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NMFS might delay chinook status By MARK FREEMAN An anticipated delay in listing wild chinook salmon as a threatened species in Southern Oregon and Northern California could lead to keeping some of those fish off Endangered Species Act rolls. The National Marine Fisheries Service is expected to announce Tuesday a six-month delay on deciding if wild chinook from Port Orford south to San Francisco Bay are a single species worth threatened status. The delay would give NMFS biologists a chance to study an Oregon counter-proposal that would split the weaker chinook stocks of Northern California away from healthier ones in this region. Splitting the vast region's chinook into two separate stocks could allow wild chinook in Southern Oregon and extreme Northern California to skirt a listing and all the new regulations that go with it to protect listed fish and their habitat. "When you clean the dust all away, these stocks aren't in trouble enough to deserve listing," said Jim Martin, assistant director of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and one of the architects of Oregon's counter-proposal. Martin said it is not a "lead-pipe cinch" that wild chinook in the Rogue, Chetco, Elk and Klamath rivers will remain free of ESA protection when a final ruling is announced next September. But Oregon's counter-proposal seems to intrigue NMFS biologists enough to merit further study, Martin said. NMFS biologists were mum Thursday on next week's announcements, which come a year after the agency first proposed the chinook for listing. NMFS spokesman Rob Jones said only that if a six-month deferral is made, it would be because of more information that needed further evaluation. Environmentalists who are fighting for the chinook listing said Thursday they expect NMFS to defer the listing on area chinook -- just as they have with wild steelhead and coho salmon before. "The pattern is to propose for listing based on science, defer a listing and then say it's not warranted," said Rich Nawa, staff ecologist for the Siskiyou Regional Education Project in Cave Junction. "I think there's some real duplicity here," Nawa said. "The only losers here are the fish and the public, who stand the chance of seeing these runs go extinct in their lifetime." The Southern Oregon/Northern California chinook are one of nine salmon stocks whose status under the Endangered Species Act is scheduled to be announced Tuesday by NMFS leaders in Portland. NMFS biologists last year proposed clumping all the wild chinook from the Elk River near Port Orford south to San Francisco Bay as one threatened species. Oregon fish managers, however, have argued that the proposed area is too broad and the populations are too diverse to lump them together. Oregon has argued that the chinook from the Klamath River north are stronger stocks of fish that act differently enough and live in such different habitats that they should not be clumped with the weaker stocks farther south. Oregon's counter-proposal calls for splitting the so-called "Evolutionarily Significant Unit" at the Klamath River, Martin said. That break would likely mean threatened status for chinook from the Eel River to San Francisco Bay, Martin said, but it would likely lead to no listing of the fish from the Klamath River north -- including the Rogue, Chetco and Elk rivers. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1999, Medford, Oregon USA