Day 210 – Field Office

4

July 28, 2016 – I work as a biologist, supporting a number of enhancement salmon hatcheries in BC. The work is meaningful to me on so many levels.

• It affords me the opportunity to work in a field that I studied in my years at university
• Although I never saw a live anadromous salmon until I was much older, my father loved to fish for a number of non-anadromous salmonids in the creeks, rivers, and lakes where I grew up. Rainbow trout, brook trout, Dolly Varden, lake trout…. these are all in the same family and I was always fascinated by them and the environment that they reside in
• Salmon are social, cultural, and emotional icons in BC, and I have a career that focuses on those fantastic animals
• The people who work with these amazing creatures are caring, passionate, and dedicated in their work, and I get to work with them
• British Columbia is the most beautiful place I’ve ever travelled and that is because of the enormous expanses of land that is uninhabited by humans. There is so much wilderness in this Province, and to have the chance to enter into the fringes of some of those areas and play a minor role in the conservation of some of the components of the ecosystem, that’s personally fulfilling

The fact that I don’t always have to work from an office on the 13th floor of a building in the middle of a large city, but  can choose to make the effort to go out and engage in some time on the rivers with these amazing people and these amazing animals, that keeps me connected to why I wanted this job so badly; it’s the only job in the federal government that I have ever been interested in, and the only one I’ll stay for.

For the past five years the facilities that I was assigned to have all been on Vancouver Island or in the North-Central Coast. A site between Gold River and Tahsis, far down a rough logging road on the north end of the West Coast of the Island; one in Campbell River; another north of Port Alberni; the fourth, a solid hour down another rough logging road; the fifth, in the remote Bella Coola Valley. My closest site was almost five hours away from home, it makes for a tiring fall, filled with long (and sometimes frightening) drives, poor sleeps in hotel rooms or bunk beds at temporary residences in remote sites. Most of my field travel occurs between October-December, so the weather is usually cold, grey, wet, and miserable.

One of my colleagues retired recently and so, without a new body to fill the void, we had to shuffle projects a bit. I inherited three new ones, regained one that I’d been taken off previously, and gave up two others. I’m thrilled with my new slate of sites though. One offers a new set of challenges with a stock of concern and challenges with hydro, and the other two are within my local area. One of those I can walk to from home, and the other is an hour drive (or ride) on a road we usually ride for pleasure. And, even better, that second one is glacially fed so their fish return to the system early, like…now…, which means that there is a brood collection program I can get out for that isn’t in the dead of the worst coastal weather.

On the flip side, there are downsides to being geared up to your armpits in waders and encased in a heavy pfd…when the temperature is over 30C, and what little skin you have showing – arms, neck, face, ears – is constantly at risk of being scorched if one does not diligently reapply sunblock at regular intervals.

The other day I flipped a message to one of the new sites I will be involved with, up in Squamish. I said I should probably come up and start to get some familiarity with their program, but also that I was aware they were in the thick of brood collection and asked when might be a convenient day to stop in.

The response was “Do you want to go rafting Thursday?”

Oh….hmmm… office, emails, phone calls, paperwork….. or rafting on the river on a sunny hot day in July and seining for Chinook.

Yeah, that’s wasn’t really a difficult decision, particularly the day before I was off for a week of vacation time.

The Cheakamus River saw a horrible disaster in 2005. A train derailed and dumped the contents of nine cars into the waters. The cars contained approximately 40,000 litres of caustic soda (sodium hydroxide), which entered the river, killing more than 500,000 fish from 10 different species, including chinook salmon, coho salmon, pink salmon, and rainbow trout, both freshwater and ocean-dwelling. It was a devastating blow to the river.

The Tenderfoot Creek Hatchery was built well before that event; it was constructed in the early 1980’s and it’s purpose is to rebuild and enhance stocks of salmon in the nearby water systems for First Nations, recreational, and commercial fishing opportunities. That the hatchery was already in place when the derailment occurred meant that they were well placed to respond with enhancement measures, but it is not something that is remedied in a few short years.

I do get to go out on the rivers with some of the other programs I work with. I’ve been on boat sets and beach seines at Tlupana, but the river is calm where I’ve been and the chum are usually relatively easy to corral, usually, but not always. Up on Corbold Creek we are in shallow water and two net sets will usually yield the daily target of 30-70 pairs of sockeye. On the Atnarko there are a few stretches of swift water that we have to traverse on foot or raft between to get to the Chinook seine sites, but the water is usually relatively safe and not terribly frightening.

So I arrived up at the hatchery before 7:30am, met the seasonal staff, geared up and jumped in the truck with two rafts tied on top and filled with nets and other gear. When we got down to the Cheakamus River I have to admit there were butterflies in my stomach. This is not a river like the others I have worked on. This is a killer river. People have, and do, die on it. It is large, swift, glacially fed and therefore silty with little to no visibility. It has rapids and flows through a forest that drops large trees into it. Those trees collect people who fall in and get dragged under by the currents, and they kill many of those unlucky people.

