ahta III

Ahta is the queen of streams. The water here is clean and cold, the river basin wide and covered in smooth cobble-stones. As streamwalkers, Lauren and I swing our legs and trip over moss and fallen old-growth to climb along the banks, balancing on huge fallen trees-as-bridges to criss-cross our way upstream. We gaze down into pools of hundreds of fish, sometimes eight or nine deep, multiplying and calculating the population, seeing numbers in the thousands.

Located at the mouth of Bond Sound on the mainland coast, Ahta is thought of as the southernmost extent of the Great Bear Rainforest. Indeed, Great Bears are found here; each time we visit to salmoncount, we share this river space with grizzlies. They walk by us on the streamside, ears attuned to the splashing fish, lifting onto back legs and rubbing against trees. We've seen them in the river eating salmon, peeling the skin off the bones, or swimming through pools, arcs of fish avoiding their huge claws. Their footprints are everywhere, deep, earthy holes in the forest floor. As we move upstream, through thick matted moss and decaying Douglas fir, we follow the bear highways created by these creatures putting their feet into exact footprints of the bear before it, pressing scent into the pathway, reinforcing their belonging to this place, and Ahta's belonging to them. 

The salmon here have been pairing up, digging redds in the cobble, pushing stones aside and hoping their eggs will stay safe while they incubate for the winter months. The spring will see tiny pink and chum fry emerge and sweep and tumble out into the sedgy estuary. Water ouzels, small songbirds who run on the river bottoms, hide away salmon eggs, and feast on the pink-jewels after shaking the fresh cool water out of their grey-black feathers. Juvenile eagles beat their ruffled wings over our heads, and we follow wolf prints along portions of the sandy banks.

This is where the salmon-forest came alive for me. I have read that the rich ocean-derived nutrients brought back by these fish to their natal streams would carry into the surrounding forest and feed the entire community. Here, at Ahta's banks, this picture is carnally painted; the sharp smell of decaying chum, pink, and coho carries far into the surrounding forest and grizzly, blackbear, ouzel, wolf, heron, eagle, gull, merganser, harbourseal, and kingfisher, to name a few, are making their seasonal homes here to feast. This place is thick with salmon carcass, flung everywhere, disintegrating bodies in the loam. The trees, the cedar and hemlock and Douglas fir, the salmonberry shrubs, huckleberry, azelea, salal, are drinking up these nutrients. Linnea borealis, Polypodium glycyrrhiza, Cornus canadensis. The thick moss is dotted by hedgehog mushrooms, yellowfeet, chanterelles, Zeller's Bolete, and angelwings clinging like shingles to rotting logs.
As we turn to go downstream again from the misting waterfalls, the air hangs with whispers of fish ghosts Their gill filaments gasping, their tails ragged, bellies hollow, eggs expelled, and scales rubbed off, protein foam tumbling back down the creek.

ahta II

ahta I

a walk, a sniff, a backrub on a few trees

streamwalking shoal harbour

I'm working a short autumn contract as a streamwalker, enumerating salmon populations in the little creeks around Gilford Island. Responsible for monitoring six main streams, I visit each one every week-or-two. Ahta, Shoal, Scott Cove, Embley, Gildford, Viner; these systems are often small, their chum, pink, coho, sockeye numbers revealed in a range of annual and seasonal fluctuations.

Shoal Harbour is just around the corner from the my home, the research station; we boat over to the estuary in less than five minutes. As with all of the streams we walk, we drift silently at the mouth of the river for twenty minutes while counting jumping salmon, throwing their bodies out of the water all around the boat, giving us a clue to the relative numbers hiding below the surface.

A few weeks ago we couldn't count fast enough, calling out numbers while coho, chum, and pink danced and splashed around us. I peered into the water, trying to make out their dark bodies, counting schools of thirty, no, eighty fish and spot a harbour seal just below the surface. Skimming below the waves, she is hunting and her sleek watery body is fat from the easy meals.

Yesterday the fish were splashing their way to the creek mouth -- we could see them sliding their bodies over the rocks, stepping up the ladder of fresh water, the coho silver-rose blush, giant chum-green-gold fire stripes, or pink freckled tails and white underbellies. We only see each one for a brief moment, tally, and continue scanning.

After our float, we tie the boat to an old dock trestle, it remembers the big logging operation that ran out of Shoal Harbour a few years ago. The roads here are still in fairly good condition, with the alder only beginning to take root along the centre of the old road, the salmonberry just thinking about sending out prickly trailing vines over the cleared areas.

We walk a ways down this old road and turn into the bush next to the creek. Climbing down into the forest, it becomes cooler, more shaded, and smells of bear and moss and decomposing salmon bodies. There are several pink and chum, gorbuscha and keta, bear-claw punctures on their sides, pulled into the deer fern and salal, they are becoming the forest, ocean nutrients feeding the huckleberry, the rubus spectabilis, the red cedar.

The water in this stream is a dark, reddish tea-colour. As with many systems on Gilford Island, high tannin content in the water, a result of decaying vegetation, stains it and increases the acidity levels. These pools of dark water make it difficult to count salmon, who will sometimes hide under logs, roots, or banksides, and lie still with only their gills and tails undulating in the current. Even in the pools with low water, we sometimes toss stones hoping to startle a fish, hoping to add another to the count.

