The Midway Creek fish passage project is part of a larger Goldsborough Creek watershed project by the Squaxin Island Tribe.

The Lummi Nation distributed sockeye salmon to tribal members last month for families to can and store for the winter.

“The tribe puts fish away as much as possible when we have an abundance, for ceremonies and all the functions that the tribe sponsors,” said Randy Kinley Sr., policy representative for the tribe. “It’s very important to take care of your people’s needs culturally.”

The fish was caught during the record 2010 Fraser River sockeye salmon fishery and has been in cold storage.

“The sockeye season was short this year and we wanted to make sure people have the opportunity to put salmon away for the winter,” Kinley said.

Watch the video below:

View more pictures on Flickr.

The tribe expects the Brenner fish hatchery to be completed by the end of the year. The tribe has been rearing the fall juvenile chinook from brood years 2008, 2009 and 2010 at its Harvey Creek Hatchery.

Fall chinook, which mostly rear and spawn in the South Fork Stillaguamish, are genetically distinct from summer chinook, which primarily use the North Fork. A hatchery program has been in place in the North Fork for more than 20 years, with about 1,500 summer chinook returning each year.

Stillaguamish fall chinook by comparison have declined to fewer than 100 fish — so few that there aren’t enough adult chinook in the South Fork to capture and use for broodstock.

For three years, tribal natural resources staff have been seining for juvenile fall chinook, which they raise in small compartments, called “fish condos,” until they are large enough to move to a larger space.

In August, fisheries biologist Carlin McAuley from the federal Manchester Research Station visited the Harvey Creek hatchery to ultrasound the 2008 fish to see if any of them had matured enough to spawn. Three fish, likely males, had matured. “We will learn about how long it takes them to fully ripen up and how long they will last before dying,” Killebrew said.

“With these first captive brood fish, we are learning how to raise, monitor and hold wild chinook salmon from infancy to old age and death,” he added. “We have never tried this before with the Stillaguamish Tribe’s hatchery program and it will help us ramp up a full-scale captive brood program to try and keep South Fork fall-timed chinook from going extinct.”

Watch a video about the program below:

For more information, contact: Kip Killebrew, Stillaguamish Tribe, kkillebrew@stillaguamish.com, or 360-435-8770; Kari Neumeyer, NWIFC, kneumeyer@nwifc.org or 360-424-8226.

A guest at the Thousand Trails campground on the reservation took some photos and video, which were posted on the Seattle P-I blog.

Video of the landing:

Video:

This video is very much worth its ten minute length and is a very impressive effort, especially for a high school student. Karnati interviewed several people who were active during the debate in the 1970s and 80s, including anthropologist Barbara Lane, tribal lawyer Al Ziontz and former Washington State Attorney General and U.S. Senator Slade Gorton.

The Lummi Nation held its biggest community cleanup to date in April.

Lummi tribal members filled 24 dumpsters full with solid waste from reservation lands. Nearly 1,000 tires were removed and recycled. About 270 tons of solid waste were removed, which was nearly twice the 148 tons removed during a similar community cleanup of the reservation in 2009. More than 9 tons of metal were recycled, including appliances.

Staff members from the Lummi Housing Authority (LHA) were on hand to help unload trucks at the two collection sites, make house calls, and clean up illegal dump sites on the reservation.

“We went to 97 homes,” said Christina Solomon, maintenance manager for LHA. “A lot of our residents are low-income and don’t have vehicles to get rid of trash that won’t fit in their garbage cans.”

The Lummi Natural Resources Department obtained a grant from the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and partnered with the LHA to conduct the five-day cleanup. The LHA provided the labor; the Natural Resources Department used the EPA grant to pay for the garbage to be hauled off and disposed at a regional transfer station, and for other materials to be recycled.

Garbage accumulates in undeveloped areas of the reservation as it does in many areas of rural America. People from the reservation community and throughout neighboring Whatcom County who can’t afford to dispose of large items like televisions, appliances, and tires dump their trash on the Lummi reservation, creating illegal dump sites that degrade fish and wildlife habitat.

Community cleanups can help deter that activity, Solomon said. She sent crews to remove the garbage from four of the larger illegal dumps. “In principle, once these dump sites are cleaned up, you won’t see as much on the side of the road, because people will anticipate the next cleanup,” she said.

