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Sisters, Oregon
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The contents of the on-line edition of The Nugget represent a selection among the stories that appear in the weekly print edition.

Opinion

Volunteering for the salmon
By Elise Gourguechon

Hatching from a little round egg, a salmon fry dodges predators and habitat destruction in the rivers of our backyard. If she survives to grow to a fingerling she will make a long journey downstream, navigating natural and man-made obstacles, fishermen and natural predators to reach the Pacific Ocean.

If, after her years in the ocean, she can avoid being eaten, she will instinctively make an amazing journey back upstream to the very waters in which she hatched.

She finds a mate who has made the same awe-inspiring journey, digs her nest, lays her eggs, gives up her life and decays into the water, her flesh providing essential nitrates and phosphates helping to sustain more life.

This story of beauty and survival has always amazed me. So as I walked down the street in Bend one day, the image of a beautiful red salmon on a poster in a store window stopped me in my tracks. It was a poster for Oregon Trout's Salmon Watch program. They were looking for volunteers.

Salmon Watch is an award-winning educational program for middle and high school students that seeks "to develop an ethic in the next generation of decision-makers that incorporates the conservation of our wild fish heritage into their view of watershed management." (see related story).

Salmon Watch could not exist without help from volunteers. Wanting to lend a helping hand, I signed right up. One day of volunteer training -- a crash course in everything I could learn about salmon and their habitat -- and I was on my way to becoming a volunteer teacher. My chosen topic: Riparian Ecology.

I was very excited about my upcoming day on the Metolius River with Mountain View High School sophomores. I hoped to share my excitement about salmon and environmental awareness.

I was also more than a little nervous about teaching high school students. I am a graphic artist and photographer. I design things on a computer, usually in a room by myself. The most contact I have with high school-aged people is the occasional photograph on assignment, lasting about five minutes.

The only children I have are the furry variety with four paws.

I wondered what I had gotten myself into.

The big day arrived and I drove out to the Metolius with two other volunteers, Molly Grove, who would be teaching about water quality, and Alicia Leonard, who would teach about aquatic macroinvertebrates.

As soon as we arrived we met the fourth volunteer for the day, Brett Hodgson, Fisheries Biologist for Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. He'd be talking about salmon biology.

Together we walked to the edge of the Metolius River.

At first I couldn't see much, but after just a few seconds I could discern the salmon moving gracefully through the current and I could hear their bodies breaking the surface of the water.

Brett explained that we were seeing kokanee salmon, genetically identical in every way to chinook except that kokanee are the only non-anadromous salmon, land-locked thanks to dams. Their ocean is Lake Billy Chinook.

We learned how to identify redds -- the nests the females dig to lay their eggs -- by the change in color and depression of the gravel. We saw two red-sided males swimming along with a less colorful female, competing with each other to pass on their genes.

The students arrived and were divided up into four groups which would rotate between stations throughout the day.

I was most nervous about the first group because I hadn't worked out exactly what to say and how to go about my lesson, but the kids were great. They were very quick with answers to my questions and I tried my best to lead them to discover the answers for themselves and think about how everything that surrounded them impacted the survival of the fish we were observing.

I had expected to see a river bright red with the bodies of spawning salmon. The action on the Metolius was not so dramatic.

I was a little disappointed at first -- until I realized that this really defined the reason I was here. My purpose that day was to share with these students whatever knowledge I had and to help instill in them a sense of stewardship for our environment so that perhaps, many generations from now, the Metolius River will once again be swarming with the bodies of spawning salmon each fall.

To volunteer with Oregon Trout, visit their website at www.ortrout.org or call 541-753-4280.

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