This creek is filled with large moss-covered boulders and pools of egg-sized cobble. We move up the stream by jumping from rock to rock, balancing on fallen trees, and pushing our way through vaccinium. I stand on stone, river flowing around me on all sides, and watch fish below my feet fighting current, jostling for their space, digging redds, pushing cobble aside, sliding up waterfalls, falling down, down, hitting the air and surface and gravity and pushing forward.

eavesdropping on whales

Some mornings I wake up to the erratic splashes of Pacific white-sided dolphins -- groups of ten, twenty, fifty, perhaps more, moving through the fog below the rocky cliff-side outside of my mesh tent door. Or a single calm breath of a sea lion as he lifts his head above the kelp. Kingfishers or ravens, hunting at the edge of the bay. The low, loud hum of a tug towing a log boom, a fishing boat pushing the waves aside, or the sound of a coho salmon throwing her slippery body out of the water into the surprising air. Or it's the A25s and A23s, two families of orca I have learned the names, calls, fin shapes, and swimming patterns of in the past few months. They breathe almost in unison, catching up with eachother while they move west, their giant lungs making it sound like they are much closer than they actually are -- the sound travelling over the top of the still water while they meet our world and swim below the surface to call to their sisters, to watch a fish slip by, and to listen to the tides move little stones up and down their beaches.

I have been working as a warden at Robson Bight Michael Bigg Ecologial Reserve in Johnstone Strait. I volunteered here a few years ago and was fourtunate to join their seasonal team this year. I run a small rigid-hull zodiac, patrolling the boundary of the reserve. Here, I contact boaters to show them out of the reserve, educate them on appropriate whale-viewing etiquette, or show them black-and-white pictures of the dorsal fins of killer whales which tell stories about familial histories, scars, recent sightings, and new babies.

This place is ecologically charged -- the northern resident killer whales, several families of fish-eating odontocetes, travel here to feed on the increasingly scarce Chinook salmon. Johnstone Strait and the Tsitika River estuary are key foraging areas for this culture of whales. Their traditions find them returning to this area year after year in the summer and fall -- this is a feasting time.

This region is also home to a number of their 'rubbing beaches,' sloped shores covered in small smooth stones that the northern residents seek out to rub their bodies on. This behavior is unique among killer whales; no where else around the globe has this species been observed to annually and continually seek out these types of beaches for this activity. We are so incredibly fourtunate to share a space with these creatures who have decided that this unique place is special to them.

Around a campfire in the evenings, we listen to a radio tuned to hydrophones at several key locations in the area. These underwater microphones allow us to listen to the whales' space. Roaring outboard engines, cruise ships, tugs, transport vessels, seaplanes, little skiffs, aluminum water taxis are common -- beneath their sounds and during the lucky quiet times, we hear vocalizations in a foreign language. Eerie echoes, clicks and whistles, elastic bands snapping, tapping, bubbles, laugher, squeaks.

This is a family sharing their experience of swimming through Johnstone Strait, up Blackney Pass and into Blackfish Sound. They hunt and plan and announce new arrivals. They make declarations about changes in movement, reprimand their children, congratulate each other on leaping, on fishing, on holding their breath. We get to eavesdrop on their private world and imagine the possibilities of their experience, so vastly different from our own.

hope ponds

The stretch of the Fraser River that runs between Hope and Mission, BC is known for its gravel substrate and highly productive biotic communities. It contains over thirty species of fishes including the endemically endangered white sturgeon, an array of minnows, sculpins, suckers, and sticklebacks, as well as supporting critical spawning habitat for all five species of Pacific salmon.

The stones that make up the gravelly bottom of this river turn and roll with the fast-moving current, smooth polishing, edges worn, they become a veritable speckled rainbow of marbled stones, as remarkably coloured and diverse both under the moving water as they are in the drying light.

I'm working with a crew of three others, students of salmon and moving water; we are studying the habitat viability of ponds adjacent to the Fraser’s gravel reach near Hope. Using a thirty-meter seine net, we dream and map the pathways where we drag out our net, encircling and capturing fish to identify, count, mark, and puzzle over. The hours spent with our hands pulling rope, waist-deep in moving currents, and careful handling of small fish in cold buckets gives us a sense of the species representative of these ponds and their mother river.

Many of the fish we capture are young salmon. Coho, Chinook, and sockeye have all been netted, weighed, measured, and set free back into the Fraser and the adjacent ponds. It is often challenging to distinguish between these species, as the fish are very young and lack many of the distinct features of these three salmon species as they mature into their adult life phases. Their parr marks, or small oval circles along the lateral line of their bodies, are often indistinct or underdeveloped; the tell-tale colouration and speckles on their fins is difficult to distinguish. Chinook have a sickle-shaped anal fin, with a light white edge to them, their eyes large and their parr markings oval and evenly spaced apart. Sockeye are silvery-bright and particularly slippery. They jump out of our cold hands much with quicker agility than their coho cousins. We puzzle over our captures, making lists and lists of these individuals, learning to distinguish between species, tripping over the various shapes, colours, sizes, and markings of each group.

We hope to answer questions about our study sites in the coming months: what is the relationship between the spring river flows and species found in these sites, their type and population numbers? Do our ponds aid in the survival of these little salmon, or do they act only as a fish trap, starving these young creatures in the winter months?
And we hope to see if there is a possibility of making these ponds more productive and safer habitats for juvenile fish. As we know, the challenges they face on their alluvial and oceanic journey render their chances of return to these spawning sites tenuous and reserved for only a lucky few. We hope to give a few more of these fish a protected and healthy beginning to their journey before they head out to sea on fantastic migrations, to aid their return to the gravelly Fraser.