In partnership with King County, the Suquamish and Tulalip tribes want to know where and how many juvenile chinook salmon are using non-natal streams in Puget Sound during their migration to the ocean.

From February through May, scientists are looking at 35 streams throughout central Puget Sound, from Mukilteo to Dash Point on the eastern shores, from Point No Point to Olalla on the western shores, and on Bainbridge and Vashon islands.

Juvenile chinook recently have been observed taking refuge in freshwater creeks and estuaries along shorelines that are not known to support chinook spawning, said Steve Todd, the Suquamish Tribe’s salmon recovery biologist.

“Because central Puget Sound has lost much of its natural estuary habitat, non-natal streams may be important rearing habitats for juvenile chinook,” he said.

Scientists at the Tulalip Tribes and Skagit River System Cooperative have a model based on findings from small stream surveys in the Whidbey basin, said Todd Zackey, the Tulalip Tribes’ field studies program manager. 

“This study is to see if and how juvenile chinook use central Puget Sound, and update and refine the model developed for the Whidbey basin,” he said.

Chinook salmon populations and their habitat have been impacted by human-driven changes, such as pollution, deforestation and development. Puget Sound chinook are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.

Objectives of the study include identifying when and where juvenile chinook salmon are rearing within Puget Sound, and determining where juvenile chinook may rear based on habitat features, said Theo Suver, a field biologist with the Suquamish Tribe’s ecosystem recovery program. 

The study’s first data collection included surveying the quality of habitat conditions in the first 150 meters of the selected streams last fall, including looking at channel gradient, channel width, presence of woody debris, water temperature and conductivity.

This spring, scientists are electrofishing the same reaches, counting and measuring all species found. Electrofishing sends an electric circuit into the water, stunning the fish or encouraging them to swim toward the electric field for survey collection.

A fin clip from sampled chinook is sent to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife to be analyzed for river origin or genetic assessment of the stock. Water samples taken by the Suquamish Tribe will be tested for eDNA to compare electrofishing and eDNA methods to determine fish presence.

A juvenile coho salmon sampled from Klebeal Creek in March. Story and photos: Tiffany Royal

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Tribal representatives take a brief break from meetings in Washington D.C. during the 2026 Puget Sound Day on the Hill. From left: Northwest Indian Fisheries Commission Executive Director Justin Parker, NWIFC Legislative Analyst Sheyanne Lewis, Puyallup Tribe of Indians Fisheries Resource Policy Representative Rodney Sission, NWIFC Chairman Ed Johnstone, NWIFC Commissioner Randy Harder and NWIFC Treasurer Joe Peters. 

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Last fall, students spawned coho salmon at the hatchery with the help of staff, then fertilized the eggs in their classroom hatchery. Fish began hatching in January.

“This is the first time we’ve hatched salmon eggs here in this incubator,” said teacher Nicole Perry.

Students gathered around Perry as she extended one of the incubator trays from its holding deck. A few students shined lights from their cellphones into the water, illuminating a collection of orange coho eggs.

The room buzzed with excitement as students noticed a few of the salmon had hatched from the confines of their eggs, stretching into oblong alevin not quite ready to swim.

Bill Finkbonner, who retired from a 47-year career at the hatchery, fielded questions from students and is helping the class troubleshoot how to best care for the salmon in the school facility.

“I really enjoy coming in and helping these kids,” Finkbonner said. “It’s good to get them in here so they can actually see what working with fish is like.”

The goals of the class include teaching students skills applicable to jobs in fisheries, environmental science and natural resources management. Staffing those roles at tribes, as well as across other government sectors and organizations, is critical to sustaining salmon and Northwest ecosystems for the future.

“There are so many job opportunities in fisheries: stream monitoring, tagging, enforcement,” Finkbonner said.

For Lummi tribal members and juniors Russel Covington and Emilio Little Brave, the class is shedding light on the kind of work some of their relatives do in hatcheries in Whatcom County and in other areas of the state.

The boys—both accustomed to seeing adult salmon in the Nooksack River caught by tribal fishers and smoked to perfection— said they hadn’t expected to see the early life stages of salmon unfold in their classroom.

“I’m pretty stoked,” Little Brave said. “It actually got me thinking about working at a hatchery because I like being out on the river.”

The class also is tending to goldfish and other species held in fish tanks. Each student is tasked with keeping the water quality healthy in their designated tank. They learn to monitor and manage water chemistry and are graded on how well they keep it in balance.

“There’s a lot to learn from the tanks about water quality and the nitrogen cycle that they will need if they’re ever going to work in the fisheries industry,” Perry said.

