844 | Saving Wild Steelhead with Nick Chambers of The Conservation Angler

844 Nick Chambers 00:00:00 Dave: Today we’re going to get an update on one of the most resilient fish in North America, the wild steelhead. From the cold rivers of the Skagit to the volcanic headwaters of southern Oregon. Our guest has spent two decades following their journey snorkeling over reds, collecting fry dispersal data and piecing together what makes these fish tick. By the end of this episode, you’ll get a look at some of the groundbreaking work on the Skagit River, the surprising connection between steelhead and Atlantic salmon, and what it takes to keep these wild runs alive. From Washington to Kamchatka. This is the Wet Fly Swing podcast, where I show you the best places to travel to for fly fishing, how to find the best resources and tools to prepare for that big trip, and what you can do to give back to the fish species we all love. Nick Chambers from the Conservation Angler joins us today to share what he’s learned about the early life history of steelhead. We’re going to find out why some rivers thrive while others fade, and why a handful of fish in the right places can shape the future of the entire watershed. This is a good one. Today. Nick has got some, uh, some good data to bring, and we’re going to dig into it. So here we go. You can find Nick chambers. You can go ahead right now to the Conservation angler. How’s it going, Nick? 00:01:11 Nick: It’s going well. It’s great to be here, Dave. 00:01:13 Dave: Yeah, yeah. Thanks for putting some time aside today to talk about, um, what you guys do at the Conservation Angler. I think we’re going to get an update on. You know, I think steelhead definitely is a focus for us along with other species. So I just want to get a background on what you guys have going. You know, we’ve had John on, uh, a couple of times and he’s done a great job at just giving us a, you know, a rundown overview of what you guys do. But I want to jump back into that today. And does that sound pretty good to you? 00:01:40 Nick: Yeah, that sounds great. I’d be happy to do that. 00:01:42 Dave: Okay. Well, let’s start it off just from the top on. Um, you know, just on you. How did you, you know, give us your background. How did you come into working at conservation? Angler. And maybe also, if you can give us a little background on the organization and how it came to be. 00:01:56 Nick: Yeah. So, you know, I grew up in southwest Oregon and was pretty much obsessed with fish from a young age. And so, you know, grew up steelhead fishing wasn’t very good at it necessarily, but totally loved it. Grew up on the rogue. So, you know, steelhead and Chinook are the those are the fish you have in your backyard essentially. So I ended up going to Oregon State University to get a fisheries degree. I didn’t really know too much about the profession until I actually went there, that it was even a path that you could choose. Um, but it was it was definitely a great choice, right? You don’t necessarily make a lot of money, but you get to spend a lot of time outside, get to do seasonal work if that’s what you want to do. So I got to travel all over Alaska, Oregon, Washington, California and spend a lot of time just outside on rivers chasing fish around. So it was been kind of a dream job for me. I’ve been doing it for about twenty years now. I think my first fish job was in two thousand and five, so I had a kind of a circuitous winding route working, you know, five to six seasonal jobs a year, bouncing around a lot. And then I started working for Trout Unlimited in twenty fifteen, and that’s where I got to know John McMillan. I was working on the The Wild Steelhead Initiative. We worked very closely there, and John was very much a mentor to me. I was able to learn a lot from him. It was, you know, totally great experience. I moved up to Washington for that position. So I was living in Puget Sound, and that was also a new experience. But that was really transformative. So even, you know, coming into that point, I’d been, you know, steelhead fishing for a long period of time and spent a lot of time chasing them around. And I’d always been with a science background and working on them. I’d always been very interested. But most of the money is generally in salmon work, right? So I spent a lot of time in Oregon working on Oregon Coast Coho, because there are only listed species on the coast. And and so it was really great to get to to you and get to know John and really be able to dig into the science behind steelhead and really learn even more about them. And then I was able, through that position to get into grad school at University of Washington in Seattle, working on steelhead up in the Skagit, and was able to put a project together and get that funded. And so I ended up just actually graduating just this past spring. Wow. Yeah. Which was it was nice. It was it was an older student. It was sort of interesting to go back to grad school in your late thirties, but I think it was a good choice for me. I was able to burn off some of that energy I had in my twenties and focus a little bit more. 00:04:13 Dave: That’s cool. That’s really cool. And you worked on this gadget, which is I mean, out of all the rivers, there’s lots of famous rivers in California, Oregon and Washington, you know, all over the rim. But the Skagit, maybe. You know what I mean. It might be one of the top just because of think of it, we’re all casting Skagit lines. Everybody knows. And the history there is really interesting because it’s not a it’s not a super positive one at least. You know, they’ve had some shutdowns. Maybe talk about that a little bit on the Skagit. What was your project. And and what’s the status of, you know, the Skagit River. 00:04:42 Nick: Yeah. So my project I was actually looking at Frye right after they come out of the gravel. So the very young stage and tracking dispersal from red. So it was a lot of snorkeling. Right. So we’d go out and identify reds in the spring and Seattle City Light was one of my main funders and a partner. So they they do read counts up there as well. So I had read locations mapped out throughout the main stem, uh, between uh newhalem and the Salk was kind of my research area. The idea behind this really comes from Atlantic salmon, and it’s that fry appear to not move very far from the read early in life, so most of them stay within even one hundred meters from the read two three hundred meters, you get kind of a tail of distribution. And then within a kilometer, which is, you know, a little over half a mile is where the vast majority of these fish are going to spend the first summer of life. And if you have a bunch of reds in in one area, you end up with a lot of competition between those fish for space and food. And the mortality rate is really, really high. It’s the greatest period of mortality in life. You might have ninety ninety five percent mortality during this early period, or even more sometimes. And so what we see is that that’s really where the biggest variation in abundance occurs. So that’s actually one of the factors that’s driving the abundance of adults is actually this very early period of life. So in the Atlantic salmon world, this is sort of pretty well studied and recognized, and it hasn’t necessarily been brought into management plans in the same way that we would like to here. But it’s somewhat well established and it’s underappreciated in steelhead, I would say. And it’s one of the things that sort of sets them apart from salmon. If we think about salmon, particularly Chinook, they’re juveniles may go to the ocean, um, right away. And so they once they hatch, they spread out and they can kind of occupy all that habitat in the