Photos

I created a flickr account and have uploaded the majority of my California photos and a smattering of photos from before that.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nataliehg/

Spawning a Trout

On Thursday I went to a fish hatchery to participate in Steelhead spawning.

When steelhead trout and salmon are born, they are imprinted with the smell of their home stream. So when they're out in the ocean deciding to come back to the freshwater streams to spawn, it's the smell of that stream that guides them and results in them spawning in the exact stream they are born.

So the Warm Springs Hatchery is at the head of Dry Creek (or at least, right before it's dammed off to create a lake or reservoir) and all these trout, imprinted with the smell, are just waiting to get inside, not realizing that they will herded into pools and then spawned by CA Dept of fish and game employees.

It all went down like this:

We all put on waders, rain jackets, and gloves even though we're working inside. About 150 fish are waiting in this channel, and a button is pressed and a gate starts moving from one end of the channel to our end, herding the fish into a much much smaller space, maybe 8x8? Basically, about 30 fish at a time are herded into a basket filled with water and CO2, which makes them slower. Relatively.

After about 25 or so fish have fallen into the basket, the elevator drops and the gate moves back - the fish can swim the whole channel again. Meanwhile, the trapped fish are slowly being doped, becoming more passive by the second (relatively more passive). After 4 or 5 minutes, the basket raises and dumps the fish into a counter top, where I (and two DFG employees) sort them into male and female. 3 ready females go into one bin, with more CO2'd water, and then about 7 males into the one next to it (also with spiked with CO2). The rest of the fish go down a hatch into a pool (not the channel).

Doped up or not, the fish are thrashing around wildly, and pretty big at that - 18 to 36 inches, I would guess. Big and thrashing while you're trying to sex them and grab them... Mostly I stood there trying to keep them from jumping off the table or from smacking me. My face was soaked, quickly. So were my sleeves under the raincoat. Thank god for waders and a heavy rain coat (mostly).

Anyway, so, now we have 3 females, getting more doped (again, relatively) and 7ish males. First we deal with the gals. Grab one, hold in this weird way, while another person sticks a needle in her belly, depressing it and releasing air into the belly so the orange eggs spew into a cloth-lined colander. Then the female goes into another bin where the water isn't spiked so they can recover.

I tried to hold a female like this, so that someone could get eggs out. She trashed. Too much. I dropped her. Visitors (parents with kids on spring break) were standing on a balcony above, watching, much to my embarrassment. Awesome. 36 inch female steelhead trout flapping and flipping and flopping all over the floor.

On to the males (this I could do successfully, probably because they were drugged much longer). I grabbed the guy, fin in right hand, resting his head on my left hip, running my left hand along his belly so the milt (sperm) spew out onto the washed eggs.

Then the males went down the hatch, into the pool, where the other, unused fish, went.

Back to the females. So the females' bellies are full of air and they're swimming upside down while they're recovering. They need to be grabbed, held upside down and rubbed on the belly so the air comes out, then carried over to the hatch and down they go.

But, of course, they're recovering from being drugged.

Yeah, I dropped one of these too. Embarrassing, again.

We repeated the whole thing until all 150 fish had been gone through and were back in the pool.

Once all the fish are out of the channel, thrown down the hatch, and into the holding pool, we moved them back into the channel, drug them, and then the head lady counts males and females and we move them into a truck with a water tank on the back. One of the DFG guys and I drove to the Russian River, well upstream of the Dry Creek mouth so they wouldn't get respawned that year to release them. We backed the truck up to the side of the river (we're about 20 feet above the water), attached a big metal tube to the back, then opened it up - fish went flying into the river - really - just this stream of water and fish shooting into the river.

Pretty awesome.

I have no pictures, get over it.

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The weekend before was Easter weekend, Heidi and I went to the Bring Your Own Big Wheel race down Lombard St.

A really far away picture of Lombard St.
The race was down the really curvy part.

My friend Zack was racing, if you can call it that. It was a lot of people crashing into each other, into walls, it was hilarious and awesome.

This video was stolen from Tony Chang (Zack's roommate - was in grad school at UIUC while I was there, we met on the bus to the March for Women's Lives).

The end, for now.

Tide Pooling and Bike Riding

These past few days have been fantastic - probably some of my favorite times here thus far. A lot of it has to do with becoming better friends with people, even those I haven't known very long.

Saturday was Cesar Chavez day and AmeriCorps WSP required us to volunteer for at least 4 hours. Heidi and I decided to host a nursery day in SPAWN's native plant nursery and invite other semi-local AmeriCorps WSP members. So the John and Brock at the Dept Fish and Game in Hopland (about 1.5 hours north) and Nate from Institute for Fisheries Resources in SF (the place I want to be next year) visited and a ton of seeds got planted. Hundreds.

After the nursery day, the guys and I went tide-pooling on Tomales Point. 20 miles away!! Who knew you could do that so close to where I live? The red circle is where we went, the green is where I live.


I saw (and touched) starfish, crabs, sea anenomes, mussel beds, some weird cockroach-y thing, and a sea urchin (I didn't touch that one). It was absolutely amazing. Our trailhead was actually in the Tule Elk Refuge and the elk were hanging out at the parking lot on our way back to my house.

Brock, John, and I accidentally got our feet wet at one point, as we were staring at starfish, assuming we were out of wet-foot danger but then the water crept up and BAM! I screamed, we all jumped back, Nate up the rocks immediately above us but Brock and John and I were not so quick.

Shells!!

This tiny guy had a funky shaped shell with this crazy curve in it.


John with a crab


Brock


Nate


Sea Anenome! The fingery things feel really, really weird. We fed the crab to a different anenome.


John and Me, looking down on the ocean and crashing waves.


Me, Nate, John... rock scrambling.

It was amazing.

I want to do it again.

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On Monday I went to San Francisco and went to a seder with Zack, who also went to U of I for a little while. Zack lives with Tony, who I met at U of I while he was in grad school. Anyway, I took Tuesday off of work, slept on their couch, and borrowed Tony's bike to take advantage of the free admission at SF's Museum of Modern Art.

I'd never ridden a bike in a big city before and I was a little nervous - I'm not really the most excited motorist when it comes to passing someone on a bike, even if they're in the bike lane. But it's really not as frightening being on the bicycle side of it. I didn't die, get hit, or get in any kind of trouble (except I walked so much my foot really hurt).

It was actually really difficult being at the museum. I spent an hour beforehand waiting for it to open by window shopping and the weather was absolutely beautiful. Once I got back to MOMA I felt, firstly, really tired, secondly, somewhat lonely, but third and most of all, cooped up. I wanted to get back outside and back on the bike.

So I left. Eventually I made it back to return the bike and home before crazy traffic.