THE RETURN OF LITTLE BIG FISH.

Byline: Mike Stahlberg The Register-Guard

SISTERS - Seldom has such a big deal been made over such little fish.

More than 50 volunteers, along with several corporate, government and conservation organization officials and one tribal chief - plus a gaggle of reporters and photographers - gathered along the banks of Whychus Creek here Saturday for the release of tens of thousands of summer steelhead fry.

Though only an inch long, the baby fish are big news because they are the first summer steelhead to swim in waters of the upper Deschutes basin in more than 40 years. Native salmon and steelhead runs died off shortly after completion of Round Butte Dam in 1964.

Saturday, a bucket brigade of volunteers young and old helped scatter 200,000 steelhead fry into small pools and backwater areas along several miles of Whychus Creek between the mouth of Indian Ford Creek, near Sisters, and the Deschutes River. Before the dam, 1,000 steelhead a year spawned in what was then known as Squaw Creek (the Oregon Geographic Names Board approved the name change a couple of years ago).

Saturday's release was a symbolic step in an ambitious - and expensive - effort to reintroduce anadromous fish to 226 miles of streams in Central Oregon.

If all goes as planned, some of the little fish released Saturday will - having by then grown big while feeding in the Pacific Ocean - return to Whychus Creek to spawn in 2011.

As things stand now, however, the baby steelhead could not migrate downstream any farther than Round Butte Dam, behind which the waters of the Deschutes, Crooked and Metolius rivers are pooled to form Lake Billy Chinook.

The original fish passage system built into the dam never worked as intended.

"Back then, engineers didn't fully appreciate how the mixing of the rivers would set up these big U-turns and circles in the currents," said Mark Fryburg, a public information specialist for Portland General Electric, one of the dam's owners. "The fish, naturally, followed the currents and they went nowhere."

While returning adults were able to make it up over the dams in the early 1960s, their offspring could never find their way downstream, so the runs died out.

In September, however, construction is scheduled to begin on a new fish-passage facility designed to solve Round Butte's downstream migration problem.

PGE and the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs, which owns a percentage of the hydroelectric project, will spend $65 million on a new fish passage. It is scheduled be completed in time to be used by the young steelhead released Saturday - which by then will be six-inch long smolts. Most of the steelhead will begin responding to their instinctive urge to head toward the ocean in the spring of 2009.

The new `selective water withdrawal tower' will be 273 feet (18 stories) tall and have openings through which water will be drawn from various depths. To avoid lowering the reservoir or building a coffer dam, the tower is to be constructed onshore, then floated into place for installation near the upstream face of the dam.

Engineers used computer and scale models to confirm that the tower's openings can be used to manipulate currents enough to draw smolts to a collection point.

Once in the collection area, migrants will be pumped into a tanker truck, tagged so they can be identified later, then set free in the lower Deschutes River below two other dams in the Pelton Round Butte Hydroelectric Project.

The smolts will then have clear sailing - if you don't count a gantlet of predators including Caspian Terns and sea lions - on their long journey to the Pacific Ocean, and back.

No wonder biologists will be happy if 100 to 200 of the 200,000 fish released Saturday actually return as adults.

The first of those survivors would be expected to return starting in the winter of 2010-11, after spending one year at sea. Others could return the next winter, as "two salts." Returning adults will be trapped, then trucked upstream for release above Round Butte Dam.

Eventually, salmon and steelhead might be allowed to make their own way through the hydroelectric complex in one or both directions.

"We're going to be very conservative at first," Fryburg said, "We're going to be very, very careful and help them as much as we can."

Other groups of fish will be on the tailfins of the first Whychus steelhead - including chinook salmon set for release next February in Whychus Creek and in the Metolius River drainage. Because salmon remain in freshwater for a shorter period than steelhead, those first salmon would also show up at the new fish passage facility in the spring of 2009. But most of them would spend more time at sea than the steelhead.

Meanwhile, spring 2008 would see steelhead fry released in the Crooked River system, as well as a second batch in Whychus Creek.

A sockeye salmon run is expected to re-establish itself in the basin. Lake Billy Chinook's large population of kokanee (which are landlocked sockeye) is expected to provide the seed stock for that.

Steelhead released in Whychus Creek were hatched from eggs that came from Round Butte Hatchery fish - whose ancestors were from the Deschutes River Basin. Even after many generations, the fish should have genetic remnants that make them well-suited to the habitat of the Deschutes Basin, biologists say.

"We are cautiously optimistic we can successfully reintroduce anadromous species into the upper basin," said Steve Marx, Bend district fish biologist for the Oregon Department of Fish & Wildlife.

Marx instructed volunteers to place their fry in "low-velocity backwater alcove areas," the kind of water in which steelhead normally spend the first months of their lives.

"Oh, my gosh, this is amazing - we're just returning to nature what should be here," said volunteer Julie Hotchkiss of Bend, who used an aquarium net to ladle baby fish into sheltered areas along the edge of the creek.

The dam wasn't the only obstacle to attempting to re-establish the salmon and steelhead runs in the upper Deschutes Basin. PGE and the Tribes agreed to spend $135 million on fish-related measures over the next 50 years. About $21 million is dedicated to fish habitat improvement - including measures designed to reduce water losses due to inefficient irrigation systems.

No one could have been more happy at the thought of steelhead and salmon again swimming in streams of the region than Delvis Heath, Chief of the Warm Springs tribe, who sang and blessed the water and the fish.

"It's a blessing for the land and for the water, and to me it draws tears," Heath said.