river, and they can occupy it more evenly. And so we think about coho seem to move further to. Right. So they may distribute themselves in accordance with the habitat that’s available. And it seems like steelhead don’t really do that. They’re just staying close to home. And so if you don’t have a lot of adults, they tend to cluster in a few places, potentially the best habitat, but they’re leaving other places unused. And they’re juveniles aren’t necessarily moving into those places and using them. 00:06:46 Dave: Right. Wow. That’s amazing. Yeah. So that sounds like a super important study. And is that something that’s already been finalize. This is something that is pretty much you’re pretty confident in, you know, the comparison because there is it is interesting Atlantic salmon versus steelhead because there are a ton of similarities. You know, I know when I started steelhead fishing, you know, I was reading Atlantic salmon books back in the day, you know, the techniques and all that. So there’s similar species, but they’re different too in quite a bit. Right? In a lot of ways. 00:07:12 Nick: They are different. Yeah. And so some of the ways that they’re similar that’s important. Right. They spend generally at least two years in freshwater. That’s one of the things that sets them apart from Pacific salmon, which rarely spend more than a year in freshwater. Sometimes it’s a matter of weeks, you know, and so their early life seems to be pretty similar. And certainly they’re not exactly the same species. But there is some previous work on steelhead to suggest that this is occurring. But people haven’t really gone down this path as explicitly as what I was trying to do here. So we do have some work from DC on the river, a little bit from California, on Soquel Creek out of Santa Cruz. That kind of suggests that, yeah, there’s this early period of life is really important in how we think about fluctuations in abundance. And also just that. Yeah. It appears that these fish generally as a general phenomenon, not just in this gadget, are, you know, really staying close to home and not just distributing. 00:08:04 Dave: Not going out. And so the importance here is that, yeah, if you have a stream that maybe is limited in habitat or for some reason if fish are piling up in an area, they’re all spawning in one area, that might be a bad thing as opposed like how would you take this data and how could other managers use this to change, maybe practices they’re doing out there. 00:08:22 Nick: So the way I think that it’s the most important is you need to know how distributed your fish are across the watershed, right? And really, that’s how distributed your spawners are, right? Are your spawners occupying just a few places or maybe do you have a couple tributaries that are accounting for most of your spawning production, or do you have are they very broadly distributed? And how does that change year to year? Because that influences how much habitat. The juveniles are really able to use during this period. And so if you think about how many fish do we need to fill up the habitat? You kind of need to know something about how distributed they are across that habitat. And so when we define something like an escapement goal or similar, right, where we think about, oh, we need three thousand fish to fill up this watershed. And that’s going to make it as productive as it can be. When figuring out how many fish you need, you need to think about that spatial distribution, right? 00:09:13 Dave: Yeah. Because that could change everything because you’re escapement goal might be totally off if you’re not accounting for if you don’t have good numbers on where all the fish are distributed. 00:09:21 Nick: Yeah. So if you set it too low, you could actually be restricting them into not enough of the habitat in the watershed. Right. And so they they may occupy just the most productive areas. And you may see like this signal of competition, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the habitat is full. That just means that those areas are fairly productive. But you could still have other potentially suitable habitats that don’t have enough fish in them. 00:09:43 Dave: Got it. And the Skagit. Yeah, it gets a lot of press because of, you know, some of the closures and things like that, but. Well maybe talk about that. What’s the current status of the Skagit now? How are things looking and how does that compare to maybe some other basins around that you’re aware of. Say up. And I know you guys have done some work maybe in Alaska, but around the Pacific Rim. 00:10:02 Nick: Yeah. You know, the Skagit is as far as Puget Sound is concerned. It’s really the bright spot. Wild steelhead in Puget Sound have generally not been doing well. Um, which is somewhat surprising if you, you know, I lived up, uh, on the upper Skykomish, really on the North Fork Skykomish. And there’s some beautiful habitat up there, relatively intact. And those runs have generally just been steadily declining since they were listed in two thousand and seven, particularly the last ten years. We’ve really seen some low points in there. It does seem like, you know, in twenty fifteen the ocean did somewhat change and maybe productivity has dropped, but there seems to be something else going on there. And so this this gadget is the one that rather than seeing a continued decline, we have seen an uptick since its low point. we saw. I think the low point was two thousand five hundred and two thousand and nine. In twenty fifteen, we had over nine thousand fish come back, and since then it’s remained relatively stable, you know, four to seven thousand fish or so, where I think the Skykomish has been having less than a thousand fish come back, or even the whole Snohomish system. And, you know, we don’t necessarily have the best handle on some of the rivers, like the Nooksack, which is also kind of in the north end of the basin, which maybe has its closer in proximity to this gadget. So some of those rivers may be faring a little bit better. And the further you get into South Puget Sound, it seems like rivers are struggling a bit more. I think this gadget is one of those places that gives us hope. You know, it does have. It’s a huge watershed. It has a lot of habitat. There’s quite a bit of it on public land and and, you know, relatively undeveloped. It’s not houses and riparian area. So it certainly has potential, I think, to hold that a pretty good wild steelhead run there. 00:11:40 Dave: And then just kind of overall broad. I know when John McMillan was on the podcast, I think the first one he did, he kind of did an overview of steelhead and, you know, status and stuff. And he actually had it was it was cool because he kind of had a positive outlook on it. Even with all the changes and everything that’s going on. What’s your take now? You know, on on just overall you guys know I’m sure you don’t know every single basin out there. But but how are we looking. You know, what else are you guys working on. 00:12:07 Nick: I guess to just to jump into the conservation angler a little bit. Yeah. Answer that question. You know, we used to run the Kamchatka Steelhead project. That was really one of our big focuses ever since the inception. And that really comes from a guy by the name of Pete Soveral started this back in the nineties, once the fall of the Soviet Union and switched. There was some poaching going on over in Kamchatka Peninsula, over in Russia, steelhead population just getting hammered there, really mostly bycatch in salmon fisheries over there. So they weren’t even necessarily the target species. But so working with some Russian scientists out of Moscow State University, they put together this program where they would