“It makes everybody feel better about where they live when it’s cleaned up,” she said. “The hope is, you keep cleaning up, cleaning up and it’s kind of contagious.”

Other communities interested in the tribe’s cleanup program should contact Lummi Environmental Program Director Leroy Deardorff at 360-384-2272.

Here is a photo set from the same outgoing King Tide.

Ciscoe Morris of the “Gardening with Ciscoe” radio show was also broadcasting live. You can listen to his two hour show from Eatonville below.

More audio at MyNorthwest.com

More audio at MyNorthwest.com

Prior to the planting, Ciscoe took a quick tour of restoration projects around Eatonville, including one at nearby Ohop Creek.

This is an important run for western Washington treaty tribes, nine of which have treaty rights to harvest a portion of the run. Here’s a piece we posted earlier on the large run and the impact it had on tribal fishermen:

A massive run of Fraser River sockeye salmon this year provided a dream fishery for tribal fishermen, but can’t begin to make up for decades of poor returns that have devastated the tribal fishing economy, tribal salmon managers say.

More than three times as many sockeye returned to the Fraser as were expected this year, but tribes were unable to reach their harvest goals because of a diminished fishing fleet, delayed realization of the run’s magnitude, diversion of the run through Canadian waters and overloaded processors.

The run of 34 million sockeye was the largest since 1913, but is not a sign of a resurgence.

“Based on the information we have, we expect poor sockeye returns for the next three years,” said Lorraine Loomis, Swinomish fisheries manager and tribal representative to the Pacific Salmon Commission, which manages the Fraser sockeye run for the United States and Canada. Fraser River pink salmon, which return in odd-numbered years, will provide some relief to tribal fishermen in limited fisheries next year, she said

Below is a video with some underwater footage taken by tribal biologist Eric Marks:

This is the tenth year the tribe has been looking for bull trout and the second in a row they’ve found a record number of the federally protected fish. While there is little direct evidence, tribal staff think the record number of pink salmon returning is contributing to boosting bull trout:

A record number of adult bull trout and juvenile steelhead migrated through the Puyallup River watershed this year, boosted by nutrients from a massive run of pink salmon two years ago.

“There was simply more food in the system in the last couple of years because decaying pink salmon carcasses fed practically every sort of organism in the river,” said Russ Ladley, resource protection manager for the Puyallup Tribe. “This shows that salmon restoration doesn’t just benefit one species, because all of the species in the river are interconnected.”

The tribe counted more than 100 bull trout – the entire run – at a trap on the White River, a tributary to the Puyallup, where fish are collected before being trucked over Mud Mountain Dam. While still a small return, it was more than double the previous record return in 2003.

The number of streams the tribe surveys in the upper White River has expanded from 3 in 2000 to 12 in 2010. Some of these streams were found because the tribe has radio tagged some of the bull trout caught in an adult trap.

Here are a couple of videos from the event itself. The first is of tribal councilmember Nancy Shippentower-Games talking about the fishing rights struggle:

Two tribal lawyers talk about the importance of the raid on the Boldt decision:

Some of this material has already been posted to our blog.

Here are a series of videos and presentations from the day. The presentations will all eventually have audio files associated with them, so it will be possible to simply press play and follow along with the slides.

Billy Frank Jr., chair of the NWIFC, welcoming participants and speaking on ocean acidification.

Basic science of ocean acidification and the latest Northwest research, Richard Feely (with audio).

What is NANOOS, Jan Newton (with audio).

NANOOS website demonstration, Newton.

Ocean acidification and seafood harvest, Billy Dewey (Taylor Shellfish) and Brad Warren (no audio yet).

Terry Williams, Tulalilp Tribes, closing remarks.

The workshop is going on right now and we’re recording it, so we’ll be posting more sessions later.

For more information, the Seattle Times had a great article on the impacts of ocean acidification entering Puget Sound:

The waters in Puget Sound’s main basin are acidifying as fast as those along the Washington Coast, where wild oysters have not reproduced since 2005.

And in parts of Hood Canal, home to much of the region’s shellfish industry, water-chemistry problems are significantly worse than the rest of Puget Sound.

