My work day generally starts at 7:30am. But when the site you’re staying at doesn’t start until 8am, you have a little time to wander before there are any humans on site, well…except for Denis, I’m not entirely sure what time have arrives….but it’s crazy early, so I always know he’s on site, probably before I even get up at 5:30am. And I always know he’s on site because I don’t have to unlock any doors when I get around to emerging from the suite.
This morning I wandered into the main building and saw something move out front. A deer, with a fawn. I popped back into the suite and grabbed a camera and the two had come around the side of the building by the time I came back out, so all I had to do was stand still and wait.
A couple of bodies were back, but the number for the river crews was only up to seven, including me, so it was another single crew day, this time on the Lower Atnarko. Again, there was lots of commentary about how the number of pink salmon meant that there had as yet been no grizzly bear encounters on the river.
Some years back someone had commented that I seem to be bear attractant. That quite a number of times there had been no bear sightings….and then I arrived.
Yesterday however, I wasn’t sure that bringing the big camera had been warranted. It would be a week of fish pics.
Guess what.
There was a bear at Belarko when we arrive, it was right below the bear viewing platform so the tourists were probably thrilled. I didn’t pull the camera out for that one, it was just a dark blob against the rocks at a fair distance. I still figured that would probably be the only one this week.
We left a truck at Belarko and took the second truck with the raft up to Pacey’s place, where we walked up-river to do a couple of sets.
DAMN there are a lot of pink salmon in the river this year! Like…when you put the net out, for every Chinook in the set…you have to pick 30-50 out of the net. Good times.
Not.
It’s back breaking.
You get the Chinook out as fast as possible, and then plant yourself on your knees over the net, and work to get the pinks out. Their bloody little teeth have the net mesh wrapped around them, and then it winds through their mouths, through their gill plate, around their maxilla, around some fins, and usually they’ve done some crazy alligator roll that ties them in a knot to 6 other pinks in the same state.
Again…good times.
Your hands get nicked, tiny little abrasions that you can’t see, but you can feel.
You get soaked by fish thrashing.
And by the time you clear your section and need to move to another, you stand up groaning about your back, your knees, and so on.
Simmy looked at me and quipped…a couple of times….”I don’t understand why you come up here to do this!” He questions my mental capacity that I ‘choose’ to do this every year.
Someone else asked me how long I’ve been coming in. Turns out that it’s been since his first year working at the site. 12 years, with the only break being 2020, for COVID. Plus one year in 2008 when I came up to write their fish health management plan, but I don’t think I went on the river that year because I was up here on contract for another purpose.
And I almost always seem to attract bears. At least one or two anyway.
Today’s bears, not the one at Belarko, were a sow and cub. We’d walked up river and done two sets and were pulling up to stop at the truck, left were we’d entered the river below Pacey’s place, for lunch, when someone yelled “BEAR” and pointed immediately across the river from where we were.
Damn those things blend in sometimes. Even when someone pointed directly at the spot, it took me a moment to see them. They were in the water against the bank, and mama didn’t seem terribly inclined to exit the water and move along. She was uncomfortably close at the start, and I didn’t reach for my camera in the dry bag for a bit because of the discomfort.
She clearly couldn’t smell us, but she could hear us. I am told their eye sight isn’t stellar, which explains the hard stare we were receiving, which added to the discomfort.
She eventually climbed the bank, but the little porker of a cub (clearly it’d been gorging on pink salmon), wasn’t particularly proficient at climbing banks, which made mama more uncomfortable, and us even more uncomfortable yet.
Yelling, banging rocks, and so on, followed, and she and her cub made their way along the bank to get around us…which also sent them pretty much directly down river and to the spot where we wanted to go.
And so we waited while they fished.
Eventually we got tired of waiting and pulled together as a group, one person with a shotgun at the ready, and m Ade our way downstream and at and angle, but vernally in their direction.
The stopped, fat little baby stood on his hind legs and looked in our direction, and they decided to move on. But they went out of sight. Grizzly bears are uncomfortable to be around, even when they are well fed, but I’d rather see them than know they are there but not see them.
In the end, I guess they’d moved along because we didn’t see them again, only tracks as evidence.
We rafted down the river, did a few more sets, collected eggs from one ripe female and a half dozen males (for females that had been spawned back at the hatchery), and picked out about a kazillion pinks.
And then it was the drive back down the valley to the hatchery, put the live brood into holding, fertilize the eggs waiting in the incubation area, have a few conversations, answer some questions, and retreat to the suite to catch up on email for a couple of hours before watching US politics and a debate that can’t really be called a debate.
And that’s what kind of day it was.