get anglers over there, catch fish, they would tag them. So use anglers to collect scales, DNA, put tags on fish, and then also to fund that research and fund some anti-poaching. And that was really a successful model. And that went on for over twenty years, I believe. And once Russia invaded Ukraine around twenty twenty, that all got shut down. And so right now we’re we’re hoping to find a replacement for that on this side of the Pacific and maybe multiple replacements. Right. So that we can kind of answer some of these questions, like you asked about what is the status of steelhead around the Pacific Rim because there’s just watershed by watershed. The amount of data we have is highly variable, right? In some places we have dam counts. We have like pretty good handle on how many fish are there in other places. We just we have no data or it’s total gas. So, you know, I am also hopeful I know it’s times. It’s it’s difficult to be. I think if you look at places like Puget Sound and the Columbia, we’ve had some some bad years. Those are also places where you have a lot of people and a lot of fishing pressure and interest, particularly in the Columbia. But, you know, if we look at some places in Alaska, B.C., right, fishing has been, you know, consistent, right? We’ve had consistent seasons, consistent fisheries. And one could argue that, well, you’re pretty far north, right? Climate change is hitting those places less. There’s fewer people. But even if you get down to Oregon. So I’m in the process of moving back down to Oregon. We look at a place like the Klamath where we just pulled out those dams, you know, steelhead in the Klamath, we don’t know a whole lot about their numbers. But even in the rogue, those those populations have been relatively stable, right. And they’re all the way down northern California, southern Oregon, where it’s very hot, long, dry seasons, you know, not necessarily what we think about as great habitat. 00:14:21 Dave: Yeah. And less people is that the different like Klamath, fewer people than, say, Puget Sound or. 00:14:26 Nick: There’s fewer people. That’s definitely part of it. I think the fish are very resilient and very adaptable. Right. So even in these these warm places with low summer flows and long, hot, dry periods, they’re able to find a way to eke out a living, right, if we give them a chance. And so I’m super curious to see what’s going to happen in the Klamath. Right. There was a small summer steelhead hatchery iron gate. It wasn’t producing many fish and that’s done now. So. And it’s been all wild for winter steelhead. So there is a hatchery in the Trinity which is a tributary. But but we have an all wild Klamath that is a huge watershed, right. And so that’s one of the things we’re working on right now, is trying to work with the state to put together a monitoring plan of how do you track recovery into this upper basin and see where fish are going. But it would also be great to answer some of these questions about the status of the population just as a whole. Right. So we can see, you know, it would be great to get a handle on how many fish are in there. It’s difficult to do, but. 00:15:19 Dave: Right. That sounds like that’s the biggest thing. One of the big things you guys are trying to do is just get enough, uh, data, surveys, whatever it takes to understand how many fish are out there, like going back to Kamchatka or wherever your new basins are, where you’re going to monitor. Is that kind of the the big focus, putting that together. So first off, you know how many fish are returning each year. And then and then you take the next steps from there. 00:15:40 Nick: Yeah, that’s part of it. You know one of the ways that steelhead are going to be resilient is because they’re super diverse, right? They have all these different life histories. They can adapt to a really wide range of environmental conditions. But the what they need to do that is they need a lot of diversity. Like right. Genetic diversity, what we call phenotypic diversity. Right. So you have a lot of different body sizes, body types, ages at maturity. Right. So you have you know in the Rogue and Klamath, you have a lot of these small fish that use these tiny little tributaries. And then they return at different times of the year. And so that allows them to sort of match all these different habitat variables, you know, like John would say, like a lock and key, right? Each fish kind of matches its little niche in its own stream, and we don’t necessarily know what we’ve lost or how we’ve changed populations in a lot of places. Right. We know these populations are depleted, but really to recover them you need to recover diversity. It’s also something that you need to protect. So we’re trying to work in places that are managed for wild fish and that have a high potential to maintain those fish into the future. And then we’d really like to answer some of these questions about how much diversity do we have in these different watersheds, kind of throughout their range? And can we figure out what a healthy wild population has and what might be missing in some of these other places where we’re trying to recover fish, right. Because we’ve we spent a lot of money restoring habitat. And that’s that’s great. It’s important. But if we don’t have enough fish and the right fish to use that habitat, it may not work. And that’s one reason I think we’ve not seen a lot of benefit from a lot of that habitat restoration. It’s not necessarily leading to recovery because we’re not managing the fish appropriately. Right. We’re not accounting for things like spatial distribution. We generally don’t do things like GPS read. So we don’t necessarily know where these fish are even going back. And we have some idea, but it’s limited. It doesn’t allow us to really answer some of these questions. 00:17:28 Dave: Yeah that’s right. So if somebody was doing restoration work out there, what would be a good monitoring project? If you could fund, you know, you could get some of these other groups doing it. 00:17:36 Nick: It’s somewhat, uh, watershed specific on identifying limiting factors. Right. So it’s a little bit hard to figure out what’s the most important. I mean, the one thing for me, just partly coming out of grad school and just thinking about this a lot, like I’m just urging people to GPS locate all their reds right? When they go out and they do. Red counts is mark those so we can start getting time series of data to see where fish are going in the watershed. And it can be difficult because it requires a lot of spatial coverage. But the more people you have doing that, that can be really important. 00:18:05 Dave: Located in Boulder, Colorado, Intrepid Camp Gear is dedicated to designing and manufacturing the best and most highly engineered automotive camp gear on the market. 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I think that would be something you could probably get out to people that are doing the work. Right. To say, you know, this one clearinghouse for everything, right. So you could keep track of these reds. That’d be kind of cool. 00:19:26 Nick: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then you also get a time, you know, what time of year the fish are there because that’s likely going to have to change. Right. And this is this is one of the things John probably talked about is that if we look at California and Oregon down where I’m from, and I’m moving back to those fish spawn. You know, middle of winter. We have December through spring spawning, but kind of an early, earlier peak than what we would see in Washington on the Olympic Peninsula or especially, you know, British Columbia. But as waters warm, we have warmer summers, longer summers. Those fish in the spring are maybe not going to be as successful. I know John’s already seeing a lot more of these late Reds are getting de-watered in the summer where twenty years ago those fish were fine. And so we’re selecting against late spawning fish and we’re going to see a shift towards earlier spawning. So we need to protect early spawning fish. Right. But we’re not necessarily in a management context. We’re not looking at things that way. We’re treating everything almost as if it’s static and so predicting and not even necessarily predicting, but observing how things are changing and then managing to protect fish that are going to be the most important in the future. So early spawning fish that are going to, you know, sort of be the new normal, be the new peak might shift a month or two earlier. And so accounting for those things and adjusting our management accordingly. 