Spawner Survey Shenanigans
by Maddie Hicks
Starting in late October, my spawner survey partner, Eric, and I began our weekly voyage up Ennis and Upper Brickyard Creeks in search of returning adult salmon. Equipped with our surveying gear and our gloves and socks stuffed with hand warmers, we traversed over log jams and through thickets of blackberry for about a mile of cumulative stream channel. For the first several weeks of the season, the streams were desolate and even dry in places. Despite a dismal start, we were welcomed on our fourth survey by over a hundred of the most brilliantly red coho that had been patiently waiting downstream in the Samish River. We were off to the races!
As we walked upstream for each survey thereafter, we recorded the numbers of live fish, carcasses, and redds (gravel nests that salmon dig to deposit their fertilized eggs) we found. Not only are these surveys a day well spent getting to hang out with, what in my opinion are the coolest animals ever; the data we collect is also extremely important for salmon recovery. At the end of the spawner season, we send our numbers to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife where they are used to make escapement (i.e. spawner abundance) estimates. These estimates, in turn, are used to monitor population trends and ultimately guide restoration efforts.
During the final weeks of the survey season, we decided to hike past the upstream extent of our reach on Ennis Creek to a waterfall that we’d been told about. As we admired the waterfall, sweaty and exhausted with twigs and plant pieces sticking out of our clothes, I couldn’t help but think about the amazing resiliency of salmon. We had only retraced the smallest fraction of the entire journey that a salmon travels in its lifetime. Salmon are anadromous, meaning that they are born in their natal freshwater streams and migrate out to the ocean, sometimes even thousands of miles north to the Gulf of Alaska, just to swim all the way back to where they started. Not to mention faced with a slew of natural and anthropogenic obstacles along the way like predators, lack of suitable habitat, and passage barriers.
Rifling through the pages of my stinky, scale-covered field notebook, we counted a total of 298 fish in Ennis and 17 in Upper Brickyard this season (as well as some bonus findings like pumpkins, a basketball, a foldable chair, and a charcoal barbeque). Numbers are up from last year for the two reaches that we surveyed, but in past years counts have been in the thousands. We have a long way to go but we’re making improvements with every restoration project that we and other organizations throughout the watershed implement. Until next year, spawners!
