Oregon coastal coho may get a reprieve

The federal agency overseeing restoration of declining salmon in the Northwest must take another look at its decision not to protect Oregon coastal coho under the Endangered Species Act.

U.S. District Judge Garr M. King in Portland affirmed a magistrate's findings earlier this year that NOAA Fisheries was arbitrary and capricious and did not rely on the best available science when it decided to leave Oregon coastal coho off the threatened-species list.

The agency has until Dec. 8 to make a decision. It will consider whether to appeal, said spokesman Brian Gorman.

Putting Oregon coastal coho back on the threatened-species list would add another layer of regulation to logging and other land-use decisions on federal, state and private lands in the central Oregon Coast Range. That would include the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's plan to ramp up logging in Western Oregon to boost federal revenues paid to timber-dependent counties.

"Eliminating these protections shifted the conservation burden onto the backs of fishermen, without protecting the rivers and streams the coho depend on," said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, which represents California commercial salmon fishermen.

Once a staple of Oregon's commercial salmon fleet, with historic population estimates of 2 million fish, Oregon coastal coho went into steep decline in the 1990s, bottoming out around 14,000, due to a combination of overfishing, loss of habitat to logging and agriculture, misguided hatchery practices and poor oceanic conditions. In recent years numbers have rebounded.

After court rulings took the fish off the threatened-species list, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife came up with a restoration plan that found Oregon coastal coho were unusually adept at rebounding from low numbers.

The state opposed listing, arguing that the fish were rebounding with the help of limits it had imposed on commercial and recreational fishing, reforms in hatchery production and improvements to spawning habitat.

NOAA Fisheries agreed, and conservation groups sued.

The Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife stands by the plan, said conservation planning coordinator Kevin Goodson, and hopes that NOAA Fisheries decides that Oregon coastal coho don't need Endangered Species Act protection.