00:20:39 Dave: Yeah, it sounds like yeah, diversity. That’s something that’s always, you know, super important. So it sounds like that’s a big part of this. It’s really interesting. There’s so much here. Right. It seems like, you know, at the conservation angle how now you and John are there. How do you guys keep all this going? Do you have. What’s the staff look like there? Are you, you know, do you struggle with that, having enough staff to put all these projects together? 00:21:02 Nick: It can be tough. Yeah. You know, there’s only really about four of us right now. We’re hoping to expand, you know. Funding is always limited. So you’re limited by how much money and time you can can put together. So, you know, one thing that we’re trying to do is get more angler science programs going, right? So our replacement for this Kamchatka steelhead project would involve getting guides and anglers out on the river to help us collect data. And so administering those programs can be difficult. But those these would all be done in partnership with agencies and that kind of thing. And so that’s, you know, we’re in the process of trying to get some of this stuff together, but it’s very early on. So I don’t want to say too much about, what we’re working on where, but that would be a way to sort of maximize our reach and our ability. Right? As you would, you would be able to work with agency staff as partners and then bring guides and anglers and train them how to take scale samples. And there could be simple things like there’s there’s these new phone apps that have come out. You can take a picture of a fish and with AI it’ll, you know, measure length, girth, that kind of thing. And then you’d also have a picture to get condition from. So you could take a scale sample, take a picture, you’d have it GPS located. You know, I mean I know sometimes fishermen don’t want to do that. So you could get rid of that part. I mean, I probably wouldn’t. 00:22:13 Dave: Yeah. That’s true. Right, right. 00:22:15 Nick: When you’re catching them, you know, it’s different than spawning because they swim through. But you know, so there’s a couple there’s one I saw right where you could carry around something the size of a baseball with you, and you set it in the picture. It’s a known size, right? Right. And so then you can measure fish from that. So there’s ways that we could use people that are already out in the field all the time catching fish, interacting with them to collect data. That could be useful. And it requires some training. But, you know, so that those kind of things can kind of and maximize our reach. 00:22:40 Dave: Yeah, definitely. You came from Trout Unlimited, which is one of the larger organizations out there doing, you know, this good work. How is the what’s the comparison like there for you. You know to versus conservation angler. Is it doing similar things. What’s that feel like? 00:22:56 Nick: It’s somewhat similar. Yeah. You know at to the Wild Steelhead initiative was really we were our own little subgroup within a much larger organization. And the organization by and large they do a huge amount of habitat restoration. And our focus was similar to what we’re doing now. And that, you know, our sort of messaging was, hey, we do all this habitat restoration, but we’re not aligning harvest and hatchery policies in such a way that’s allowing enough fish to use this restored habitat. We focused on more of the policy management side of things, to try to improve the way that we manage fish, to maximize the investment on restoration that was being applied. So being such a tiny group, in many ways, it’s it’s great. In some ways it’s it’s more challenging because there’s fewer resources available. But we’re still focused. You know, I think the biggest benefit that we have going forward, and if we’re really going to have steelhead into the future in fishable numbers, is by addressing some of these other aspects that are very important, but not necessarily politically palatable to a lot of groups to take on hatchery and harvest issues, right, where everybody can kind of agree on restoration. Right? It feels good. Everybody’s like, yeah, we need to do this. 00:24:04 Dave: Right. So you guys are in that thing. So yeah, the hatchery discussion has been there forever. So you guys are kind of out there in the middle of that kind of ready to take on some of that with data that you’re putting together essentially. Right. So you’re not coming in here blind. So you actually have some, you know, some movement there. Right. Is that kind of part of the process? 00:24:22 Nick: That is part of it. And you know, what we’re going to do there is is still up in the air. I mean, we do have a network of rivers that don’t have hatcheries on them that have healthy wild steelhead populations. And right now that’s kind of our focus. Right? Places like the Klamath, the North Umpqua, the John Day up into B.C., through Alaska. Right. There’s a number of rivers there that would provide us, you know, steelhead populations that we could study and answer some of these questions that we want to do. So I think in some of the lawsuits in the past, because, you know, TCA has been involved in a number of lawsuits. Some of them are more like low hanging fruit, but aren’t necessarily they don’t have direct implications on some of these really high priority rivers for us. So I think we’re kind of like strategizing and figuring out what we want to work on and where and where we can focus our time, because, as you said, right. We’re limited. And so certainly that’s on the table. You know, what that is and how that looks. It’s unclear. But but our focus is definitely on places where we can have wild fish and fish for them. And fishable numbers. Right. Not just kind of like going after hatcheries willy nilly. 00:25:19 Dave: Yeah, that’s kind of the cool thing with the wild fish, because there are some places I think, um, the Skeena is one, right? That is a good example of, I’m not sure the whole hatchery background, but I mean, there’s basically no hatchery fish up there. And they’ve had a it’s a place a lot of people in the world want to go to from all around the world to go to Skena. What’s your take? Do you know much about the Skena Basin? Is that something? Where is a good example of one of these wild? Is it is it comparable to Kamchatka? Or maybe talk about the differences between some of those, you know, all wild basins. 