Willamette River Has Sockeye? Over 100 Counted At Falls

Don’t get out your Spin-N-Glos and coon shrimp or anything, Oregonians, but there’s a bizarre albeit not entirely unexpected new species turning up in the Willamette Falls fish ladder this autumn: sockeye.

A total of 111 of the salmon have been counted there through October 30. Mostly, it’s only been a handful a day for about four or five weeks now, but October 17 saw a high mark of 10.

Here at the southern edge of their range, there really is only a single sockeye run in Oregon proper, one that’s slowly being rebuilt on the Deschutes River on the other side of the Cascade Range, and so given that Columbia River sockeye bound for Northcentral Washington, southern British Columbia and Central Idaho swam by Greater Portlandia months ago now, what in the heck is going on at the falls situated on the Willamette River between the towns of Oregon City and West Linn?

“You are right that these sockeye are very likely kokanee that survived being flushed out of Green Peter Reservoir in 2023,” said Beth Quillian, an ODFW spokeswoman.

Two falls ago, the impoundment on the Willamette’s Middle Santiam River was drawn down massively for the first time by the Army Corps of Engineers as part of a court-ordered effort to aid the downstream passage of young Endangered Species Act-listed spring Chinook and winter steelhead. Drawdowns are seen as a “critical element” in the federal biological opinion authorizing dam operations and mitigating their impacts to the fish.

But 2023’s drainoff also infamously sucked “more than a million” kokanee out of Green Peter, not only killing about 8,000 of them due to barotrauma but likely the future of the fishery, given that drawdowns are continuing annually.

Yet apparently some of those kokanee survived and went … somewhere, anyway, over the past two years.

Kokanee are landlocked sockeye salmon. Their ocean-going relatives spend two to three years in the Pacific after rearing a year in a lake below the stream in which they’re hatched.

No images of the sockeye in the Willamette Falls ladder were immediately available. ODFW uses video cameras and recordings to count fish at the station. On the tally, the sockeye are described as “NM,” or not marked, meaning they weren’t clipped at a hatchery prior to release.

Quillian reported that the sockeye that have continued up the Willamette and arrived at the South Santiam River’s Foster Dam – which backs up the next reservoir below Green Peter – are estimated by hatchery staffers there to be averaging 18 to 24 inches and 2 to 3 pounds. That’s good sized for a kokanee, though on the small side for a sockeye returning from saltwater.

The first Green Peter drawdown in 2023 also created a muddy mess and water quality problems for small communities and local landowners’ wells. It was halted early in fall 2024 and this year’s is being performed more gradually.

SOCKEYE ARE THE SECOND SPECIES to turn up in notable numbers in the Willamette following drawdowns the past two falls.

Deep flushing Lookout Point Reservoir southeast of Eugene appears to have pushed “large numbers” of walleye into Dexter Reservoir, the Middle Fork Willamette and the mainstem Willamette. The fish were illegally stocked in Lookout Point sometime in the 1990s.

ODFW biologists are unsure that the walleye population will ever explode in the upper Willamette River, but they are keeping a wary eye on the situation, as the nonnative fish are known to prey on young salmonids.

“So far they haven’t reached that critical mass where they become established in the Willamette, but it is something we’re concerned about and we hope they don’t reach that point,” agency assistant biologist Jeremy Romer told outdoor reporter Zach Urness of the Salem Statesman Journal for an October 22 article.

Urness wrote that ODFW encourages anglers to catch and keep walleye. One known spot is the base of Dexter Dam in late winter and early spring when the fish gather to spawn. Unmarked sockeye don’t appear to be open for retention in the Willamette system.

This year, the Corps had also planned on beginning fall drawdowns at Detroit Lake on the North Santiam, home to another popular kokanee fishery, but pushed it back to 2026 to analyze the impacts and gather public input.

Willamette Valley towns’ concerns about being able to provide clean drinking water to their residents were addressed in part during an October 23 virtual press conference. As Kathleen George of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Jennifer Fairbrother of the Native Fish Society reiterated the importance of the drawdowns as a tool to restore important salmon and steelhead runs, they also acknowledged their impacts and extended offers to local communities.

