FALL CREEK, Ore. — The forest is cloaked in mist, a chilling gray that drifts through the mossy tangle of limbs. It is barely dawn, but Ronald Yechout is wide awake, recounting the day he stumbled across the Fall Creek salmon massacre.
"Here," says Yechout, striding across a narrow bridge. One day in November 1998, Yechout stopped at Fall Creek while elk hunting to admire the annual return of coho salmon from the ocean. "The river was full of fish, absolutely crawling with them," he says.
Yechout (pronounced YEK-it) was delighted. But then he heard thunks and thwacks coming from the nearby fish hatchery. Walking over, he found hatchery workers with baseball bats, clubbing thousands of salmon to death.
What's going on? he asked.
The answer puzzled him, then outraged him, then launched him on a crusade that, three years later, has helped throw the Northwest's salmon-recovery effort into turmoil.
Along this creek in the Oregon woods, scientists tried to create a salmon that equaled the wild fish made by nature--and then, deciding they had failed, set about erasing their mistake with clubs.
Killing salmon to protect salmon? Yechout, standing by a creek now bereft of fish, thinks that this is no way to save a species.
In the 1800s, when industrial society arrived in the Pacific Northwest, the salmon began to disappear. Traps and nets intercepted millions of fish. Dams blocked rivers. Log drives scoured stream beds clean of fish eggs.
Nobody wished ill for the fish. The five species of Pacific salmon and their cousin, the steelhead, were a vital part of the economy. But there was no political will to stop development or overfishing, so Northwesterners staked their hopes on hatcheries, which promised to restore the lost abundance with no need to preserve habitat.
Hatcheries were supposed to take advantage of salmon's nomadic life cycle, keeping them safe from predators as eggs and young fish, then letting them fend for themselves during their migration to the sea and back.
Oregon's first salmon hatchery was built in 1877, and many others followed. For decades, however, few of them worked. It wasn't until the 1960s that hatcheries regularly yielded enough returning adults to supply the eggs needed for the next generation.
Techniques gradually improved, and hatcheries now prop up salmon populations all around the Pacific Rim. Hatcheries in Canada, Japan, Russia and the United States released up to 6 billion salmon annually during the last decade, accounting for about 25% of all young salmon entering the North Pacific.