00:25:47 Nick: It’s somewhat comparable. And that, yeah, it doesn’t really have a history of hatchery production and it’s maintained a relatively strong run. I know there’s been a few down years lately, including this year. But, you know, Kamchatka is somewhat unique in that it’s it’s tundra rivers instead of forested areas. But I think it does have some of the same cool factors in that what you have in Kamchatka is relatively intact steelhead populations, right? We have fish that are thirty eight inches and twenty pounds. Right. So huge girth, so body sizes that we used to see here we have records of it’s maybe as recent as the nineteen thirties but are just absent now. And so you know, why have those gone away. Right. Is that a is that a fishing effect. Are we selecting for younger fish or is this, you know, is it a habitat effect. Right. There’s just not as much food, right? We’re not escaping as many salmon as we used to. So there’s there’s a shortage of food. So our fish are just longer and skinnier. So getting some of those questions of what have we lost? I’m less familiar with the Skeena. You know, I, I think there’s been a depletion of some life histories like some of these really early entering spring, spring entering summer runs I think are there’s not as many as they used to be. So, you know, I think that’s the cool thing in Kamchatka is that you do have this really broad diversity. And I it’s somewhat reflected in the Skeena, but I don’t know, necessarily have enough background with the Skeena to know if that’s totally comparable. 00:27:03 Dave: Yeah, I guess it’s different. Yeah. And probably the Kamchatka that twenty years of data is quite a bit. What about when you look at up into Alaska, you know, the whole kind of up eventually it ends right there. Distribution. Do you know kind of where that line is and why that is? We’ve talked about that a number of times. But what’s going on up in Alaska? Is there just a place where you get too far north where they can’t reside up there? 00:27:24 Nick: So that’s what it seems like, right? So so rainbow trout go up to the Kuskokwim and that’s the edge, right? They don’t go up into the Yukon or anything north. So we have them up through the Kuskokwim drainage, and they’re really abundant and quite large up there. So they seem to be doing well, but they just haven’t expanded their range. And then for steelhead, they really they’re on the Alaska Peninsula and it’s really the southern side. Right. So north of the Alaska Peninsula you’d have Bristol Bay. That’s kind of the demarcation line. Right. So we have them on Kodiak Island and then on the Alaska Peninsula, on those streams that face the Pacific and then out the Aleutians. And once you get into Bristol Bay, you have fish that are the size of steelhead, but they’re they’re rainbows, right? Right. Rainbows. So we have these huge fish thirty four inches, you know. So I think there’s a there’s a few things that go on there and it hasn’t necessarily been really looked at that closely. But I think what’s occurring is you have fish that are you have a really short growing season and it’s really cold in the rest of the year. But during that growing season you have tons of food, you have eggs, sockeye flesh, you know as much as you can eat. There’s a buffet in the river of really high quality food, and then the rest of the year it’s just really cold. You don’t put on growth and there’s not much to eat. So what’s probably happening is this fish they spawn in late spring, their fry come out. They’re really small that first year, and they’re probably not big enough to eat eggs and flesh. They probably just they may not put on a ton of growth until they get into that first fall period, but they have a really short window to grow before that, that onset of fall. And for fish to smolt go to the ocean as a juvenile steelhead. They need to hit these body size thresholds, right. There’s a certain size and they make that decision actually at the end of summer, but they don’t smolt until the next spring. So that decision of whether or not they’re going to smolt is made months in advance, and it’s based on body size and body condition and these types of things. And so what’s happening most likely is fish are too small to smolt as a one year old, which is pretty rare, we really only see that mostly in California. Most fish are two years old before they smolt, so they they don’t hit that threshold in their first year, but then their second year, they’re big enough to eat eggs and flesh, and there’s so much food that they probably put on too much growth in that second summer. And so they overshoot that threshold. So that’s my guess of what’s really occurring is it’s a combination of temperature and food that’s leading to a growth rate that doesn’t really match with like a steelhead life history. And then they can produce so many eggs. As a big resident, they grow really fast once they get to that size where they can really eat a lot of food. They can mature at a large body size. They can produce as many eggs as a steelhead would. And their survival in freshwater is, you know, fairly high. And so their lifetime fecundity of how many eggs and offspring they can produce is probably higher than what a steelhead would do. 00:30:03 Dave: Right, right. So it’s makes sense for them to keep that life history. 00:30:07 Nick: Yeah. Yeah. They’re more productive. And then also just this sort of like food temperature dynamic and freshwater leads to them just not having it just doesn’t quite match a steelhead life history. But I do think this this may change, right? As as temperatures warm as climate change progresses, particularly in less productive watersheds. Right. So Bristol Bay, you know, it’s known for tens of millions of sockeye. But a lot of the other rivers out there, they’re productive, but they don’t have rainbows that big. So I you know, I guided on the connect talk for a season, and there are a few fish that are in the high twenty inches range up to thirty inches. But the majority of rainbow trout are, you know, sixteen, eighteen inches. So I think some of these other watersheds, we have more smaller fish. As they warm, we’re more likely to see steelhead expanding into some of these rivers. And eventually probably we will see some fish move up into the Yukon and expand their range northward. 00:30:53 Dave: Right. So that’s what’s going to happen after if the climate keeps changing like it is getting warmer north, then you’re going to see probably steelhead, these rainbows turning into steelhead or just other fish taking over that area. 00:31:04 Nick: Yeah, I think that’s likely. And this is where I think there would be some cool research to do on that front is like what leads to a steelhead rainbow trout in these places specifically? And what sort of life histories are we seeing be successful. Right. And how are these populations changing as rivers warm? Because some of those steelhead runs, I don’t think they’re particularly large, one thousand, two thousand fish. It can feel like there’s a lot because they’re small rivers, so they’re relatively easy to access. But that’s sort of like front of colonization or whatever would be interesting to study, because one of the challenges is those fish use the same ocean as our fish from, you know, the Columbia and Washington, right? Our fish go out and they seem to go north and kind of do a lap around the North Pacific Gyre. Potentially. We don’t have that much data about steel in the ocean, but certainly there’s overlap. And where those fish go in the ocean to our fish. And right now, the ocean, the North Pacific is still, you know, a hospitable place, right? There’s still food. It’s still the appropriate temperature. Fish can survive. But as we see more of these blobs coming in and ocean changes eventually, that’s likely. What will limit anadromous is really, you know, is the ocean inhospitable versus not because most likely they can survive in the freshwater temperatures that we’re going to see over the next few decades. 