Scientists from the University of Washington and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned Monday that the changing pH of the seas is hitting Puget Sound harder and faster than many other marine waters.

That increasingly corrosive water — a byproduct of carbon-dioxide releases from industries, power plants and vehicles — is probably already harming shellfish, and over time it could reverberate through the marine food chain.

Here is a photo gallery of the event.

Below the jump is a five minute movie featuring food preparations for the event.

Read the story here, and see Billy Frank Jr.’s column here.

You can watch a video of the celebration after the jump:

Lummi Nation master carver Felix Solomon has been studying traditional canoes for several years. When a 300-year-old cedar tree, buried for the last 100 years, was uncovered in the Stillaguamish watershed, the Stillaguamish Tribe asked him to carve a shovel-nose river canoe for them.

During the 6-month, 6-day process, Solomon taught Stillaguamish tribal members, including Chairman Shawn Yanity and assistant fisheries manager Jeff Tatro, the art of carving.

The Stillaguamish Tribe debuted the canoe during its First Salmon Ceremony in July 2010. Yanity and Tatro paddled the canoe into the Stillaguamish River to return the remains of the first salmon to the water.

View photos of the carving process on NWIFC’s Flickr feed or Facebook page.

Stillaguamish tribal chairman Shawn Yanity, left, and assistant fisheries manager Jeff Tatro use the new canoe to return the remains of the first salmon to the Stillaguamish River.

The Daily Herald:

ARLINGTON — The guest of honor was the first chinook salmon of the season, but the focus of the day was the launch of the Stillaguamish Tribe’s first shovel-nose dugout river canoe in a century.

Continuing on its path to cultural restoration, the tribe on Saturday welcomed hundreds of people from other Northwest Indian tribes and the Arlington community for a day-long celebration at the Victoria Ranch northwest of Arlington.

Tribal members presented Pendleton blankets to special guests and served a generous salmon dinner. There were more gifts, singing, drumming, prayers, speeches — even a string of jokes told by Stillaguamish Tribal Chairman Shawn Yanity.

The action took place in front of the carefully decorated, freshly completed cedar canoe.

It took six months and six days to get the canoe from log to ceremony, said Felix Solomon. Solomon is the Lummi artist commissioned by the Stillaguamish to carve the tribe’s first traditional Coast Salish canoe in modern times.

Read the full story in the Daily Herald here.

View photos of the carving process on NWIFC’s Flickr feed or Facebook page.

Watch a video here.

NWIFC News reported about the project in our spring magazine:

The Upper Skagit Tribe has partnered with Bonneville Power Administration and timber company Sierra Pacific to enhance elk habitat on 20 acres near the tribe’s reservation in Sedro-Woolley.

In October, the tribe hydroseeded the area with grass and clover. Continued work includes planting native shrubs and hand-seeding places where the hydroseed doesn’t take.

The $10,000 project is part of tribal and state efforts to recover the Nooksack elk herd, which had declined in population from more than 1,700 to about 300 by 2003. The herd has rebounded to about 700 animals.

“By providing nutritious forage opportunities, we hope to allow the Nooksack herd to grow without causing a problem for nearby landowners,” said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s natural resources director.

Area landowners have complained that elk that move into the Skagit Valley bottom lands during the winter trample fields, knock down fences, damage crops and create traffic hazards on area roads and highways.

“These elk have to go somewhere to feed,” Schuyler said. “We hope this enhanced habitat will keep them in the forest lands and away from the populated areas.”

The tribe uses beach seines to monitor marine populations throughout southern Puget Sound. You can read an article about the tribe’s nearshore research efforts in our Fall 2008 edition of our magazine.

Tribal fisherman Johnnie Grossglass prepares to release one of the ceremonial salmon.

There is a new video posted at http://nwifc.blip.tv/ of the Swinomish Tribe’s 2010 Blessing of the Fleet ceremony and luncheon that took place May 13. Guests were treated to a salmon and shellfish meal, before following the Edwards family from the tribal gym to the waterfront. The tribe’s fleet of fishermen received blessings from the Shaker, Pentecostal and Catholic churches. Fishermen were then sent in each of the four cardinal directions to return several salmon back to the water.