“We welcome the conversation about how we can support those communities while sediment is an issue for them,” said George.

NFS was among the organizations that took the Corps to federal court over dam operations and won, eventually leading to the drawdowns.

I asked the Grand Ronde and NFS officials afterwards if they had any comment on the drawdowns spreading walleye into more of the habitat of the fish that they and others are trying to recover.

“One often overlooked benefit of drawdowns is that they can help reduce the populations of invasive fish in the reservoirs that prey on large numbers of outmigrating salmon. This has been a real problem in Lookout Point Reservoir over the years,” stated Fairbrother.

In a podcast supporting Urness’s article on Willamette walleye, ODFW biologists stated that Lookout Point’s once packed boat ramp lots are now much emptier, and that Fall Creek Reservoir, where drawdowns have been going on much longer, used to be a tournament bass fishery but no longer is because the largemouth are basically gone. The Corps reports they’ve seen “a 98 to 99 percent survival rate” for spring Chinook through Fall Creek via drawdowns.

Fairbrother said that there have long been anecdotal reports of walleye in the mainstem Willamette and that NFS supports “a comprehensive plan to address invasive species around the state,” but at the moment they “haven’t seen enough evidence to conclude that walleye are establishing populations in the Willamette downstream of the dams.” 

“What we do know is that the cost of pausing drawdowns would lead to the extinction of native salmon and steelhead,” she added. “These reports are important to monitor, but our first priority must be to provide safe fish passage.”

George agreed with Fairbrother’s assessments based on what she’s heard from Grand Ronde technical staff, according to press conference organizers.

A National Marine Fisheries Service five-year status review issued last year found Willamette Valley spring Chinook and winter steelhead remain at moderate risk of extinction and that the viability of both species has declined relative to the previous review. Drawdowns are one of two “top recommendations” for recovering the stocks, per the review. The other is “providing effective upstream and downstream passage” facilities around the dams for returning adult fish and outmigrating smolts to make maximum use of available spawning grounds in the Cascades, though the cost of building juvenile surface collectors has been questioned. Drawing the reservoirs down allows young fish to go through a low-level regulating outlet, easing their downstream journey.

MEANWHILE, IT’S HARD TO SAY IF ANYTHING will ever come of this showing of kokanee turned sockeye in the Willamette this fall – they’re not like coho, which can spawn in just about any little stream – though theoretically it could be repeated a couple years after Detroit Lake is lowered in 2026.

“We are interested in outplanting these fish above Green Peter Reservoir to supplement the juvenile kokanee releases we are doing there,” stated ODFW spokeswoman Quillian. “However, sockeye are known to carry Infectious Hematopoietic Necrosis Virus (IHNV) at levels that can have negative impacts on other salmonids. ODFW’s Fish Health Lab has taken samples to test for IHNV and we are awaiting the results (it can take up to a month) to determine if we can outplant the sockeye that continue to come in.”

It’s actually not the first time that a dam-blocked salmonid has apparently reverted to its migratory ways in the Northwest in recent years. When the Elwha River dams on Washington’s northern Olympic Peninsula were taken out last decade, rainbow trout that had been lakelocked for a century immediately headed to sea as summer steelhead.

While there are several websites that publish daily fish counts – Fish Passage Center, Columbia Data Access in Real Time – sockeye are only being tallied on ODFW’s for the falls. And the salmon are just one of several species being noted there.

“A variety of species can ascend Willamette Falls in low numbers each year,” stated Quillian. “While ODFW notes all fish species that use the ladders at Willamette Falls, they are not all noted on the public spreadsheet. Walleye and sockeye numbers are being recorded this year because we are seeing more of them.”

In addition to the 111 sockeye, so far this year ODFW has counted 20 chum salmon, seven smallmouth bass, six walleye, and one pink – probably a lost humpy from Puget Sound.

The numbers are nowhere close to the Willamette fish that are most keenly watched by anglers and biologists – spring Chinook, winter and summer steelhead, and coho – but those for sockeye do help to tell a small part of a much larger story about efforts and effects of restoring native fish in the watershed.

Editor’s note: A new paragraph sixth from the end has been added to clarify the fate of the sockeye returning at Foster Dam.