Graduates have taken jobs at Lummi’s hatchery and natural resources department. The class runs all school year, is open to all grades, and is offered in beginning and advanced levels.

Surrounded by students, Nicole Perry, who teaches aquaculture at Ferndale High School, shines a light on coho eggs and hatchlings in student care through a partnership with Lummi Nation’s Skookum Creek Fish Hatchery. Photos and story by Kimberly Cauvel

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Standing on the riverbank one November evening, surrounded by the silhouettes of trees and the sparkle of stars beyond, Lummi Nation fisherman Jeff Solomon maneuvered a dip net into the water to try to intercept some hooligans on their migration upriver to spawn.

“I’ve got a few,” said Solomon, who is also a natural resources specialist for the tribe and has been helping to study these fish for about a decade.

He angled his catch to a group of university students huddled nearby in the dark, waiting to document the timing of the catch and the size, sex and spawn readiness of each fish. They also prepared some of the fish for further analysis in a lab.

“We’re trying to answer a couple of biological and ecological questions,” said Delaney Adams, a master’s student in marine science at Western Washington University (WWU). “Any information we can uncover will be exciting.”

Adams is leading the current research, with support from other students of WWU and Northwest Indian College, and in partnership with Solomon and Lummi’s natural resources department. The study aims to gain insight into spawn timing, the ratio of male to female fish, egg abundance per female, and the diet the fish consume on their way upstream.

“Very little is known about the Nooksack River population of hooligans,” said Marco Hatch, associate professor of environmental science at WWU and an advisor of Adams’ project. “It’s not a fish that’s in every river, at least in big numbers, so it’s interesting that way.”

The team spent many frigid evening hours dipping for hooligans and gathering data this past migration season. The work—and tribal harvest—takes place in the dark because hooligans travel upriver during high tides, which peak at night during their migration season.

Beyond that well-established element of hooligan movement, most of what is known about the Nooksack population comes from the long history of tribal harvest, including declines Solomon has reported during his lifetime.

“We’re still here, trying to figure them out,” he said.

Maiyuraq Nanouk Jones, a WWU student, right, measures a hooligan caught from the Nooksack River after sundown in November while her WWU peer Isaac Potter takes notes. Photos and story by Kimberly Cauvel. 

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Team Longboat, a group of students from Port Townsend’s alternative learning school OCEAN, are helping operate an Olympia oyster nursery on the docks of Port Townsend’s Northwest Maritime Center to fulfill their science project requirement. 

“When you’re teaching maritime topics, having some kind of real-world application for what they’re learning makes that education stronger,” said Simona Clausnitzer, Northwest Maritime’s Career Explore and School program manager. “Their experience situates it within the community, the place and the world, so it makes the education—including using math and science skills—more meaningful.”

Funded by the tribe and developed and overseen by the Puget Sound Restoration Fund (PSRF), the small nursery system is filled with baby Olympia oysters from PSRF’s hatchery and seawater from Port Townsend Bay. 

Students are learning how to feed the oysters (science) using a ratio of micro algae paste mixed with fresh water (math) and figuring out how much food will be needed each week (more math). Students also will figure out the number of animals in the tanks and their density as they grow.

“These settling tanks will help increase the overall capacity of producing Olympia oysters for restoration projects in the Salish Sea,” said Neil Harrington, the tribe’s environmental biologist. “More oysters in the sea improves water quality and helps bring back this iconic species to areas where they grew historically.”

The partnership made sense, as PSRF has been trying to scale up its production while also wanting to add an educational component to their work.

“It’s awesome to partner with these educational organizations,” said Ryan Crim, PSRF’s hatchery manager. “This fits within our goals, and it fits within their goals. It’s just a really good match.”

After the oysters are released into north Puget Sound in the early summer, the nursery will be disassembled and stored at the Jamestown tribal campus until the following winter when it will be reinstalled for the next round of Olympia oysters. 

Students from Team Longboat clean and set bags of empty shells that provide cultch—a hard surface where oyster seed can settle—in the Olympia oyster nursery at Port Townsend’s Northwest Maritime Center. Photo courtesy of the Northwest Maritime Center

Story by Tiffany Royal

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The packs are storage boxes, holding batteries that power two monitoring devices at each tree. Trinies, a hydrologist, and Auguston, a water resources technician, keep the monitors in working order to record data in this secluded forestland of the Nooksack River watershed.

The tribe is taking the pulse of these particular trees—Douglas firs planted on state Department of Natural Resources land—to better understand how different age classes of commercially managed trees consume different amounts of water, tapping into groundwater supplies important for replenishing streams.

