pictures will appear... someday.

I'm so bad at posting on here.

I went to spring training and it was fantastic. Sitting in the sun all day watching baseball... what can be better? I'm going to create a flickr account and post some photos, eventually. Maybe this weekend.

Immediately after driving back from Phoenix (with a night spent on a couch in Santa Barbara, thank you Anthony), I left for a conference about an hour north of home, in Santa Rosa, CA. The conference was the Salmonid Restoration Federation, full of presentations and lectures about salmon and, well, restoration focused on salmon-bearing creeks. I did work trade in the kitchen to go for free (and AmeriCorps paid the rest).

Now that I've returned to SPAWN from vacation and conferences, a new, big project has begun: Downstream Migrant Trapping.

In the life cycle of the coho salmon (and the steelhead trout), the eggs are laid and a year and a half later the juveniles (smolts) migrate downstream to the ocean, where they'll live for a year or two (or more, if they're steelhead) before heading back to the creek to spawn. They actually migrate at night, facing upstream. Meaning they're floating to the ocean facing backwards in the dark... smart move.

We have a trap in San Geronimo Creek set to trap migrating smolts (and anything else that gets caught there, including newly hatched salmon/trout fry). We mark the smolts and from the recapture percentages we can estimate population. Each morning the trap needs to be checked, and while I'm not there every single day, it's a lot of them. I know it's significantly warmer here than it is in Illinois, but the stream at 8 or 9 AM is COLD. I thought my hands were going to fall off this morning! So did Paola, so I know it's not just me being a wimp. The sun doesn't hit the spot we do the data collection at until around 10:30 or so, and half the time we're out of there before that happens.

In the morning we arrive (8 AM if I'm with Todd, 9 AM if I'm with Paola) and fish everything out of the trap - smolts and larger fish in one bucket, fry and smaller fish in another. We dope the smolts with an organic sedative (clove oil), measure, weigh, identify, and clip their tails. We measure 25 fry of each species and all of the other species we catch (california roach, stickleback, juvenile lamprey eel, signal crayfish). The other day one of the crayfish we caught had eggs on her underside - that was really neat. We began late last week, getting around 400 fry in the trap. Now that number is down to less than 100, which is interesting.

We've also put a smaller trap in one of the small tributaries (Larsen Creek) that leads to San Geronimo Creek. This is likely not to catch smolts at all, even though it is a salmon-bearing stream. In the summer, the small tributaries often dry up and SPAWN does fish rescue, bringing volunteers out to catch the fry in the drying pools and moving them downstream, away from certain death. These streams are not historically intermittent, so while it's an unsustainable practice, it's a result of development and rescue is really the only option. So there aren't smolts left in Larsen Creek because as fry they were all transferred out or they died.

Instead, that trap is meant to catch fry that might be migrating out of Larsen Creek before the really hot season begins. This will help us figure out what percentage of fish we're rescuing and whether the program is worth it. The trap went in the water yesterday, but there were no fish caught when we checked it today.

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SPAWN partnered with the College of Marin to create a display creek/garden for the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, taking place this week. Tomorrow Heidi and I get to work at the show and finally see the display (we weren't part of the project). I'm excited, though it means I need to get up early again tomorrow (and again, Saturday, for smolt trap checking).

But Sunday, Sunday I will sleep forever.