I’ve started volunteering with Arocha
https://arocha.ca/what-we-do/conservation/ on a chinook spawner survey on the Little Campbell River. This 3 yr project is a partnership between Arocha, the Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club hatchery and DFO. The goal of the project is to inform enhancement and regulatory efforts of LC chinook and recovery planning for Boundary Bay chinook.
One of the purposes of the survey work I’m involved with is a better understanding of the presence of clipped chinook in the river. The hatchery produces and releases chinook, but it hasn’t clipped them for many years. Yet, in the fall, clipped chinook return to the river. Where are these chinook coming from? is one of the questions to be answered.
A couple times a week, teams walk the river, to collect head samples of dead clipped chinook, as well as to record carcass measurements and observations. The collected heads of the clipped chinook will be dissected for the presence of a coded wire tag (CWT). The CWT will tell us what other rivers the stray clipped chinook originated from.
I walked the river yesterday and, in the reach we were on, we recovered 10 chinook carcasses, 2 of which were clipped. The 2 clipped fish were both jacks. Interestingly, the remaining 8 fish were mostly bucks and many were unspawned, or partially spawned. I wondered if the drought delayed their migration enough that it affected their ability to spawn successfully? During yesterday’s walk there were still many chinook in the river. River walks will continue until late November in order to recover as many as possible.
I’ll report back when we get the 2022 CWT data back from DFO.
Cheers.