Historically, the sea lions would often stay on the river year round, but they were nearly exterminated by fishermen and hunters, and are only now beginning to return. So we do not usually see them on the river other than in the spring, but they could begin to show up at other times, since that is historically what they did. Last year, one of the sea lions was seen at the dam in the fall, but that animal, sadly, has been killed. He was one of the first to be killed in this misguided program. He will be greatly missed.

You are right that it can be difficult to find out about these animals without the bizarre, territorial twist that some of the ODFW literature, for example, puts out. In fact, sea lions do eat salmon and other fish. As predators, they have an important role in the maintenance of a healthy balance in our ecosystem, and it is very strange and disquieting to see people trying to stigmatize them over that. In fact, that is an issue with a great many predators -- people see themselves in competition with the rest of the planet and often the predators are the first to go. This *always* has negative consequences for the entire ecosystem, and it is a shameful thing to see ODFW and WDFW repeating the same, predictable errors yet again. A good resource on this pattern is the group Predator Defense. See their website here: http://www.predatordefense.org/.

At one time, there were many other predators on the river as well as sea lions, all of whom looked forward to the returns of the great salmon runs every year. The salmon would go out to the ocean and gather biomass, and then bring that biomass surging back into the river each year. They evolved a run strategy to "swamp" predators -- meaning that so many would come upstream that predators would eat some, but others would go on to spawn the next generation. The role of the predators -- including bears, sea lions, seals, lynx, foxes, weasels, coyotes, and many others -- was a complex one. In part, they helped to make the salmon species stronger by preying on the weak, the slow, and the less creative among them. But aside from their evolutionary role, they also helped to feed and strengthen the entire ecosystem, by releasing some of the biomass that had been gathered by the fish. When they would feed, they would nourish themselves, but then countless other organisms would also be fed -- studies have shown that the salmon, through the help of predators, fed the entire ecosystem from the river all the way up into the forests on the mountains all over Cascadia.

You can see that today with the sea lions. When they eat a salmon, you will see sea gulls and other birds gathering around the spot. The sea lion eats as much of the fish as it can. But there are always bits of fish that get scattered to the birds, who would not otherwise be able to catch a fish on their own. Under the water, the same thing is happening with tiny fish and other organisms, who are feeding on the fish. Those animals then carry that biomass off, and some of it goes to feed their young, some of it is deposited as scat on the forest floor, where it is digested and scattered by yet more organisms, until it becomes the very soil that nourishes the great forests that once covered this entire region.

So predators do, indeed, serve a very important role and it is dangerously short sighted when officials fail to recognize that and imagine that they are doing the ecosystem a favor by "managing" away predators.

Most of the predators who were native to this region have been killed off by humans in the past century or so. At the same time that humans killed off native predators, we also killed most of the salmon. Sea lions and salmon co-existed on the Columbia throughout history, with the salmon nevertheless numbering in the tens of millions during most of that time. Now, however, in just over a century, humans have managed to bring the number of salmon plummeting down to less than 1% of their original numbers. It's very sad to see people blaming sea lions, when the sea lions were not even here on the river during much of the time that the salmon were disappearing, since the sea lions, too, were being exterminated from the river during most of that time. They are only now beginning to return, since the passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act in 1972 made it illegal to kill them. If that act had also made it illegal to kill salmon, we would be seeing the salmon doing much better than they are. It is not sea lions who have led to the decline of salmon, it is us.

In any event, if you want to see the sea lions at the dam, the best time is from about March through May. There are two species of sea lions up there -- the California sea lions and the Steller sea lions. The ones being killed by the ODFW right now are California sea lions, though the ODFW has been making noises about seeking permission to kill Steller sea lions if and when they are ever de-listed (right now they are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act).