the big salmon shows where they navigate through our local fresh waters to their birthplace where they'll lay a few million eggs and die. We hear it's really cool how they swim upstream and jump up waterfalls and get eaten by bears and orcas and McCormick and Schmick's diners. Ah, the wonders of nature.

Now's the time when the Bonneville Dam ladders should be crawling with Chinook, but, well, where are they? Traditionally 19,000 salmon would have passed through the area by now, but as of Tuesday there have been four lonely fish. That's not true. There have been 135, which may as well be four when compared with twenty grand.

A hundred and thirty five fish do not a run make. The Columbia River Chinook run sucked last year too, if you remember, but some miraculous deluge of fashionably late salmon is always possible. Last year's run was also a late bloomer.

From the AP:

"There are ups and downs in the fish world," said Cindy LeFleur of the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. "Last year was one of the latest runs we'd seen and this year is shaping up that way."

She said a late surge remains possible and more should be known in late April, when about half of the run normally would have passed the dam.

She said the sport fishery below the dam has told scientists the fish are in the river. "But we're not seeing movement over the dam."

Well, of course. How many generations of salmon have to show up and say "my moms climbed this ladder and her mom climbed this ladder so now I gotta climb this ladder," before someone says, "You know what? Fuck it."

Not too long ago NOAA considered the spring Chinook runs on the Columbia healthy, though, so unless the fish are giving up on the dams en masse there's another explanation for their absence. Just, no one knows what it is.