00:32:13 Dave: Right now. Is steelhead mostly your focus? Are there other species that you’re working with as well? 00:32:18 Nick: We’re mostly focused on steelhead, but Chinook are kind of the other one that are interesting. They’re not as diverse as steelhead, but they still have a good amount of diversity. They do different things, different run timings, and they’re also just as a, you know, a sport fish. They’re fun to fish for, right? They kind of have a bit more of that history. They’re huge. So there’s a lot of interesting things. They also these other fish species are very important as food for steelhead too. So certainly steelhead is our first love. But I think, you know, Chinook are something that we’re interested in as well. 00:32:48 Dave: Yeah. We fish for up at togiak. I fished for the first time for swinging for Chinook. And it was it was really cool because just getting the feel of how different it was than steelhead fishing, you know, the whole thing, just the bigger fish and the runs and all that and bigger stuff. But but there is this kind of a downer. There’s a struggle here with the Alaska. You always think Alaska is that place where it’s just like, there’s no way you’re going to ever, you know, affect Alaska because it’s there’s so big. But now all these closures on Chinook, what’s your take on all that. Is that just another ocean condition thing or what. Is there other things going on there. 00:33:21 Nick: I don’t think it’s ocean conditions. This is is debated. It may be small part driven by ocean conditions, but a lot of this is driven by declines in in body size, which really is most likely a commercial fishing effect. Right. Because these fish go out to the ocean, they Chinook spend a lot more time in the ocean than steelhead do. Most steelhead are two years, occasionally up to five, but most Chinook historically were four and five year olds. Right. And a few three year olds. Well, what we’re we’re doing is every year you spend in freshwater, you earn saltwater. You have a chance of getting caught in a fishery, right? So the longer you spend in the ocean, the less likely you are to survive. And so we’re selecting for younger fish to come back. And so we’ve ended up with instead of populations dominated by five year old fish, they’re dominated by three year old fish. And they’re very small. And so they have fewer eggs so they’re less productive. They also they can’t dig in as big a gravel or dig as deep of reds. And so they’re they’re more prone to scouring. So they in theory they’re more suited to a small stream. They’re more like a coho, right. Or a steelhead. But they’re still trying to spawn in these large mainstem rivers because that’s sort of their niche, right? That’s where they they go back to. They hone back with pretty high fidelity. That’s one thing we see with steelhead, right. They they come back to the same stream and even like the same section of river and Chinook do the same thing as well, maybe with a little different fidelity, but it seems pretty good. And so if they come back and they try to spawn in a main stem, but they’re too small, they just may not be as successful to recover Chinook. One thing we likely need to do is recover that body size, and that is most likely a harvest effect. There’s there’s some evidence that it could be temperature related in the ocean, but that’s uncertain. You know, there’s there’s potentially some, um, poor survival early in life. Right. If there’s different food sources when they first meet the ocean and they don’t time their ocean entry right with the right food source, that could lead to poorer survival. So it’s probably multifaceted, but I think the fish are a bit more resilient than what we give them credit for often. And if we if we leave them alone, they seem to come back and they seem to do pretty well. 00:35:17 Dave: So if you were to take those the fishing, like you said, whether that’s um, I guess there’s different types of fishing out there. But the trawlers we’ve heard a little bit about. Right. Some of those where they just they’re taking everything or what is it. Do we have that. Do we know the the fishery that we could help, you know, if it was restricted that would recover some of those bigger fish? 00:35:34 Nick: Yeah. It depends a bit on stock. So out Togiak stock that Bering Sea kind of that western Alaska area. There is a lot of trawlers that have a bycatch of Chinook. And this is I haven’t kept up on it totally. I know there’s been a few lawsuits over the years and they’ve they’ve lowered some of their bycatch, but there’s a lot of ocean bycatch of Chinook in that fishery. And it’s really a fishery targeted pollock and hake, which are sort of a low quality fish that we use for fish sticks. But it’s not even necessarily there’s money in it, but it’s you know, we’re trading fish sticks for Chinook. So it doesn’t seem like a great trade to me. And then if you go to other places. So our fish in the lower forty eight, they travel up the Inside passage, right, Vancouver Island, Haida Gwaii, Prince of Wales. And they stay close to shore. And a lot of those fish get caught in the Southeast Alaska troll fishery where, you know, hook and line behind boat, but commercial troll fishery and those harvest rates can be fifty, sixty, eighty percent at times on our fish. And then we also harvest those fish when they come back. So the the end harvest rate can be quite high on some of our stocks because a lot of them are getting caught in Alaska. And then they get caught down here. And the other challenge of them getting caught in Alaska is you have things like Upper Columbia spring Chinook, which are critically endangered, that are getting caught in that fishery where once we once you have a terminal fishery, you can kind of target, say, fall run Chinook that are in much better shape than some of these spring run Chinook. But it’s pretty hard to do that when you’re in the open ocean. 00:37:01 Dave: There’s a place where every bend in the river feels like it’s been waiting for you, where the air smells of sage and pine and trout rise beneath the shadows of the Tetons that places visit Idaho, Yellowstone, Teton Territory, the heartbeat of fly fishing in the west from the legendary Henrys Fork to the winding South Fork of the snake. This is where Big fish and bigger stories live. You’ll find endless waters welcoming towns and locals who still wave as you drive by, with drift boat in tow. This is your starting point for world class fly fishing, year round recreation, and wild country that stays with you long after you’ve packed up your gear. Check it out right now. That’s wet. Fly to visit Idaho for yourself and support this podcast while you go. Back to what you guys are looking to do and you’re really focused on. Part of it is knowing how many fish are coming back and where are the best places are to put our energy kind of in freshwater. Is that kind of a good a quick summary of part of the work you guys are doing? 00:38:02 Nick: Yeah, I think it’s understanding, you know, the basic biology of these fish in sort of priority wild rivers. Right. And it’s really with a management focus. Right. How do we sustain and recover fish. What are the most important life history components. What’s maybe missing in some of these places. How are these populations changing into the future so that we can adapt our management to reflect those changes and adapt with them? Things like, you know, fishing seasons, gear types, that type of thing. You know, protecting, protecting early time fish or protecting weak stocks, that kind of thing. 00:38:34 Dave: Yeah, exactly. And what about as you go down to so we talked about the northern distribution. What about on the south end. I know I’ve heard historically that steelhead might have gone all the way down into Mexico. What’s it looking like? Because you hear a lot in Northern California. You hear some good things down there. What are you guys looking on the southern end about studying some of that down there? 