Counting station has a storied history

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Art Besaw counts fish passing Gold Ray Dam in 1980.

November 09, 2009

By Mark Freeman

Mail Tribune

On the morning of April 22, 1942, two men sat atop the fish ladder along the north end of Gold Ray Dam, about to make Rogue River history.

They stared at a white board placed under water and along the ladder's base, waiting for a big shadow to dart by.

One shadow, one spring chinook salmon.

And so began a running set of fish-counting data on the Rogue that is now wrapping up its 67th year, with perhaps just one more run of spring chinook to go.

As Jackson County mulls whether to remove the dam, it also is deciding the fate of the counting station, which has been in operation since that fateful spring day.

"I would have loved to have seen that," says Dan VanDyke, an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife biologist who uses Gold Ray Dam counts for managing the Rogue's salmon and steelhead runs.

"I think it would have been fantastic to see how they were doing their counts, way back when, with the white board," VanDyke says.

When the original wooden dam of 1904 was rebuilt with concrete in 1941, the redesign included a new fish ladder along the dam's north end, allowing fish to pass either directly from the Rogue or through the powerhouse's tailrace, according to Oregon Game Commission documents.

A year later, the game commission — which later became the Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission — decided to take advantage of the new fish ladder to get a better handle on the Rogue's migrating salmon and steelhead.

So they built a small shack atop the ladder and began counting the salmon and steelhead that swam past. When they were not counting, boards were placed in the ladder to block passage, commission documents say.

In 1948, an Oregon State College mathematics professor created a formula for extrapolating partial counts into full run estimates, and that procedure stayed in place until the current underwater fish-counting station was built in 1968.

Construction of the current station, says ODFW biologist Tom Satterthwaite, was a critical change that forever influenced the data collection there.

Counters began tallying the species of fish, its likely age and whether it had a clipped fin noting it was of hatchery origin, Satterthwaite says.

"That gave us the ability to have empirical data on the hatchery verses wild (trends)," says Satterthwaite, who has worked with these fish counts for more than 30 years.

A designated fish counter continued to work in the chamber 40 hours each week, counting fish that led to run estimates with a five-year average error computed to be less than 1 percent, game commission records show.

The counting format continued virtually unchanged until 1991, when a video system was installed to tape every fish that swam past the window.

The on-hand counting ended for good in 1992, Satterthwaite says, and the video system has remained since.

Reach reporter Mark Freeman at 776-4470, or e-mail at mfreeman@mailtribune.com.

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