Read more about the Smuggler’s Slough restoration.

First, Chair Cynthia Iyall:

Natural resources director David Troutt:

Here are some links on the overall restoration project:
Nisqually Delta Restoration
Turning the tide after 100 years: restoring the Nisqually Delta
The Olympian: Water flows again at Nisqually estuary
Being Frank: A Tribute To Kenny Braget
NWIFC Blog: “Welcoming the Tides” to Nisqually coverage

The tribe is working with WildLands and S & K Environmental Restoration, a division of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, which developed the rotary stinger to plant trees more efficiently than traditional methods.

View a demonstration of the rotary stinger below.

The tree planting is part of a project that began last summer to restore 140 acres of salmon habitat around Hansen Creek, a tributary to the Skagit River near the Upper Skagit Tribe’s reservation.

The restored freshwater floodplain habitat will develop 53 acres of river delta and 87 acres of forested wetlands in the Skagit County-owned Northern State Recreation Area.

The past 60 years of dredging and levee maintenance has degraded spawning habitat and interfered with natural stream processes. “We have all six species of salmon in the Skagit watershed,” said Scott Schuyler, the tribe’s natural resources director. “Hansen Creek supports chinook, steelhead, coho, chum and pink salmon, but it has been straightened, narrowed and disconnected from its floodplain fan and wetlands.”

The Upper Skagit Tribe is removing parts of the levee and building log jams that will restore natural sediment movement and improve salmon habitat. The project will restore nearly 2 miles of side channel habitat, as well as hundreds of feet of mainstem habitat to support fish productivity.

The tribe is partnering with Skagit County and several federal and state agencies. The restoration is expected to cost more than $2.6 million. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) American Recovery and Reinvestment Act awarded nearly $1 million to the project. Last spring, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency awarded $105,000 to the project through Puget Sound Partnership funding.

“I think this restoration project is an excellent example of the tribe’s spirit for action, your ability to leverage resources and to create partnerships,” said Michelle Pirzadeh, EPA’s Acting Regional Administrator in Seattle. “The tribes have a long history of demonstrating their ability to care for natural resources in a way that’s sustainable and we can learn a lot from them.”

Other funding partners include National Association of Counties – Coastal Initiative funds, Washington State Centennial Clean Water and Salmon Recovery Funding Board funds, in addition to matching contributions from Skagit County.

The fragmentation of habitat in Puget Sound has resulted in the loss of freshwater wetlands important to salmon survival. The Hansen Creek restoration is an important part of the salmon recovery effort. Puget Sound chinook and steelhead are listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act, and Skagit coho are listed by the state Department of Fish and Wildlife as a species of concern.

“Salmon habitat has suffered centuries of abuse,” said Billy Frank Jr., chairman of the Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission. “The tribes are undoing that damage one step at a time. We all have to work together to get Puget Sound healthy again.”

For more information, contact: Lauren Rich, environmental planner, Upper Skagit Tribe, 360-854-7006 or LaurenR@upperskagit.com; Kari Neumeyer, information officer, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, 360-424-8226 or kneumeyer@nwifc.org.

The tribe monitors both species in watershed and is pointing to increased numbers of both, mostly likely because of a big pink run two years ago:

A record number of adult bull trout and juvenile steelhead migrated through the Puyallup River watershed this year, boosted by nutrients from a massive run of pink salmon two years ago.

“There was simply more food in the system in the last couple of years because decaying pink salmon carcasses fed practically every sort of organism in the river,” said Russ Ladley, resource protection manager for the Puyallup Tribe. “This shows that salmon restoration doesn’t just benefit one species, because all of the species in the river are interconnected.”

Here are some recent videos of migrating pinks in the White River system:

Further up the river in the Greenwater River, a tributary to the White:

See this page to download and share this video.

Following record high temperatures this summer across western Washington, Tulalip tribal biologists noticed that chinook salmon weren’t making it all the way to Wallace River, a tributary to the Skykomish River.

The hot, dry weather likely contributed to poor returns in a couple of ways. Water temperatures were too warm and a lack of rainfall reduced water levels and flow.