00:38:53 Nick: I don’t know if we’ll make it down there. It’s super interesting. There’s some cool rivers. It’s really developed. I’ve talked to some of the people that work on fish and like Malibu Creek, for instance, which, you know, one of those creeks that has steelhead down there. That whole area just burned with that Palisades fire, right? Yeah. So they’re dealing with landslides that come down after fires and all kinds of things, and really small populations of fish. So they’re they’re just kind of hanging on. And it’s super interesting because you can have fish that are populations that are largely resident, and it may not be suitable for steelhead to come back from the ocean every year. Right. You have bars that form at the mouth, right? Like sandbars. And those may not even get blown out in some years. And then they blow out. You have a high water year and steelhead come back, which just blows me away that that’s even possible. But, you know, you might have a population of just a handful of fish. So super cool. And I admire the people that work on that, because it just seems like so mentally challenging to deal with populations that are so on the edge. And, you know, we might, um, I won’t say we won’t work on it down there. We just haven’t been necessarily looking at that kind of stuff as you get into the Central Valley. Right. There’s still a lot of steelhead that come back in some of these places. They’re largely hatchery fish. You have, you know, so much modification and diking and there’s, you know, water issues and then massive hatchery releases, you know, I’m just not even sure what to do in some of these places. There’s just a big policy nightmare overlaying all this biology. 00:40:14 Dave: Yeah, it makes more sense. Yeah. Where you guys are doing where you’re focusing on the areas where it’s a little clearer picture. There’s not as much going on. So you can kind of get a feel for the populations and how they’re doing. Then you can utilize that data to, you know, expand out to the rest of the areas. Right, to make decisions is that that’s kind of part of the thinking. 00:40:31 Nick: Yeah. Exactly. Right. So if you have the Klamath, right, all wild other than some strays from the Trinity, which you know, is probably somewhat minimal. Yeah. You can learn a lot more about that river and the fish in it. Right. And their wild fish doing, doing their thing rather than being, you know, largely hatchery fish and maybe run timing. A lot of their attributes are really dictated by what’s being propagated in the hatchery rather than sort of what the environment dictates. So yeah, simpler in many ways and just more interesting, I think more valuable data. And you could spend your entire career working in places like the Central Valley or even Puget Sound, where there’s just sort of like a mire of politics and regulation and, and issues that just make it very difficult. 00:41:12 Dave: Right, right. Exactly. And you’re there working with John McMillan. That must be pretty cool working side by side with John. He’s such a powerhouse and all this stuff. What’s that like? Uh, learning from him, working together with John out there? I’m not sure if you guys kind of chatting daily or whatever, but what’s that look like? 00:41:27 Nick: Yeah. You know, we’re actually, like, pretty close friends. And I think we have many things in common. Right? Just our love for steel, like, structured our lives around them in many ways to the detriment of possibly other aspects of our life. Right. We’re just like, you kind of have an obsession that you just have to chase these fish around. And we’ve definitely become close over that. I really like the science. That’s really to me, that’s how you form a lot of decisions that should be made, is you understand the biology of the fish and then you can build from there in terms of like management or policy to protect fish. And so I think we have we have a similar approach in that we also just generally get along well. I really, really enjoy working with John. I appreciate him. He has such a history just growing up with his dad and all the people around. Right, that were, you know, some of the pioneers of conservation of steelhead. So that historical perspective is so valuable. 00:42:15 Dave: Yeah, he must have some pretty good stories with, uh, his dad and just kind of all that stuff out there with being early on. Right. Because he was probably a youngster when some of this was getting going in the seventies or something like that. 00:42:25 Nick: He was. Yeah, he really was, you know, and so he knows it’s just amazing to me like who he knows. And then the history of stuff, you’d be like, oh wow, I just learned about this. Have you heard about this? And he’s like, oh yeah, my dad was there. And like, you know, it’s involved. It’s really unique in that vein that he’s just like he’s been in it his whole life and that perspective. So it’s been really invaluable to learn from him and even just the science. Right. Like there’s a part of science of just not knowing what to even read. You can go on Google and the internet’s gotten better, right? With Google Scholar, you can go on there and search just literature. But sometimes if you don’t know the questions to ask, you just won’t even find whole areas of research. So my graduate work really, John pointed me in that direction. And that even comes from Jason Dunham. Right. So it’s not like John is the only one who’s found all this stuff and put it together. We all learn from others. So, you know, John’s advisor in grad school, Jason Dunham. He pointed John towards this area. John thought, oh, this is cool. It seems relevant. He pointed it to me and then I was able to put a graduate project together and go to school. So it’s had a huge influence on on me. So it’s been good and I just yeah, I appreciate working with him. He’s a great guy. 00:43:29 Dave: Definitely. If you had to say, you know, as we start to take it out here pretty quick, uh, you know, as far as maybe a few of those books, what would be if somebody is listening now, they want to learn more about all this that we’ve been talking about today. Do you have a few good resources you’d direct somebody to. 00:43:43 Nick: Famine Without Rivers is Jim first book. He wrote another one, and I can’t remember the name of it off the top of my head, but that gives like a really good historical context of the decline of Pacific salmon. Right? It goes through splash damming and logging and all the all the things that we did to them. Overharvest that is a great one to kind of understand the history of this. It’s very depressing if you love fish, but King of Fish is another one by David Montgomery. That was pretty good. And again, similar vein, kind of the historical context, I think actually going through John’s Instagram. Oh, yeah. Really valuable. Right? Like, if you really love, like, the biology of steelhead and the nitty gritty, you should go back and read a bunch of his posts. And I’ve encouraged him and we’ve thought about this, of actually taking a lot of this writing that we’ve done and putting it into a more published format at some point. And we’ll see, because I think a lot of that doesn’t exist. The literature exists, but it’s somewhat inaccessible to people that don’t have a science background, just the terminology. And just even finding it and knowing how to access it can be difficult. It’s a skill on its own. So we have a blog. We’re getting more regular and posting on that. And so, you know, certainly we’ll post updates about the work we’re kind of doing. And so that’s a good way to stay in touch. Also, we’re really trying to continue some of the work we started doing at Trout Unlimited, similar to what’s on John’s Instagram. Right. Just talking about the biology of these fish. And really, you know, it’s interesting to us, but ideally it’s all tied back to why we need to manage these fish in a certain way. Right. Why we’re advocating for whatever policy on a certain river or the questions that we’re trying to answer. Why? And why those questions are important. 