BOISE, Idaho — Federal hydropower officials will buzz two Idaho mountain rivers this week with helicopter-mounted cameras typically used for tracking illegal immigrants or finding dangerous transmission-line hot spots.
For this mission, the cameras will be pointed at endangered salmon spawning grounds in an effort to pinpoint the spots where habitat restoration would do the most good.
The Bonneville Power Administration says thermal and video images captured today and Tuesday above the Lemhi and Pahsimeroi rivers will focus BPA-financed work, such as planting streamside vegetation to give young chinook or steelhead cool nooks to hide from predators.
Environmentalists say the effort by the BPA — which markets energy from 31 Columbia River Basin hydroelectric dams — is distracting from a more significant issue: removal of Lower Snake River dams that kill migrating fish.
But power agency officials fighting dam removal contend fish-passage improvements at eight Columbia and Snake dams, running about $80 million yearly since the early 1990s, are nearing peak effectiveness, with 90 percent or more of young fish swimming to the Pacific Ocean surviving each dam. Consequently, they said, habitat improvement will increasingly occupy BPA’s focus.
“I’m not saying the dams don’t continue to impact fish, but they are substantially more innocuous than they were 30 years ago,” said Bill Maslin, director of BPA fish and wildlife in Portland, Ore. “The degradation of that habitat continues. We think that’s where the better opportunities are.”
Thirteen Columbia River salmon runs are listed under the Endangered Species Act, four of which — Snake River sockeye, fall and spring Snake River chinook and steelhead — spawn in Idaho.
The surveillance flights will be conducted from a BPA helicopter normally used to find hot spots in the agency’s 15,000 miles of transmission lines. Similar cameras are used by law enforcement agencies to search for illegal immigrants near the U.S. border.
“It’s used wherever people are looking for temperature differences,” said Peter Stack, whose Airborne Integrations in Portland operates the cameras for the BPA. “Those could be people hiding in the bushes, animals hiding in the woods.”
Or places where cooling springs enter the Lemhi and Pahsimeroi — and where cows have munched streamside plants, resulting in river hot spots. Both rivers, tributaries of the Salmon River, are plagued by low stream flows and high temperatures.
“Thermal data will help us prioritize projects, but it also works in reverse, where we’ve done these projects already,” said Joe DeHerrera, a BPA biologist said. “This thermal data should say, ‘Look, it is working. It’s doing what it should.’ ”
In addition, a digital TV camera will take a broader landscape video to give biologists a better picture of places where tributaries of the Lemhi and Pahsimeroi have been diverted for irrigation or straightened.
Both sets of images will be combined in a digital map.
Groups such as the Upper Salmon Basin Watershed Program, based in Salmon, Idaho, will use the map to guide work with private landowners, such as installing fences to keep livestock from waterways or redirecting irrigation-diverted streams, said Hans Koenig, the group’s project coordinator.
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