Monday August 31, 2026
Moscow-Pullman Daily News —
With a motion resembling an easy golf swing, Abraham Yearout launches a spawned-out spring chinook salmon toward Lolo Creek.
The carcass splashes in the clear, cold stream on the Nez Perce-Clearwater National Forest and settles on the gravelly bottom. Yearout, a fisheries specialist with the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resource Management, repeats the motion that sends nine more carcasses into the stream.
The fish from Rapid River Hatchery will slowly decompose and feed the bottom of the food chain to benefit a web of aquatic life that includes juvenile salmon and steelhead. Think of it as the circle of life with an assist from humans.
The help wasn’t always needed.
“Pre-dams there were millions of fish that were coming back to these watersheds, these tributaries, and spawning and dying and then their carcasses were providing nutrients for their progeny,” said Marcie Carter, deputy director of the Watersheds Division within the Nez Perce Tribe’s Department of Fisheries Resource Management.