The Tulalip Tribes and the state share the eggs collected at the state’s Wallace River Hatchery, but this year’s returns were far below normal. Most years, the tribe gets about 2.4 million chinook salmon eggs for its hatchery program. In the event of a shortfall, the state gets the first million eggs, the tribe gets the next 800,000, and then the remaining eggs are split evenly.

While it is still too early to tell exactly how low the run will be this year, a model used by the tribe predicted that the total egg take would be under 2 million and as low as 1.4 million, which could have left the tribe with as little as only 400,000 eggs.

Action had to be taken to make sure enough salmon return four years from now. Both the tribe and the state closed their fisheries, and the tribe opened its fish ladder in Tulalip Bay to catch the adult chinook that were failing to swim upriver.

Update (Sept. 28): The tribe collected 530 chinook in Tulalip Bay and held them at the tribe’s Bernie Kai Kai Gobin Salmon Hatchery until they were ready to spawn. The state and the tribes also worked together to capture an additional 530 fish below the hatchery on Wallace River. In September, the tribe spawned hundreds of the fish and expects to be able to fertilize more than 1.3 million eggs this year.

Returning tidal flow to former estuaries is an important step toward restoring salmon habitat. Puget Sound chinook salmon are listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act.

On Wednesday, Aug. 19, an excavator made the final berm cut to allow full tidal flow to 200 acres of the Crescent Harbor salt marsh on Naval Air Station Whidbey Island for the first time in about 100 years.

The salt marsh had been cut off from fish access, with a minimal tidal exchange through a tide gate built in the 1900s.

Representatives from the SRSC, which is the natural resources management arm of the Swinomish and Sauk-Suiattle tribes, joined U.S. Naval officials at NAS Whidbey Island to watch the tide reconnect with the existing narrow channel.

“Our ancestors walked this earth right here before there were any non-Indians,” said Brian Cladoosby, chairman of the Swinomish Tribe. “They lived out here when all of this was marsh land, so to have the tidal flow reintroduced is really amazing.”

The SRSC partnered with the Navy in 2007, to fund and design the restoration, acquiring grants from the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program and Salmon Recovery Funding Board. The Whidbey Island Conservation District assisted with engineering.

Marking the success of another project, on Tuesday, Aug. 18, crews removed the last of the old dikes and levees that prevented the tide from flowing into a former estuary around Wiley Slough in the Skagit River delta.

The state-owned parcel of land, known as the Headquarters Unit of the Skagit Wildlife Area, was converted from an estuary to a recreational area in 1962 – using dikes, drainage ditches, culverts and tide gates.

The 175-acre Wiley Slough restoration was proposed in 2002. It was completed in partnership with the tribes, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Seattle City Light and the conservation group Skagit Watershed Council, with funding from the state Salmon Recovery Funding Board, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, NOAA Restoration Center and the Estuary and Salmon Restoration Program.

For more information, contact: Steve Hinton, director of restoration, Skagit River System Cooperative, 360-466-7228 or shinton@skagitcoop.org; Kari Neumeyer, information officer, Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission, 360-424-8226 or kneumeyer@nwifc.org.

For two weeks, canoe families from all over western Washington and British Columbia traveled on their ancestral highways, arriving on the shores of Suquamish Aug. 3 for another week of celebration of their culture. The purpose of the journey is to practice their traditional ways of life, as well as pass these lessons on to younger generations. The work of the older generation is catching on – many of the canoes were filled with young tribal members.

This year also marked the 20th anniversary of “Paddle To Seattle,” when several U.S. tribes and Canadian first nations traveled to Suquamish to sing, dance and share stories before paddling to Seattle. It was then that canoe families were challenged to travel to Bella Bella, B.C., in 1993.

Since then, tribal journeys have taken place annually at various sites throughout the Northwest. For more information, go to www.tribaljourneys2009.com.

Photos can be viewed at our site on Flickr. Video can be viewed here.

Daniel Kuntz, the tribe’s beach manager, explains the process of digging, counting and measuring the clams each month.

Herman Dillon Jr., the tribe’s fisheries commission chairman, talks about the various drifts that tribal fishermen use in the fishery.

Tribal fisherman Mark Bridges shows off a dangerous piece of trash that was wrapped up in his net earlier in the day.