View our latest posts: From the Field

Whale, it’s o-fish-ally over!

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The last 10 months have been filled with demanding and inspirational experiences including but not limited to teaching over 1,100 students, handling dead (and living) salmon and other creatures with said students, designing new outreach materials and activities, and identifying my next pursuit in life. And it’s that last experience that will stick with me long after I’ve left Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group. 

While engaging children and adults alike this year, I have reaffirmed my love for learning and educating. There’s something addictive about all the new things we discover about our universe and the feeling only gets more addicting as you can share these discoveries with others so the knowledge multiplies again and again.  Nothing is as satisfying as the “a-ha!” moments on people’s faces when they make connections or experience something amazing. I love that feeling and want to be familiar with it always.

As a second-term AmeriCorps volunteer, I am so appreciative that Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group provides others like me the opportunity to get dirty, get involved, and get educated. I am planning on going back to school to finish my bachelor’s degree and work towards a Middle School Science teaching accreditation. I’ve been “the Salmon Lady” for the last two years and maybe in the future, I’ll use the other nickname I was given this year, Ms. V. 

Thank you to my students. Thank you to all the teachers I’ve worked with. Thank you to this amazing salmon community. 

Thank you thank you thank you, 

Ms. V the Salmon Lady

A Glimpse into the Corps Experience

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by Tessa Marie

The Washington Conservation Corps has given us a unique opportunity to make an impact for our local streams and wetlands. We work together with Skagit Fisheries to plant trees, remove invasive species, and work on a variety of construction projects aimed at improving our environment for future generations.

There have been some surprising lessons along the way. For example, I never knew of a planting technique called live staking. To live stake, we cut off a limb of a mature cottonwood or willow tree and stick it about a food deep directly into the ground. Doing this in the winter months allows the dormant limb to focus all of its energy into growing roots and then presto! It becomes a new tree! I had no idea that starting a baby forest could be so easy.

Going into WCC, I also had no idea how much work goes into prepping planting sites, let alone the actual planting process. At a site known as Marietta Creek, we spent several weeks in October building about one mile of fence through a cow pasture to keep the animals away from the stream. We returned for several more weeks in December to transport 4,099 potted plants and stage them in our planting area.  We rented a UTV to help us transport plants across the pasture, and also crammed hundreds of plants into a Skagit Fisheries truck and trailer.

Our restoration crew coordinator Joe pulled up to the fence and hopped into the trailer filled with spruces in 2-gallon pots. He picked one up, turned toward my colleague Nathan, and asked, “Are you ready?” Nathan readied his stance. Joe tossed the pot into the air, over the fence, and into Nathans’ arms. I watched in awe, “You’re kidding right?” No, no they weren’t kidding. That’s an actual spruce flying through the air. Nathan set the spruce down just in time to catch the next one that Joe flung towards him. Once I took a moment, watched a few more tosses to reconcile my disbelief, I got ready. Joe pivoted towards me and tossed me a spruce. Next thing you know, Joe is hurling spruce after spruce over the fence with precision, giving Nathan and I just enough time to set it down and get ready for the next plant. That was an exciting and efficient offload! I was completely out of breath by the time we had the trailer emptied. I will probably always chuckle to myself when I think back on this project.

I am one of six members of a Washington Conservation Corps crew based in Mt. Vernon. We work with Skagit Fisheries Enhancement Group to restore habitat near streams that feed into the Skagit and the Sauk River. In the fall we focused on construction projects and some site maintenance to prepare for the planting season in the winter. Now that it’s springtime we are focusing mostly on invasive species removal with brush cutters. Before this position, I had no experience with power tools and very little planting and construction experience. I feel super empowered to be able to run a brush cutter, chainsaw, a drill and other construction tools. It is extremely rewarding to know that our projects are a result of our hands and our pure hard work.

Spawner Survey Shenanigans

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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!