Coho still hanging in the balance.

Byline: SCOTT MABEN The Register-Guard

The epic life of Northwest salmon, from mountain streams to the sea and back again, is a Sunday swim compared to the scientific, political and legal labyrinth coastal coho continue to navigate to fend off the threat of extinction.

Their journey appears far from over.

Oregon wild coho, in the Siuslaw and other coastal rivers from Seaside south to Port Orford, briefly was stripped of its threatened status under the federal Endangered Species Act this fall after a ruling by U.S. District Judge Michael Hogan in Eugene.

But environmental and fishing groups won a stay from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Friday. So the coho bounced back onto the list of threatened species, where it'll remain while Hogan's decision is heard on appeal.

The latest turn in the eight-year battle to protect the coho also means that dozens of timber sales on U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management districts will continue to be held up as the courts weigh arguments over how to protect the fish.

In a lawsuit brought by the Alsea Valley Alliance and the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, Hogan ruled Sept. 10 that the National Marine Fisheries Service was wrong to grant protection only to wild coho when the agency lumped both wild and hatchery fish into the same genetically coherent unit. Federal law dictates that all or none of the fish in what's known as an evolutionarily significant unit should be listed, Hogan concluded.

His decision inspired critics of the Endangered Species Act to file four more petitions with NMFS seeking to remove 15 Pacific salmon units from the threatened species list along the West Coast. In addition, the Pacific Legal Foundation plans to file suit next month to remove the Southern Oregon-Northern California coastal coho from the threatened species list, in part to free up more water for Klamath Basin farmers.

That case could end up before Hogan as well.

But the courts likely won't move fast enough to unsnarl the legal dispute before NMFS revamps its hatchery policy and finishes an extensive review of the basis for listing two dozen salmon and steelhead runs in the Northwest and California, including threatened steelhead and chinook salmon in the Upper Willamette and McKenzie rivers.

While the appeals court decision isn't expected for 18 to 24 months, the two NMFS efforts should wrap up by next fall and affirm or reverse listing decisions, said Brian Gorman, a spokesman for the agency in Seattle.

"And for the first time we will have a hatchery policy that reflects both the concerns that Judge Hogan articulated in his decision in September and the notion that hatchery fish need to play some kind of role in salmon recovery," Gorman said. "We've never articulated what that role should be."

The Pacific Rivers Council, a Eugene-based conservation group that petitioned for the wild coho listing in 1993 and appealed Hogan's recent decision, contends that hatchery fish should not enjoy protection under the Endangered Species Act.

"Unfortunately, there are many ways NMFS could get this wrong," said David Bayles, acting executive director. "There's a lot of room for error here. We have our fingers crossed that NMFS will do the right thing."

The easiest way for NMFS to overcome the problem is to find solid genetic evidence distinguishing hatchery fish from native coho and to exclude the hatchery fish from the evolutionarily significant unit, said Glen Spain of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, a coalition of commercial fishing groups.

"If they had better evidence, they probably would have found that," said Spain, the group's Eugene-based Northwest regional director. "A lot of the genetic studies are out of date and used primitive methods."

Regardless of what the agency does, Bayles said, environmental groups are confident that federal protections will stick.

"No matter what happens with hatchery fish, the wild fish need protection. And there's no doubt that the Endangered Species Act intends to protect the wild fish," Bayles said. "At the end of the day the Endangered Species Act hasn't changed and the situation with wild coho hasn't changed."

Favorable ocean conditions recently have produced large returns of salmon in Northwest rivers, but most of the fish are hatchery-reared. Wild coho numbers remain far below their historic levels.

"There has been a flood of hatchery fish back this year, but the situation for wild fish is still pretty desperate," Bayles said.

Opponents of federal protections for Pacific salmon runs are pinning their hopes on Hogan's ruling, which they believe exposes a fatal flaw in the basis for affording the fish threatened status.

Bill Moshofsky, vice president of Tigard-based Oregonians in Action, said he expects NMFS will take coastal coho off the list and draw the same conclusion for other salmon runs by making no biological distinction between hatchery and wild populations.

"We think the huge return of salmon makes a mockery of the idea that they are endangered of extinction," Moshofsky said.

He claims that an "anti-hatchery bias" dominates state and federal salmon policy and is used to justify more controls on logging, farming, ranching and urban development, while government officials do nothing to limit the killing of salmon by terns, cormorants, seals, sea lions and other predators.

"This does not make any sense in our view," Moshofsky said. "We're looking for some balance, and some rational, sensible policies related to hatcheries to prevent disease and integrate those populations with the natural populations."

In the three months between Hogan's decision and Friday's stay, only a few of some 40 timber sales that had been suspended for the coho listing moved forward. Three sales totalling 11 million board feet of timber on the BLM's Coos Bay district were logged, including some century-old trees south of Coos Bay.