I don’t have my Swift Water ticket, I’ve never managed to get myself into the course, it’s always been inconvenient or has been cancelled before I manage to take it. That lack of training was definitely niggling at the alarm centres of my brain. On the flip side, I was with experienced crew, and I was only too happy to recognize where the authority lay on this trip. Just bellow at me whenever necessary, please. On the river, Jordan would point out every hazard and constantly reminded us where stay away from, and what to do if we found ourselves in a situation. Everybody was always watching everybody else. I don’t have any photos of the rough water, I found it a better idea to pay attention to where the next dip and standing wave is than it is to be looking through the viewfinder and only seeing a small window of what’s going on.

We did two boat drift sets, single boat sets where crew on shore held one end and ran down the rocky edge, or slogged through murky water. I didn’t always keep up, but I always caught up and helped anchor the net when the order was bellowed from the raft across the river. Sometimes we waded through chest deep water, once having to duck under a large tree that had fallen, while clinging to another log for balance, cautiously placing our feet, each step an unknown because of the opacity of the river. I did lose my balance once and have a banged up knee to show for it.

After each set we’d drag ourselves back into the raft and row down to the next set location.

We pulled in on a bank and found some shade to eat lunch in, watch the river, chat about any number of topics. Brian grabbed a rod and did some angling, no success. Someone found a little alligator lizard. The river rushed on by. And eventually we rejoined it.

It was a hot day, with half a dozen or more sets, most of them frustratingly empty. We snagged boulders and other invisible obstacles below the silty blue white waters, one left both boats hanging in the middle of the fast moving river, hanging from the lead line lodged firmly in a rock somewhere below. Jordan and Alex strained to free it as the other four of us watched helplessly. When it finally came free we finished the set, pulled in the net, and the crew mended the hole.

We bounced through several sets of rapids, saw herons, kingfishers, and a young eagle. But the Chinook were elusive. By day’s end we only had three bucks to show for about five hours of work. The crew was thrilled with those three fish, because some days they come back empty handed.

When you expend this much effort for each fish, each fish is precious, there is no fooling around once it’s been cleared from the net, to loose it now would be heartbreaking, particularly such a nice big five year old as this one is assumed to be. When I have been on other rivers and the net gets pulled in full of fish, up to ten people might be sorting through them and tossing those that are green back into the river, taking those that are ripe for their eggs or milt and, occasionally, a few that you probably wanted manage to escape and slip away.

But here, when a float on that net would bob, anticipation was evident….was it a fish? Or was it just a snag. When the net came in with a fish, four or five people were on that fish, circling it, while two would try to untangle it from the net as carefully as possible, cutting the net away if needed. Someone would have a fish tube, partially unzipped, next the the head of the fish, ready to slip it in and zip it up quickly so as to not risk losing it. The tube was then securely tied to the side of the raft to be taken down river and tied somewhere that it could be retrieved with the transport truck.

When we reached the pullout site the transport truck was backed to the edge of the bank and opened, and then each fish, in its tube, was rushed up the bank and deposited in the tank. Two crew then left with the fish and took them back to the hatchery. After taking the fish to the hatchery they had to drive far up Paradise Valley to the put-in site to retrieve the truck that we’d left there, then drive that back down to our pull-out site and reload the rafts and gear for the drive back to the hatchery. We waited, roasting in the afternoon heat, for them to return.

Compared to my other sites, facilities that produce tens of millions of fry, will handle more than a thousand fish in a day, and can collect eggs and milt from up to a couple of hundred pairs in an egg take day, this is so much work, but no less important. The target on this river is only 35 pairs, but the effort to get them to produce those fry to help rebuild this stock, it’s massive. When the public criticizes DFO for not doing this or that, I wish that public could see the efforts the staff working at these sites expend to help the natural resources. I never cease to be impressed by the people working on these sites, they throw themselves into their work with such passion and commitment. They work in dangerous, and often shitty, conditions because it needs to be done. This is hard work, exhausting work, work I couldn’t do every day. And they do it because they love the outdoors, and they love the fish. If you ever visit a hatchery and think it brutal, the reality is that these staff have a huge respect for the environment they work in and the animals that they work with.

It was a long, hot, gorgeous day, and one that makes me appreciate, again, the awesome program I and lucky to work within.

And it’s pretty awesome to now have the opportunity for some summer fieldwork.

I love field days, because this is what my work is really all about, it all comes down to the fish. Without the fish, there would be no Salmonid Enhancement Program.

That these fish return to the rivers after three to five years to spawn and die and repeat the cycle that has been happening for millennia….. I think the Pacific Salmon really are one of Nature’s Miracles, and any minor part I can play in their continued existence in the face of the damage that we humans have done to their ecosystems, that is an honour.

And now I’ll go count my bruises.

116 Photos in 2016 – 81. Nature’s Jewels or Nature’s Miracles