About 1,700 Snake River Sockeye Spawners To Enter Redfish Lake This Year, Most Since 1950s
Columbia Basin Bulletin, September 10, 2010 [here]
Central Idaho’s Redfish Lake is teeming, in a comparative sense, with sockeye salmon once again after decades of relative dormancy.
Through Tuesday a total of 1,145 of the reddening spawners had been counted this year at either Sawtooth Hatchery or Redfish Lake Creek after completing a 900-mile freshwater journey up the Columbia, Snake and Salmon rivers to Idaho’s Sawtooth Valley. That’s the most sockeye known to have entered the valley in any year since 4,361 were counted swimming up Redfish Lake Creek in 1955. No other known return, dating back to at least 1954, has even totaled as much as 2,000.
Of this year’s total return to-date, about 400 were sampled at a Redfish Lake Creek fish trap by Idaho Department of Fish and Game researchers to determine their condition and ancestry and then allowed to continue their trip toward spawning grounds in Redfish Lake.
The rest of the trapped fish were taken to Eagle Hatchery near Boise for holding and sampling. Most of those fish are being returned to the creek this week and next as spawning time approaches. About 100 of the sockeye held at Eagle will be spawned at the hatchery so that their genetic makeup is infused into the Snake River Sockeye Salmon Captive Broodstock Program, which is responsible for most of the returning fish … [more]