Bounty Fishers: The Government Will Pay You to Go Fishing
On the Columbia and Snake rivers, anglers are paid by the fish to catch and kill northern pikeminnow, up to $500 for a tagged one. The strangest part is that the fish carrying the bounty is a native.
On a summer morning on the Columbia River, an angler swings a dull silver fish over the gunwale, drops it into a tote, and runs the boat toward a check-in station on the bank. The fish is a northern pikeminnow, about a foot long, and it is worth money. So is the next one, and the one after that.
The Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Fishery pays anglers a cash bounty for every pikeminnow 9 inches or longer they turn in on the Columbia and Snake rivers. There is no bag limit and nothing to release. In 2025 the highest earner made $159,310 over a single season. The program is funded by the Bonneville Power Administration, the federal agency that markets power from the dams on those rivers, and it exists because those dams have tilted the odds against young salmon. The pikeminnow, oddly enough, is a native fish.
How the Money Works
The rate rises the longer an angler stays at it. The first 25 fish of the season pay $6 each. Fish 26 through 200 pay $8 apiece. Every pikeminnow after that is worth $10. The escalating scale rewards the people who treat the season as work rather than a weekend outing.
Scattered through both rivers are tagged fish worth far more. A pikeminnow carrying a visible external tag pays $500. One carrying only an internal PIT tag, which is invisible until staff scan the fish at the station, pays $200. An angler does not know a fish is worth a bonus until someone runs a wand over it on the dock.
The people who commit to it earn accordingly. In 2025 the top 20 anglers averaged 4,133 fish each and took home an average of $41,736 for the 5-month season. The operation is run by agencies, not by a tackle shop promotion. The Bonneville Power Administration funds it, the Pacific States Marine Fisheries Commission administers it, and the wildlife agencies of Oregon and Washington and Northwest tribes run it on the water. Anglers register through a phone app.
Why a Native Fish Carries a Price
The northern pikeminnow is not invasive. It is native to the Columbia, and it has lived in the river far longer than the program that pays to remove it. The state does not intend to wipe it out, and says so directly. Oregon's fish and wildlife department writes that the goal of the program "is not to eliminate the native Northern Pikeminnow, but rather to reduce the average size and curtail the number of larger, older fish."
The reason is salmon, and the reason behind that is the dams. Northern pikeminnow eat juvenile salmon and steelhead, millions of them a year as the young fish move downstream toward the ocean. In a free-flowing river that predation is ordinary. The Columbia is not free-flowing. Its dams convert fast water into a chain of warm, slow reservoirs, and they concentrate disoriented young salmon at the places where large pikeminnow wait. The result is an old predator and prey relationship pushed hard in the predator's favor. So the agency that markets the power from those dams pays anglers to push it back, a bounty written into the budget to partially mitigate what the hydroelectric system does to salmon.
Whether It Works
The numbers suggest it does. Since the program began in 1990, anglers have removed nearly 6 million pikeminnow from the 2 rivers, and the agencies estimate that has cut pikeminnow predation on juvenile salmon by as much as 40 percent. After 35 years, thinning out the largest and hungriest fish remains one of the cheaper tools in an expensive salmon recovery effort.
"Good public participation has always been the key component to achieving our salmon enhancement goal," said Eric Winther, who leads the project for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
The Bounty Does Not Stop at the State Line
The program runs the length of the Columbia from the estuary up to Priest Rapids Dam in eastern Washington, and up the Snake River to Hells Canyon Dam, which carries a stretch of it into Idaho. Idaho also runs its own cash-for-fish programs, aimed at predators and non-natives that press on the fish the state would rather protect. In Lake Pend Oreille, Idaho pays $15 for every lake trout and has seeded the walleye population with tags worth $1,000 each, along with a monthly drawing that awards 10 prizes of $100. On the South Fork of the Snake, non-native rainbow trout that crossbreed with native cutthroat carry hidden tags worth between $50 and $1,000. The logic repeats: put a price on the fish doing the damage, and let recreational anglers carry out the management.
Fish and wildlife agencies are usually in the business of setting limits, on how many fish a person may keep, how large, and how often. These programs invert that. They remove the limits, open the budget, and ask anglers to take as many as they can. The fish on the line might be worth 6 dollars or 500. Either way, somewhere downstream, it is one fewer mouth waiting on the salmon run.
Sources
- Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Program, https://www.pikeminnow.org/
- Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, "Northern Pikeminnow Sport Reward Program", https://myodfw.com/articles/northern-pikeminnow-sport-reward-program
- Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, "2026 Northern Pikeminnow Sport-Reward Fishery begins May 1", https://wdfw.wa.gov/newsroom/news-release/2026-northern-pikeminnow-sport-reward-fishery-begins-may-1
- Idaho Fish and Game, "Angler Incentive Programs", https://idfg.idaho.gov/fish/incentive
- Bonneville Power Administration, "Top angler earns over $100K protecting juvenile salmon from northern pikeminnow", https://www.bpa.gov/about/newsroom/news-articles/20231206-top-angler-earns-over-100k-protecting-juvenile-salmon-from-northern-pike