“Streamflow is the big driver,” said Maggie Taylor, the tribe’s water resources program manager. “The goal is to better understand how land uses are impacting Nooksack River flows.”

The team is investigating how tree growth on this forestland near Acme may interact with the hydrology of the South Fork Nooksack River. Their study will quantify how much more water younger, thirstier trees consume compared to more mature trees.

“We want to know specifically, what are these trees here doing in this watershed?” Trinies said.

Previous soil moisture studies in other Northwest forests found that young trees likely use more water than mature trees because they are growing rapidly—and that repeated harvest and regrowth could be taxing on water resources.

“There is a hydrologic cost to that,” Taylor said. “When you’re constantly growing younger, thirsty trees, you are going to be using more water.”

At the study site, Trinies and Auguston visit one set of trees they could easily wrap their arms around and another set of trees too large to encircle in their arm spans. These adjacent groups of trees are about 60 years old and 120 years old, and appear roughly uniform because they are on land where timber harvests have taken place in the past.

Sensors attached to the study trees measure sap flux—the vertical movement of sap inside of a tree that distributes water and nutrients needed for growth. Soil sensors measure water content in the ground.

The information provided by the sensors, combined with information from core samples taken from the trees, will be used to estimate water consumption.

“With this project, we’re measuring how much sap is moving up in the trees, and using that combined with soil moisture levels to quantify how much water they are actually pulling out of the ground,” Trinies said.

Understanding how tree age corresponds to levels of water consumption could inform future forest management and land use priorities in the watershed. Wetlands, for example, bank water naturally and may warrant being prioritized over land uses that siphon water off the landscape.

The study is building off hydrologic modeling the tribe has been working on for over a decade.

“This project fits into a group of projects Nooksack has been doing to explore all of the ways we can retain more water on the landscape, as those resources decrease because of melting glaciers and other impacts of climate change,” Taylor said. “We are seeing drier summers and wetter winters, so the question becomes: how can we retain water so that we have it available when it’s needed?”

The South Fork Nooksack River in particular has low flow issues that are a concern for salmon in the summertime.

Chris Trinies, hydrologist for the Nooksack Indian Tribe, foreground, and Rich Auguston, water quality technician, check a monitoring station attached to a Douglas fir. Photo and story by Kimberly Cauvel. 

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While no documented cases have shown up in western Washington, six white-tailed deer tested positive in eastern Washington in 2024, said Dylan Bergman, wildlife biologist for the Point No Point Treaty Council, a natural resources consortium that supports the Jamestown S’Klallam and Port Gamble S’Klallam tribes.

Expecting CWD to show up in the region within the next decade, Bergman recently held workshops about the disease with tribal natural resources staff and law enforcement.

“Once widespread, we could see 20-50% of deer dying from CWD, and 5-20% of elk dying,” he said. “We need to develop a plan for how to address infected animals when it starts showing up here.” 

Field staff and tribal hunters should be aware of what to look for when hunting or conducting field work. Symptoms in the animals include drooling, staring into space, and no startle response to stimuli—the latter making them more likely to be hit by vehicles. 

“The lack of response is a pretty clear indicator of late-stage disease progression,” Bergman said. “They may stop being afraid of humans and may be visibly skinny.”

CWD is not virus, but a misshaped protein called a prion that causes normal proteins to become deformed, leading to neurological degradation. While symptoms may not show up for the first six months, the time from onset of disease to death is highly variable and could take up to 18 months and longer, Bergman said.

Similar to mad cow disease and scabies, CWD is contagious within herds and can be spread via urine, tissue, nose-to-nose contact and saliva. While not yet seen in black-tailed deer, CWD increases rapidly in white-tailed deer and mule deer and can also affect elk, caribou and moose.

The easiest way to test a wild animal is by removing lymph nodes from behind the larynx and just below the jawbone. Workshop attendees received their own sampling kits to use in the field or on roadkill. 

Ideally, once an elk or deer is harvested and lymph nodes are removed, Bergman said, the carcass would be put in cold storage to preserve the animal while samples are tested, which can take several weeks. If the results come back negative, the hunter could then process the animal. 

Human health risks are unknown, and while there has been no documentation of CWD moving from an animal to a human, USDA recommends against eating a CWD-positive animal, Bergman said.

With CWD now in eastern Washington, it could be a decade before it shows up in the Olympic Mountains, he said, with the Olympic Peninsula being somewhat insular from the Cascade Mountains by Interstate 5 and Puget Sound.

Within populations, CWD takes a few years to spread before animal numbers tank, Bergman said. After that, herds build resistance and can live longer with CWD, so reproduction builds back up over a few years. 

