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SUNNY Temp: 41 °F Wind: CLM at 0 mph Thursday, November 28, 2002 SECTIONS Home Page Local News Sports Business Obituaries Life Opinion - Politics AP News Weather Classified Archives Site Map EXTRA HomeLife Magazine W3 Magazine Jobs @ Mail Tribune Tempo A & E Oregon CarZone Wellness Connection Real Estate Newspaper in Education Prime Times Outdoor Journal Personals Movie Times TV Times E The People CLASSIFIEDS Find a Car Find a Home Find a Job Find Everything E SOUTHERN OREGON Automotive Communities Entertainment Publications Recreation Calendar ABOUT US FAQ What's New Advertise Home Delivery Classified Ad Contact Us Media Kit Email Story to a Friend November 21, 2002 Hours spent looking at silhouettes By MARK FREEMAN Mail Tribune Videotaped images of eight fish swimming in the Gold Ray Dam fish ladder dance on the monitor, then one silhouette darts off the screen as it fins into the upper Rogue River. Rene Pellissier, the river’s official fish-counter, rewinds the tape slowly, frame by frame, looking for tiny clues to identify the fish. It’s not a hatchery fish, that’s for sure. But in one frame, the meaty part of the fish’s tail looks a bit thick compared to its body size, like a coho salmon. But the next frame reveals a thinner tail section and a wider fin, more like a chinook salmon. The next frame is clear: It’s a wild fall chinook. "They can look different from one frame to the next," Pellissier says. "Sometimes I’m dealing only with silhouettes, and there are a lot of chinook that can look like coho." This chinook is one of 373 fish that Pellissier spent more than five hours identifying and cataloging Tuesday while counting the fish that swam over Gold Ray Dam on Oct. 10. Thanks to above-average or record runs of fish this year, Pellissier is six weeks behind on the counts. He’s falling further behind every day as more and more fish get videotaped on their up-river journey. Too many fish, too little time. And there are few options and even fewer dollars available to get the counts caught up. Counts normally handled in a 20-hours-per-week job now take more than twice that time. Pellissier must count thousands more fish this year than during the average or below-average runs of the past. Pellissier is 18 tapes behind on this year’s counts. That doesn’t include the tapes for the remainder of October and November. Already, Pellissier is working so many extra hours trying to catch up that he will run over budget in April, three months earlier than his contract calls for. The lag is more than just an inconvenience to upper Rogue anglers who keep a pulse on fish runs by checking the daily counts. The counts are used to evaluate fish runs targeted for improvement in Oregon’s statewide salmon-recovery plan; to reveal ratios of hatchery and wild fish for the Rogue’s five runs of salmon and steelhead; and even give a snapshot of the health of wild coho — which are listed as a threatened species. "I know that it’s so critical to keep these counts up that it’s frustrating," says Pellissier, a fisheries biologist. "I’ve never been this far behind in a job in my life." Chances are that won’t change anytime soon. The lagging economy leaves no extra money in the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife budget to boost the job to full-time status. Agency managers are instead looking to steer some help Pellissier’s way. Possibilities include having the fish-counter at Winchester Dam on the North Umpqua River in Roseburg help Pellissier catch up, or perhaps getting a fellow ODFW biologist to help without unduly squeezing other projects or violating delicate funding requirements that dictate what money can pay for what type of ODFW work. "We know the counts are extremely important and we’re trying to come up with a way to get them caught up," says Steve Denny, the ODFW’s southwest regional manager in Roseburg. "There are several options, but so far we haven’t been able to come up with the most cost-effective and appropriate one." Denny two years ago asked that both the Rogue and Umpqua counting positions be full time, but the agency received money only for one full-time and one part-time position. Denny chose the Roseburg job for the full-time slot, in part because brood-stock collection done at Winchester Dam for hatchery programs and higher maintenance requirements there seemed to make that job more in need of full-time status. That was before thousands of extra salmon and steelhead started swimming onto Pellissier’s videotapes. "To be honest, I didn’t anticipate this," Denny says. Fish are videotaped over a 48-hour period in the dam’s counting chamber. They are read on a sophisticated video system in a small storeroom at the ODFW’s White City office. It takes Pellissier as much as 10 hours to count some fall days, when as many as 1,000 fish cross the dam. Even when Pellissier logs twice his regular hours, one step forward results in two steps back. "I count seven hours a day, and sometimes I come in and count from 5 a.m. to 8 a.m. on Saturdays," Pellissier says. "Yet I’m still falling behind." Fall counting is the most time-consuming because there are as many as six different types of fish possible in the ladder, with each fish also classified by size. Wild and hatchery coho, wild fall chinook and wild and hatchery summer steelhead are the main migrating fish in fall. Though Pellissier has yet to see a cutthroat trout there, he has to keep an eye out just in case one shows up. Telling hatchery from wild is simple for Pellissier as well as any Rogue angler: Hatchery fish have clipped adipose fins, which are the tiny fleshy fin on the back near the tail. As for differentiating chinook from coho, anglers rarely need more than a Dr. Seuss background to identify the fish they catch in the river. For every one fish or two fish, there are some red fish and blue fish. Some that swim have gums of black, and others have less-spotty backs. But Pellissier rarely gets the benefit of seeing the splashy red lower belly and tell-tale black gums to identify a chinook from coho, which have fewer and smaller spots than chinook. "It would help so much if I could see their colors, count their spots," he says. "Mostly, I have to rely on the geometry of the anal fin and (tail)." The anal fin is the triangle fin on the lower rear of salmon and steelhead. In chinook, the caudal fin has a short front and long back. In coho, the front and back lines are closer to even. And in steelhead, the caudal fin is thick and the tail fin is straight. "I’ve handled thousands of fish in my job, but I still had to go to the hatchery and study these fish, then go into the (Gold Ray Dam) counting chamber to study and practice, just to get it right." 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