Oregon Public Broadcasting

Thursday, the Nez Perce tribe took a big step in restoring coho to the Northwest – officials delivered 700,000 fish eggs to a fish hatchery in Estacada.

Ethan Lindsey reports the eggs made a historic, nine-hour journey from Idaho to Oregon.

The bright-orange coho fish eggs were packed into ice chests and driven in two pickups.

Mike Bisbee is the coho project leader for the Nez Perce tribe. He drove one of the trucks.

Mike Bisbee: “We wrapped the eggs in burlap sacks, got them wet, and then put the ice chests in the back of the pickups.”

It’s the first year that so many coho swam over the dams, that the Nez Perce needed extra space to hatch eggs.

Larry Telles is with Estacada’s Eagle Creek hatchery.

Larry Telles: “Ideally, you would not transport these fish all the way back here. But we are making the best of a situation that in the future will hopefully be rectified and the fish won’t leave the basin until they migrated on their own.”

The fish eggs will be incubated for more than a year.  Then, as young fish, they will be loaded into much bigger tanker trucks and driven back to northern Idaho, and released.