Steelhead in Peril: Will you help save our State Fish?

I’m writing to ask for your support in recovering steelhead—the Washington State Fish. At this moment, wild steelhead are in peril statewide, with five different populations listed as “threatened” under the federal Endangered Species Act. It is essential that we act now to stabilize wild steelhead populations before they disappear entirely.

LLTK and our partners have begun this work in earnest with the Hood Canal Steelhead Project, a basin-wide experiment that builds on principles and techniques we developed from 1998-2008 in a pilot project on the Hamma Hamma River.

When we started our work on the Hamma, the steelhead population there was statistically non-existent. Ten years later, we are once again seeing wild steelhead spawning in the river. But despite the successes we’ve seen on the Hamma, steelhead runs in the rest of Hood Canal have dropped dramatically.

The Hood Canal Steelhead Project seeks to transfer what we learned on the Hamma to the larger rivers of Hood Canal, and thus to have a chance of making a significant impact on steelhead recovery. Like the Hamma project before it, the Hood Canal Steelhead Project employs limited hatchery intervention, as well as new rearing and release strategies, to increase survival and adult returns.

The promise of this work is great: the Hood Canal rivers now being supplemented (Duckabush, Dewatto, and Skokomish) are larger than the Hamma and provide more rearing and spawning opportunity. To give you an idea of what that looks like— if we put 200 steelhead in the Hamma Hamma, they would have about 1.5 miles of habitat in which to rear; the same number of fish would have ten miles in the Duckabush. More miles of healthy habitat means more healthy fish, so the results of hatchery intervention in the Hood Canal Steelhead Project rivers could be even better than what we’ve seen in the Hamma Hamma.

Of course, achieving the goal of wild steelhead recovery will be neither easy nor immediate; it will take time, effort, and sustained sources of funding to make it possible. We simply can’t do it without your financial help. Please consider making a gift to the organization that is getting results in wild steelhead recovery, by donating securely online to LLTK. Your investment in LLTK is an investment in the future of steelhead. Together, we can save our State Fish.

Thank you for your support,

Jim Youngren, Chairman, LLTK Board of Directors