Field season always feels like a marathon, and this year is no exception. I haven’t visited Conuma River since 2019 because of the pandemic. Because there are no accommodations other than the onsite residences, it wasn’t responsible to have people staying there, and I just can’t make it in and out in a day, it’s too far.
But with things easing up a bit, and everyone having been vaccinated at least once or twice, I was able to get in for a visit and provide a bit of help with some genetic management that is being carried out with one of the stocks.
I came in on Monday afternoon, spent Tuesday and Wednesday at the site, and left early Thursday morning.
As has been the case for months….the weather was clear and dry and warm…..bordering on hot. The hatchery was successful in collecting all the Chinook brood they needed and they held well on site since they are held in cool well water rather than surface water. But the fish in the rive itself, that’s another story. We went down to the river late Monday afternoon to take a look at the conditions.
It was heartbreaking to look down into the river below the site and see quite a number of Chinook just hovering in the shallow water. The river is low, and the large fish can’t get upstream to spawning habitat, so they are holding in increasingly warm and oxygen deficient waters.
Carcasses littered the riverbed.
The fish that weren’t already dead are probably just dead fish swimming.
Tuesday we went to try to collect chum; the hatchery is holding some fish in the ponds, but has a long way to go in collecting their target. We took a boat and a transport truck down to the Conuma and tried a couple of sets without a lot of success. The fish have been holding out in the estuary waiting for cooler and higher waters. We walked down to the mouth of the river and a few groups came up as we watched, but not enough to warrant further effort that day. So we went back to the site to do a sort and egg take on those fish already in holding.
Wednesday was a long day of sorting through the Burman Chinook, reading PIT tags to identify who was who against a spreadsheet from the Molecular Genetics Lab, culling those fish that didn’t type as Burman or were or lower Burman ancestry than we wanted (we are trying to shift the stock genetics back to a more historical Burman-like genetic profile from one that has seen a lot of unintentional introgression from stray fish. Then, once we’d finished up the adult sort and gamete collection, we had to match fish as best we could, again using the data from the Molecular Genetics Lab that was able to tell us who was related to who and how….so we had to set up a set of crosses that didn’t see siblings or half-siblings being crossed. It’s not difficult, but it’s time consuming because it’s easy to accidentally make a mistake.
The mornings on the coast are starting to feel a little bit like fall, if only in that the fogs are trying to form, though they are burned off quickly when the sun makes it over the horizon. I got a little bit of that West Coast magic when I headed out to make the drive back to the inside of the Island.
I was out the door early Thursday, but stopped to join in on a virtual meeting and that, unfortunately left me missing the ferry by just one car….I was the first car to NOT get on the boat. Oh well….someone has to be that car, and at least I knew I’d be on the next one 😉