State agencies have tried to manage the spread of the disease by hunting to reduce herd densities but generally, it is difficult to stop the spread and there is no vaccine or cure, Bergman said. 

CWD is a relatively new disease, first documented in the 1970s in the Rocky Mountains, and scientists suspect it jumped from sheep to deer. It became more widely known in the 1990s as it spread across the United States and has been getting more attention in the last decade. 

Testing of elk and deer is now mandatory in some areas of eastern Washington, and transport of deer, elk, moose and caribou from eastern Washington is restricted to animal hides, clean skulls and processed meats. 

Above: PNPTC wildlife biologist Dylan Bergman, center, teaches tribal staff to sample lymph nodes from the neck of a deer to be tested for chronic wasting disease. Story and photos by Tiffany Royal.

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The Washington Forest Practices Board’s decision to expand forested buffers along headwater streams is a long-needed step toward salmon recovery.

As we continue to feel the effects of climate change, forested buffers along streams without fish help cool the water downstream where there are fish, especially during dry summer months. Forested buffers along all streams improve the habitat needed by fish, wildlife, and plants throughout the watershed, including vulnerable species of fish and amphibians listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Riparian restoration is essential to recovering the salmon populations that are essential to supporting tribal treaty harvest rights, economies and culture. Long-term sustainability of forest economies also depends on healthy watersheds and resilient fish populations.

The governor-appointed Forest Practices Board is tasked with upholding the landmark Forests and Fish Law of 1999, which federal, state, tribal, and county governments developed in collaboration with private forest landowners and members of the public. Its members closely followed the science and the law when they adopted the new rule.

A key part of the rule is the flexibility to make site-specific management decisions to adjust buffer placement. The tribes are committed to supporting landowners to make these changes in a reasonable and good way, but we are not willing to sacrifice our treaty-protected rights and resources.

The Forests and Fish Law brought together former adversaries when longtime NWIFC Chairman Billy Frank Jr. worked with Stu Bledsoe, executive director of the industry trade group Washington Forest Protection Association, to create a plan to help improve water quality and reverse the decline of fish populations throughout the state, while also valuing the timber industry. They wanted to create a way to work together instead of resorting to litigation_.

According to Billy: “After many months of negotiations by all of the parties involved, the result was the Timber/Fish/Wildlife Agreement—now called the Forests and Fish Law—which put an end to the war in the woods with a cooperative science-based management approach that ensures a healthy timber industry while also protecting fish and wildlife.”

That’s the same spirit we need now. Instead, the Washington Forest Protection Association decided to sue the state departments of Ecology and Natural Resources over the new buffer requirements, claiming the new rules are too expensive and unnecessary.

We can’t allow politics or greed to undermine the work we’ve done to protect the forested areas that make our state a special place to live.

The recent decision to expand forested buffers was based on more than 20 years of research and monitoring of headwater streams in Washington state. The Forest Practices Board acknowledged that timber harvesting next to streams raises water temperatures and agreed the current rules needed to be updated to keep headwater streams cool.

The science used to support this rulemaking was independently reviewed and approved by experts at the University of Washington. All the decisions that led to the new rule were based on consensus decisions. An independent cost-benefit analysis determined the likely benefits of the proposed rule outweighed the likely costs.

While some landowners expressed concern that alternative frameworks weren’t fully explored, years of scientific review and stakeholder engagement under the adaptive management program evaluated potential options and showed that stronger protections were necessary. The Forest Practices Board deliberated for years before formally adopting the proposed rule.

The treaty tribes agreed to be part of the Forest Practices Board because all parties committed to following the science and adapting the forest practices rules as necessary. The agency is based on a foundation of adaptive management that relies on the best available science.

For generations, the tribes in western Washington have known that maintaining trees along streams is critical to providing the necessary shade to help keep streams and rivers cool. Now is not the time to go backward.

The treaty tribes look forward to working together to preserve the trust and balance of this framework that is the key to the long-term protection of Washington’s forests, waters and treaty-reserved resources.

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The Upper Skagit Indian Tribe, Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe are each eager to see components of the agreement fulfilled.

“We believe this agreement creates the strongest opportunity to safeguard the river, uphold our treaty rights, and support salmon recovery for generations to come,” said Steve Edwards, chairman of the Swinomish Tribe.

The agreement, announced March 5, includes plans to implement a trap-and-haul fish passage system at the dams, finance habitat restoration throughout the watershed, restore flow to a dewatered segment of the river, infuse Native language into interpretive elements around the hydroelectric project, and more.

