Longer nights and cooler water temperatures mean an end to fishing restrictions on three of western Montana’s most favored trout rivers.
Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks lifted “hoot owl” restrictions on the Bitterroot, the entire main stem of the Blackfoot and the Clark Fork, downstream of the Rock Creek confluence.
Noah’s Ark supposedly provided shelter to animals from the rising floodwaters. But at a federal breeding site near Shasta Lake, Calif., the opposite is occurring: The tanks of Livingston Stone National Fish Hatchery are providing refuge this summer for salmon nearly out of water. There, staffers are rearing the only insurance policy that the Sacramento River’s winter-run Chinook have against extinction: a living genetic bank of 1,035 baby fish, selected to reseed the population should it extinguish in the wild.
Federal dam operators are breaking the law by allowing the Columbia River to reach lethally hot temperatures for salmon. Scientists report that 400,000 sockeye, 80 percent of the run, are dead or dying. Fishermen and conservation groups are calling on the Obama Administration to take action to stop the extreme river heat.
Why has the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the federal agency in charge of salmon and climate science, refused since 2008 to analyze how climate change is affecting Columbia River Basin salmon, and how to reduce or buffer those effects? And why does Washington state support this inaction?
An estimated 109 spring chinook died last week on the upper section of the Middle Fork John Day River, apparently due to low river flows and warm temperatures.
Unusually warm waters in the Columbia River Basin have prompted federal officials to invoke measures to help migrating fish survive the hostile conditions.
As river temperatures climb to record highs while water flow continues to drop, the Wild Fish Conservancy is calling for an emergency closure of fisheries across the West Coast where temperatures are higher than 65-degrees.
Numerous decades-old sturgeon being found dead in the Columbia River near the Tri-Cities are prompting a proposal to close catch-and-release fishing for the species.
Theories for the sturgeon deaths include the possibility that the sockeyes they’re eating in this year’s big salmon run could be diseased from migrating upstream in the Columbia’s unusually warm water conditions.
Another theory, Hoffarth said, suggests that the sturgeon are stressed by the combination of dramatically lower-than-normal Columbia flows with higher-than-normal July water temperatures.
Sunday, August 23, 2015 at 12:00AM 
