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.

salmon coast

I'm in the beautiful Broughton Archipelago, at the Salmon Coast Field Station on Gilford Island -- home to noble fir, hemlock, and salal, huckleberry, cougar, and belted kingfisher.

We're working to sample individuals of chinook salmon, collecting tiny cuts of their heart and gill tissue to screen for viruses, but it's been slow; the fish aren't biting in this area. So we occupy ourselves with the tasks of not-science:

Coady built a fish smoker and we keep it running all day. Two early morning fishing trips out of Cramer Passage left us with several pink salmon and a few coho; we feast and feed the green alder fueled fire below the screens of fish strips, salmon candy for visitors and for the winter. We haul firewood up the hill, clean garlic bulbs from the garden, and watch the water for humpback whales lolling and rolling in front of Echo Bay. We harvest and chop kale, dig potatoes, and bake rhubarb cake.

Every day-or-so, I hike into the dockside community of Echo Bay, following up our waterline to a stream where our drinking water and showers are piped down from. From there, I follow a stream down to the estuary, scouring up and down the streambank for mushrooms and forest treasures; salmon bones, flowering succulents, animal scat, ripe huckleberries.

I jump in the green-grey cold sea every day, eyes open under the surface, looking for hazy fish darting between the kelp, log-floats, and barnacle-shoreline. Yesterday a seal lifted his head above the water, watched me kick my fin-feet through the deep. This evening some Pacific white-sided dolphins came close while we were swimming; the ocean is alive.

Coady and I run around on his little boat; we visit the nearby Blackfish Lodge, a floating fishing lodge located across the passage from us to collect samples for our project, to eat birthday cake, and giggle with four-year-olds. After the party, we peer through the pitch dark to guide our ride back to the station. Thousands of bioluminecent fish shoot away from the hull of the open aluminum boat; their bright silver bodies obscured by the opaque darkness of the midnight waters' surface -- our route guided by the forested silhouette shape of the hills imagining a whale-propelled galaxy of plankton exploding beneath our tiny boat.

counting salamanders

sifting through the forest debris, we work to quantify the amphibian distribution in a forest site in maple ridge. our class, divided into teams of three to four individuals, are each given a starting point, measured out forty meters apart down the gravel logging road running approximately north//south. we find our commencement points, grab out tie rope, and dive into the bush, measuring out a line of one hundred meters. then, on each side of the line and under it, we scour.

acting like bears, feeling our way through the forest on all-fours, we scratch away at the underbrush, we overturn rotting logs, peer into small crevices, strip at moulding bark, we peel back the forest.

the forest, close to our faces, smells fresh and clean, recent rainfall has given little fungi the opportunity to push their way to the surface and we compare tastes of licorice fern to the scent of licorice centipedes. our fingernails are ringed in blackened humus, knees steeped in the earth.

western redbacked salamanders, ensatinas, gooey egg masses clinging to debris in ponds, flowering trillium, all observed with face at earth-level, field work is dirty and sweaty and possibility of discovery is under every needle on the forest floor.

Robson Bight

Two summers ago I volunteered with a warden program in Johnstone Strait run by CETUS Research and Conservation Society. Camped in Boat Bay on West Cracroft Island, every morning started with a muddy hike through salal, cedar, and skunk cabbage to a lookout named Eagle Eye for the giant telescopes and box full of binoculars set on the edge of a high ocean-facing cliff.

foggy morning on the cliff

high-tech monitors

The morning would begin by turning on the radios and hydrophone receivers, making contact with marine park wardens and then firing up a small camp stove to brew hot coffee to warm our hands from the northern Vancouver Island late August fog. Here to monitor the boat traffic and whale behavior outside of  Robson Bight Michael Bigg Ecological Reserve, we worked to collect data used in studies looking at the correlation between human presence on the water and the behavioral changes seen in whales.
The resulting studies have shown that these whales respond to boat traffic by adopting more erratic swimming patterns when they would usually be foraging, suggesting that high levels of anthropogenic interference will cause reduced hunting success for these already threatened populations of killer whales.

An ocean environment is saturated in sound – noise travels further through water than  through air, and in an environment where light may not be a illuminating sense, creatures living in this environment use sound to guide their paths, to find food, to communicate, and to identify and avoid danger.

Highly acoustic creatures, killer whales use echolocation to hunt, navigate, and sonically light up their environment. Their vocalizations – clicks, whistles, moans, and squeaks – help us to recognize them as distinct groups of whales where families can be told apart by their different accents.
Being cognisant of our often invasive presence on the water near these animals, a series of hydrophones, set up by Orcalab, broadcast underwater noise to our lookout station while we watched from afar; in this way we were able to gain insight into the complexities of sound in which these animals participate and produce while gaining an appreciation and sensitivity for the loud levels of boat traffic also moving through the area.

In the early morning, the sounds of the pod's chatter would crackle over the speakers; for the moment completely uninterrupted by the loud roar of tugboats and fishing vessels moving down Johnstone Strait. Sitting atop the cliff, peering through binoculars, we could silently eavesdrop without the whales knowing or being affected by our closeness to them.