“This is a monumental commitment by the city of Seattle to invest in tribal culture and salmon habitat,” said Scott Schuyler, natural resources policy representative for the Upper Skagit Tribe.

For the treaty tribes within the river’s 1.7-million-acre drainage from the North Cascades mountains to Skagit Bay, the city’s new commitments to supporting salmon and tribal culture are past due.

“Such an agreement is long overdue and will open miles of salmon habitat in which salmon threatened with extinction may spawn and rear,” said Nino Maltos II, Chairman of the Sauk-Suiattle Indian Tribe. “Salmon are the Pacific Northwest’s signature species. They contribute greatly to the region’s economy, from the headwaters of the Skagit River basin to Southeast Alaska where they migrate.”

The presence of the dams—Gorge, Diablo and Ross—and their respective powerhouses and infrastructure has impacted the Skagit watershed, its salmon runs and other cultural resources for more than 100 years. Yet the new horizon is hopeful.

“Fish passage, in combination with habitat restoration funds Seattle City Light has committed, will help recover salmon to the benefit of the tribes, nontribal people of Washington, and the environment,” Schuyler said. “It should ensure our children’s children will have fish to harvest. I would like to see it happen in my lifetime.”

The agreement balances strong guidance for enhancing salmon populations across the Skagit watershed with the continued production of clean power for the residents and businesses of Seattle.

“This is a hard-won, fair, and forward-looking agreement that honors our treaty rights, strengthens the ecology of the river, and provides a responsible path forward for hydropower generation and salmon recovery,” Edwards said.

The agreement includes about $1.5 billion in line items to support salmon recovery, including flow protections, adaptive management, habitat restoration and fish passage. Fish passage is expected to be conducted through a trap-and-haul system similar to that used to restore a growing sockeye population on the nearby Baker River.

Developing the settlement agreement took more than seven years of intensive negotiations. Seattle City Light is seeking a new 50-year operating license from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in order to continue obtaining renewable energy from the dam system. The dams provide about one-fifth of the electricity consumed in the city.

The new license is anticipated to cover 2030-2080. Construction of the fish passage system is expected to begin within the first five years of the license.

“Our most important partners in this have been the treaty tribes in the basin,” said Chris Townsend, director of natural resources and hydro licensing for Seattle City Light. “This is an effort to address some of the real and significant impacts to the tribes.”

See each tribe’s full statement: 

The Gorge Dam restrains the Skagit River upstream of Newhalem. It was built in the 1920s and modified in subsequent decades for the purpose of generating electricity for Seattle’s growing metropolitan area. Photos and story by Kimberly Cauvel. 

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It was a brief glimpse, but a clear statement: a partnership between the Hoh Tribe and Trout Unlimited to install engineered logjams in the river and make it a more dynamic and welcoming home for salmon is showing benefits. Owl Creek is a crucial tributary of the Hoh River, a fishing area for tribal members since time immemorial.

“I’ve grown up on this river,” said Walter Ward-Bos, who serves on the Hoh Tribal Council. “I fished it with my dad and grandpa, all the way from the mouth to the Hoh Bridge. Fishing is a way of life for us.”

That way of life was threatened when flood events in recent decades swept too much water and debris through Owl Creek, scouring it of rocks and wood that usually slowed the river’s flow to provide safe harbor for the chinook, coho and steelhead that spawn and rear in its waters. Interested in making Owl Creek more hospitable and climate resilient for salmon, the tribe and Trout Unlimited studied, planned and secured funding for a project aimed at the goal. Since wood is needed to slow water and create eddies for fish to rest in, the partners undertook an ambitious task. Using helicopters, they placed 5 million pounds of wood in rock-secured logjams throughout 1.2 miles of the creek.

Salmon can already be seen navigating around the logjams and spawning in the area. The logjams are also collecting new wood that’s fallen into the river, kickstart- ing a process that will keep the river and its inhabitants healthy as years go by.

“Seeing what we see now is incredible,” said Sean Ludden, Olympic Peninsula restoration project manager for Trout Unlimited.

The tribe and partners are also planning restoration work on Elk and Winfield creeks, other Hoh River tributaries important for salmon.

“We hope to see improvement like we’ve seen in Owl Creek,” said Kim Bray, the tribe’s natural resources director.

Top: Maggie Bockart, a habitat restoration biologist for the Hoh Tribe, uses a GoPro to search for salmon in Owl Creek. Photo and story: Trevor Pyle

Right: A helicopter swings materials into place for an engineered logjam projects partnering the Hoh Tribe and Trout Unlimited. Photo provided by Trout Unlimited.

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