Fall's 'full circle'

Oct. 7—TRAIL — After three years in the ocean and a grueling 157-mile swim up the Rogue River, all these spring chinook salmon want to do is spawn till they die.

The wild chinook are pairing off in the river, digging redds and laying eggs for fertilization in an underwater dance that the BBC's David Attenborough could narrate.

These hatchery fish instead have Mitch Semlow.

Semlow is the technician who sorts chinook during fall spawning days at Cole Rivers Hatchery, determining spawning pairings for these fish without the least chinook input.

"We're just trying to make good fish for future fishermen to enjoy," Semlow says. "And to be the judge and jury, that's just part of it."

These sorts of arranged marriages have played out for 50 years at Cole Rivers, where even some soft candles, rose petals and Barry White broadcast over the loudspeaker couldn't add any romance to this truly ritual exchange.

Since 1973, technicians like Stemlow have been deciding which males and females to spawn at this facility to offset the loss of wild spring chinook spawning habitat by the building of Lost Creek dam less than a mile upstream of the hatchery.

Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife technicians Wednesday finished spawning the final batch of eggs and chinook sperm — called milt — and placed more than 2 million eggs in the first stage of their journey toward release as smolts next fall at roughly the same time as next year's spawning occurs.

"In one year, it brings it all in full circle," hatchery Manager David Pease says.

Wild spawning in the main-stem Rogue just a few hundred feet away maintains the natural mystique that helps make wild salmon such an allure in the Pacific Northwest.

Nature shows are loaded with footage of female chinook digging egg nests in heavy gravel while the males fight over who gets to spawn with her. A shot of eggs, then a coating of milt, sends the next generation on its merry way through a spring hatch of fingerling that must survive to smolthood before heading to sea to grow large.

Within the concrete confines of hatcheries, there's a lot to yada-yada-yada through the natural process, replacing it with a scientific process that gives these chinook no chance to swipe left or right on FishTinder in their selection of mates.

But the basic process has its high points not normally seen by the rank and file anglers who rely on hatchery releases and returns to bolster the prized adult chinook they can catch and keep.

It starts with chinook that swam into the hatchery collection pond as early as April and stowed away in a concrete pond until their bodies alter in preparation for the fall spawn.

On spawning day, groups of males and females are herded out of the holding ponds into a concrete canal that funnels them into the spawning house, where they immediately are shocked to settle them down.

The first step is technicians like Semlow squeeze their bellies to determine if they're ripe for spawning that day. Those that aren't are dropped down an aluminum tube for a waterslide ride back to a holding pond.

"It's not a lucky break," Pease says. "They only get another week."

Males are placed in a water trough to await their fate. Females are slid down a long table to another technician to kill the female and place it belly-up on a slotted table.

Eggs are flushed from the females into plastic buckets; males have their milt similarly thrust from their bodies into paper cups.

Each bucket contains the eggs from one female. One male's milt gets mixed into two buckets, then swirled. Those two buckets are then mixed together.

"That's a family unit," Pease says.

Those eggs are then taken by golf cart to the facility's nearby hatch house, where they are dipped in iodine to remove any fungus and then placed in watery trays until they hatch.

Their parents aren't so lucky.

All chinook die after spawning, and these do so at the hands of a technician — not nature.

The carcasses are placed in large totes and frozen until winter when they are systematically planted in the Rogue so their bodies' nutrients can enrich the river ecosystem as their wild brethren do naturally.

This year's spawn was a successful one, Pease says. Crews collected and fertilized slightly more than 2.2 million eggs from 786 females and 393 males.

That should be enough to make next year's release target of 1.73 million spring chinook smolts to fuel future fisheries in the Rogue, Pease says.

But stats like that will never show up in a Barry White song.

"Yeah, this works," Pease says. "But there's nothing romantic about it at all."

Mark Freeman covers the outdoors for the Mail Tribune. Reach him at 541-776-4470 or email him at mfreeman@rosebudmedia.com.