This recovery is a credit to the abundance of quality habitat on the Skagit – habitat that continues to improve with ambitious state, tribal and non-profit restoration projects such as the effort by the Skagit River System Cooperative and Wild Steelhead Coalition (supported by the Orvis Company) to reconnect Barnaby Slough, a prime rearing area for young steelhead and Chinook salmon, to the Skagit. But this recovery is also a credit to a significant change in how the Skagit’s steelhead have been managed, particularly around the issues of harvest and hatcheries.
Steelhead may be labeled a “game fish” in Washington, but for the last century the state has managed wild steelhead like an abundant food fish under a model called Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY). This management strategy, which aims to maximize harvest and angling opportunity, is widely attributed to causing the collapse of fisheries around the world. And in Washington it has done just that, as MSY has enabled unsustainable steelhead harvest rates resulting in the decline of wild steelhead stocks in the Skagit and statewide.
Despite the Skagit’s great habitat, the combination of decades of excessive harvest by both recreational anglers and tribal commercial fishers as well as the proliferation of hatchery steelhead proved to be a lethal combination for the Skagit’s wild steelhead. While hatchery steelhead were intended to supplement the Skagit’s diminishing wild populations, in actuality they have played a far more nefarious role as culprits of further steelhead decline - a fact that has played out time and again in rivers across the steelhead’s native range. Even the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife, which has overseen much of the state’s hatchery operations, acknowledges that these manufactured fish pose a significant genetic and ecological risk to wild steelhead.