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An Interview with Jeff Korth, District Fish Biologist Jeff Korth is the district fish biologist for Grant, Adams, and part of Douglas counties, and currently is coordinating studies of fishery declines and changes in Moses Lake in the Columbia Basin. He started with the agency in 1987 doing project work in western Washington, first creel checks on the Green River, then steelhead redd surveys in the Chehalis drainage, genetic stock index work on salmon, and fish count coordination at Bonneville, Dalles, and John Day dams on the Columbia River. Originally from Wisconsin, Jeff has a bachelor's degree in wildlife management from University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and a master's in zoology from Louisiana State University-Baton Rouge.

Q: How do you manage fish in this dry central Washington district? A: It's primarily recreational. Grant County is the number one fished county in the state. We actually have a tremendous amount of water here. I have a lot of fun saying I'm a fish biologist in the desert. But because of the irrigation and reclamation projects, of course, Grant County has a ton of water and it was all new water when it was first formed back in the ‘50's and ‘60's. It was just like all the fields around here, when water got in there it was very fertile land, all it needed was water. It was the same for the fisheries — they were very productive for decades. By the time I got here, things were in a kind of downward slide, like a field that you just keep planting until you run out of nutrients. That's not the whole picture, of course. It's not that simple. I can't document that the lakes are running out of nutrients. It could be that the nutrients are just tied up in different ways. We certainly have many more waters with different species of fish here now than in the heyday of lake rehabilitations, but that has sort of built up. Originally it was almost all trout fisheries, except for the big bodies of water. But even by the ‘70's there were a lot of warmwater species, primarily spread around by the public. And so over time we started managing for warmwater species. But we try to hold the line on trout waters, too, because we can get the most bang for our buck in trout fisheries. We can produce more days of recreation in a trout fishery in these smaller lakes than we can any other way. The main reason for that is that trout are a known quantity. They don't reproduce here in the Basin. You put X number of trout in there and after a number of years you pretty much know what the survival is, given that the lake is free of competing species. It's a lot easier to manage than a water with introduced warmwater species that can reproduce and interact with other fish — it's harder to keep tabs on what you have and to keep it all in balance so that you meet the demand for recreational fishing. Trout grow a lot quicker, too. In one year we can grow a fish that's acceptable to the fishing public. It takes much longer with warmwater species. Had there originally been water in this area, rainbow trout would have been the native species. Q: How do the fisheries you manage fit into the agency's emphasis on wild salmonids? A: These fisheries provide recreation. I think they're an important part of the whole scheme of things. We're worried about declining fishing license sales, and a lot of that decline is because of a lack of opportunity on declining native stocks. Fishermen have been displaced from those fisheries, and they've got to have a place to go or they're not going to buy licenses. We have the opportunity here in the Basin with these fisheries, because they are almost completely removed from the native populations of fish, to propagate them and create these fisheries. I've always believed that anglers go through phases. Initially they're interested in harvesting fish. They want to catch them, have those stringers of fish, and remember that. As time goes on, maybe as they begin to believe they've harvested their fair share, they harvest less and are more keyed in to the pursuit, maybe even to the catch and release stage. I look at my job as providing a diversity of those opportunities, from one end of the spectrum to the other. We need to have those opening day fisheries, those are social events, where people get in on the ground floor, get their kids interested. And then we need to have those lower key fisheries that don't just start off with a bang and the whole thing is over in a month. We need year-round fisheries, walk-in fisheries, where the fishing is slower but steady, where it's more tranquil and things are not so crowded. And then on the far end of the spectrum we need our selective waters where we only allow one fish harvest and we shoot for as high a carryover rate as we can, with very large yearlings and maybe fly fishing only or selective gear or shore anglers only or other restrictions. We try to shoot for a diverse angling experience, where we bring new people in by making it easy for them, and also accommodate the angler whose been into it for a long time and wants more of a challenge. Q: Some of those anglers have been complaining about competition from cormorants. Are they a serious problem? A: The first cormorants starting appearing in the Basin in the ‘70's, and now there's a large rookery in the north Potholes area. One of the contentions of the public as our fisheries have declined around here is that the birds are to blame. We recognize that they have an impact, after all they do eat fish. What we don't know is what fish they eat and what size of fish they eat and do they eat enough at any one lake to have an impact on that fishery. Some people have advocated wiping them out, but of course that's not realistic. We had an opportunity in the fall of 1997 to get a grad student from the University of Washington's co-op unit in Pullman to start a study in the Potholes seep lakes area, where we thought our highest cormorant impact was, including trout-only, mixed species, and warmwater fish-only lakes. The field work is primarily observation, with randomized selection, where the student is counting cormorants as they come in, watching what they eat, how much they eat, how long they feed, and so on. A lot of what we find out is going to be where were the birds, when did they show up, what fish were in the lake at the time, and what did they eat? By the end of this summer we should have the first