00:45:16 Dave: Exactly. Rick Williams, he had a new book, Managed Extinction. We talked about that and some of the stuff he’s doing. I think he’s tied into some of those. I think as well I think he’s connected there. But but yeah, I think that this is probably a great place to kind of leave it. I also want to give one shout out to Patagonia. They’re the sponsor for today on this episode, and we’re trying to get the word out. More on their Swift Current waders, which have some more episodes coming on, what they have going there. I’m interested in that because I’m going to get some people on from Patagonia. They’re going to talk about, you know, what they’re doing, how those waders are different as far as the recycled materials and stuff like that. Do you guys have much? I’m sure you’re familiar with Patagonia and Yvon Chouinard and all the work there. Is that a company you’re well aware of, kind of some of the work? Have you worked with them over the years? 00:46:03 Nick: You know, we’ve gotten some grant funding from them. I’m certainly aware of them. I’m wearing three Patagonia layers right now. 00:46:08 Dave: There you go. 00:46:09 Nick: Here in the. 00:46:09 Dave: Cold. What do you got on what? What’s your Patagonia. If you had to pick one that you really love, what is it? 00:46:13 Nick: They have a discontinued Patagonia. I’ll give a plug here for the the Nano puff, but it’s got the the pouch in the front with the zipper. So if you’re wearing waders, you can stick stuff right in the pouch. 00:46:22 Dave: On the top. 00:46:22 Nick: I think they call it a bivouac hoodie. So the nano I wear all the time when I’m fishing. It’s comfy with the hood, but I love the one with the vertical pocket or the horizontal pocket. 00:46:30 Dave: Oh, the horizontal pocket, right? 00:46:32 Nick: Yeah. It’s perfect for when you’re wearing waders. I wear that one or the the R1 hoodie. 00:46:36 Dave: Yeah. Me too. I’m a big yeah r1 R2 yeah. We had uh, when I did the episode with Yvon on the podcast, I was asking him about, you know, just same sort of thing, but he just kept going. It was really cool because he just kept driving into all the conservation stuff that was in his head. You know, the fact that they’re working with the companies to build a new dryer, to take out the fleece microfibers right out of the environment and stuff. And, you know, it’s just like, I mean, similar to you guys, right? You guys are always there. You’re always in the middle of it thinking about what can you do next, right? 00:47:04 Nick: Yeah, I mean, I think what they’re doing is super cool because no other company has really done that. I mean, obviously he’s he’s very wealthy, so he has the ability to make some sacrifices. But I appreciate that he is. And you know, there’s lots of people, right? I mean, we’re we’re funded off of donors. So there’s lots of people that are doing good work, but they do really kind of put their money where their mouth is on that stuff, and I appreciate that about them. 00:47:24 Dave: Yeah, definitely. Well, leave us away with just maybe a couple of actions, people listening out what they could do to support, you know, what you have going or really just anything around steelhead. What are a couple things people could do today? 00:47:34 Nick: I’d love it if people just follow us on Instagram at The Conservation Angler, go to our website, read our blog. You know, we’ll have some opportunities for people to get involved and participate in some angler science. That would be great. As we develop these things, you know, just we’ll try to get the message out and get people more involved just to explain how people can do that. And of course, you know, always donate button on our website. Donations are always very much appreciated. Nothing’s too small, you know, that really helps us fund our work and and expand what we’re doing and yeah, do good work. So. 00:48:03 Dave: Perfect. Yeah. I feel like I was just we just did a recent survey on our podcast of listeners and the percentage of, you know, what episodes do you listen to most? Or what do you love most? And you know the conservation piece. And I don’t think this is always the case, but, you know, it doesn’t get as much as many listens as some of the other stuff we do around, you know, fly fishing. I think it’s something very important that we have to keep doing. But I think maybe part of it is there’s not always a super positive message. Right? There’s always some struggles. But what’s your take on that? Do you find that that sometimes getting into the connecting to the anglers, sometimes it’s a challenge to get them to be a part, take action. 00:48:40 Nick: It can be a challenge sometimes. You know, it depends on the issue. I think we’ve had a surprisingly good response on on a lot of issues. If we really I think if we do a good job of communicating why we’re advocating for something and the need for it, I see a lot of people respond in a positive way. Right? So some of it’s on us to do a good job of messaging and communication. And it seems like, you know, steelhead anglers are pretty passionate. So there’s there’s a number of people that are willing to engage and, and show up and testify. So I have a positive, relatively positive outlook on the community of people that are out there. I know that it’s not always as much fun to listen to conservation talk as fishing talk. 00:49:16 Dave: Right, right. Well, this was this was awesome today, Nick. I think that the stuff you went in today was was amazing. I think it really is getting some people thinking out there. So yeah, we’ll send everybody out to conservation anglers if they have questions for you and want to thank you for all the time and all the great work you and John and everybody else is doing. And yeah, we’ll look forward to keeping in touch. 00:49:34 Nick: Yeah, yeah, thanks, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. It’s fun. 00:49:38 Dave: There you go. If you want to connect with Nick and the conservation angler, you can do that right now, the conservation angler and check them out on Instagram. And as well John McMillan check out his feed and get some of the information there like Nick talked about today. If you want to get access, take this conversation further. Go over to Web Fly Swing Pro. That’s what this is, our community, uh, where you can get access to everything we have going that’s taking this on trips and taken it to the next step. Our next episode, if you want to check in in our next trip as well, is Togiak River Lodge. If you’re interested in heading up, we’re going to be heading back up there swinging for Chinook for King salmon. We talked about that today on the podcast, How Limited Things Are, but we did learn quite a bit today about Chinook and steelhead, so I hope you get a chance. If you’re interested in swinging for these fish, let me know. You send me an email Dave at com and I want to thank you for stopping in today and listening to the very end. I hope you’re having a great morning, great afternoon, or if it’s evening, I hope you enjoy your night and we’ll see you on the next episode. Talk to you then. 00:50:44 Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to the Wet Fly swing Fly fishing show. For notes and links from this episode, visit Wet Fly com.