Fish from the sky

The strange saga of salmon in the Columbia River just got a new chapter.

Coho salmon smolts 7-8 inches long disrupted a track meet in Astoria, Oregon when they fell from the sky onto the javelin throwers.

This bizarre event happened when hundreds of thousands of young hatchery-raised salmon were planted in the lower Columbia River, and birds began catching fish and flying around over the nearby track meet, squabbling over who got to eat them.

These are the same birds that we humans have been squabbling about and harassing, because they've been eating too many of "our" expensive hand-raised salmon.

...all because we were promised that we could have both dams and fish, and it's turned out to be just a bit harder than expected...so now we spend BILLIONS raising salmon, driving them around in barges and trucks, and trying to stop birds and fish and sea lions from eating them in the unfriendly habitats of today's dammed river...

Makes me want to go back in time and promote the brave fish biologists who said the dams would kill salmon, and fire the ones who ended up running the agencies because they said we could have our river and damn it too.

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