results. But even if we find out that the public's worst fears about cormorants are realized, I doubt that we'd take any major action against the birds. We have to recognize that portion of the public that's adamant about this, and the fisheries themselves, are not the only constituents we serve and not the only resources we manage. We're not going to sacrifice one species for another. It's the same thing as the sea lions at the locks or the terns at the mouth of the Columbia. I think there's a middle ground. We want to accommodate some of those animals to some extent, even if it costs us some of our recreational management. But we don't want to go the other way either. We're not in this business to enhance the bird population at the total expense of our fisheries — that's artificial in the sense of the birds. You create an artificial population of birds, just like you create an artificial fishery. But cormorants may be the least of our problems in the Moses Lake fishery area. Q: What's happening with the Moses Lake fishery? A: We have a newly-funded project coming on line on Moses Lake that's going to concentrate on one of the largest fisheries in the area, where we hope to learn about what's going on there and then apply it to other big waters. The history of Moses Lake is much like that of Banks and Potholes and other large reservoir fisheries — initially they were great fisheries. Moses Lake was the premier crappie fishery in the state. It was also great for bluegill, perch, largemouth bass. But the whole thing started changing in the late ‘70's and through the ‘80's it turned around completely — crappie were almost non-existent, it wasn't even worth going out for bluegill, and even the perch fishery finally crashed. Walleye appeared on the scene in ever increasing numbers in the late ‘80's, early ‘90's. They were probably always there, but they started to dominate as the predator species. Smallmouth bass seemed to displace largemouth bass, although largemouth could have just been decreasing for other reasons. A lot of changes had taken place and there was no way that I was going to have the resources to look into the situation to understand what had happened. There was a lot of supposition. Everyone had a pet theory — Mt. St. Helens, carp, cormorants and other birds, overharvest, you name it. And none of these things were documented as related to fish populations, so we had little firm data to know what to do in terms of management. Ten years ago I wrote a proposal for the Columbia River Fish & Wildlife Mitigation Program (BPA mitigation) to fund a research program on Moses Lake to determine what the limiting factors are on that fishery and what enhancement measures would be feasible. Moses Lake is considered off-site in that program, and the study is for non-native species, but it qualifies as substitute mitigation for anadramous fish losses that can never be mitigated. Last year the Bonneville Power Administration finally had some money for the Moses Lake project, which had evidently gained enough importance with the Northwest Power Planning Council, which makes those decisions. We're fully funded for this year — about a quarter of a million dollars — and we're hiring biologists and buying equipment to get the study started. It's the kind of work that the department has never had the kind of personnel and time and money to do in the past. And the things that have happened in the last ten years with endangered species and all, have put us even more out of the money to do these kinds of things. Our highest priority has to be some of these ESA-driven issues, but it's been at the expense of our recreational fishery resource and we've fallen behind. Lack of manpower to do what we need to do to stay on top of recreational fisheries has been our greatest problem. Long ago these fisheries almost managed themselves when we were in an earlier successional stage of the aquatic habitat here. Now we're constantly setting back succession to keep these waters productive for recreation. And we're dealing with newly introduced species, like walleye. It all just takes more staff time to stay on top of. The warmwater fish enhancement fund that started a few years ago has helped with some of it, but maintaining our basic trout fishery is still a manpower challenge. Recreational fisheries management can involve a high capital expense and it can conflict with other types of management, other species, or other environmental management beyond WDFW responsibilities to that of DOE or DNR. It's much more complex and expensive today. You don't just go out and dredge a pond or build a dike to set back succession to maintain a fishery — it takes a lot of permitting and haggling with everyone, then a lot of people and money to get a project done. For all those reasons, I'm sure it's difficult for our administration to look at recreational fisheries and see what's necessary out here because they don't have the time to be fully aware of how difficult this has all become. Most all our problems trace back to managing resources in the face of an increasing human population, be it listed species or permit complexity. I'm a little one-sided about the recreational aspect of our department because that's my job. But then I like to think it's also part of my job to speak out in defense of it. And it is a very, very important part of what we do and what the department means to the public. If we're not doing what the public wants, our case is just going to get worse. Our ability to deal with other things that we need to do as an agency, the things we're charged with doing by the legislature, we're not going to be able to do as well either, because our funding and support will have declined. We have to balance the two. Q: Do you fish a lot? A: I fished a lot more before I got in this business! The very best fishing comes at the times of the year when I'm busiest and I'm working long days and weekends. When kids who are anxious to get into this business ask me about my job, that's one of the first things I tell them — it's hard on your hunting and fishing, because you're going to be working when everyone else is playing. When I got into this business I thought I'd make my hobby my work and every day would be a holiday. But work is work, although I am lucky that my work is something that I'm really interested in and I feel good about it. Not everyone can say that. I haven't run across many other jobs that I'd be willing to trade mine for.