Elise Brunk: This podcast is sponsored by the US Fish and
Wildlife Service and the Student Conservation Association. The
goal for these short podcast episodes is to really create a
window into the conservation and the educational work that's being
done on the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. My name is
Elise Brunk, I'm from Portland, Oregon, and I just graduated
from Trinity University, while I, where I studied molecular
biology and art,
And I'm Emma St. John: and I'm Emma St. John. I'm from Montclair, New
Jersey, and I'm a rising senior at Mount Holyoke College
studying geography and geology. We're both visitor services
interns from the Student Conservation Association, also
known as the SCA. The SCA has volunteer and paid employment
programs designed for high school students, college
students, and recent graduates. They partner with state and
federal organizations providing internships all across the
United States. And all of their programs are focused on
conservation.
Elise Brunk: We are working in the town of Bethel on the Yukon
Delta Wildlife Refuge, which is in southwest Alaska. Bethel is
actually the largest western town in Alaska. Bethel is home
to about 6000 people in the entire region has a population
of about 25,000 spread across 50 villages. The whole refuge
covers just over 19 million acres. So it's quite large. And
one of the interesting things about it is that it's not
continuous. There are pockets of state and private land within
the refuge as well as wilderness areas.
Emma St. John: The physical land itself isn't exactly continuous
either, over half of the refuge area is covered by water. And
you can really see this on any map of the area. So really
incredible and unique landscape that constantly changes. And so
many of the lakes and ponds in the areas are ephemeral.
Elise Brunk: So if you go hiking on the tundra, you might kind of
get wet feet, we definitely got wet feet last time, so we wore
the wrong shoes. Our job is mostly to work in the refuge
Visitor Center, not out in the field. So we staffed the front
desks on the days that the visitor center is open to the
public. And we also lead educational outreach projects in
Bethel. And we generate social media content for the refuge. So
that's Facebook posts and talking on the radio. And we
also get to help organize environmental education
materials that are within the refuges possession so that they
can be implemented and shared with local groups like schools
across the region.
Emma St. John: So this is the very first episode in this
podcast. If you're hearing this, you haven't missed anything. And
be sure to tune in for our next episodes. Over the next few
episodes, we'll be having other staff members talk about their
work and their experiences on the refuge.
Elise Brunk: This one's just us. We could talk for a while about
what we've been doing this summer, and we want to share
what we did up at the Kwethluk fishing weir a couple weeks ago.
But before we get into everything that we were doing up
there, I'm gonna ask what's a weir anyway, we certainly didn't
know before we got here. So if you're wondering, we really
can't blame you. Emma, what's a weir?
Emma St. John: All right, great question. A Weir is essentially
a fence across a section of a river that larger fish like
salmon, which are targeted at the Kwethluk weir can't pass
through. So they're all directed to one entrance with a tunnel
through the middle. upstream of the weir there's a wooden trap
that fish congregate in. When the doors closed, the door of
the trap is only closed for a few hours of the day, when
workers at the weir are planning to take more detailed sampling,
age, sex and length data. When trap is open, fish can freely
pass through the weir. And their passage is recorded on video
camera and then counted by species.
Elise Brunk: Yeah, so Emma and I got to spend three days up at
the weir. So we got a little taste of what it's like to work
there for a full season. And that's just the summer really a
couple of months. It's a well established camp. It's been used
in use seasonally for years. So they have a number of canvas
tents complete with little woodstoves in them, which is
super cozy. And they have a good kitchen setup. And it's all on
these raised platforms.
Emma St. John: Probably the most exciting part for both of us at
the weir was getting to do the age, sex, length data, also
called ASL with the actual fish in the weir trap. So we went to
the water wearing dry suits so it wasn't too cold. And we were
inside the trap itself, which has an open top and just bars on
the side. And it holds the fish while the doors are closed.
Elise Brunk: It's big enough to fit the both of us at the same
time. So we were armed with this large hand net, like maybe two
feet by two feet. And we both stand at one end of the upstream
end of the trap. And then hustled down to the other end
holding the net insync together, and then try to scoop up
whatever fish we could get. And when we pulled one up, we would
sit it in this little swing on the side of the trap. And from
there, we can measure it easily get a good enough look at it to
tell the species and the sex. And then lastly take a couple of
scales from the side of the fish. And they use those to
determine age actually, that scales have this sort of ringed
banded formation if you look at them under a microscope, kind of
like tree rings, so that gives you their age. That was a really
neat experience. And we're both a little tentative at first
because you have this Big Fish, the largest one was
Emma St. John: 84 centimeters.
Elise Brunk: yeah
Emma St. John: it's a big pregnant chinnook
Elise Brunk: 84 centimeters and they're splashing everywhere. So
it was a really cool experience to get to contribute to that
kind of research.
Emma St. John: I had actually never been fishing before in my
life. I've never held a fish. Oh, wow. So that was really
exciting. What a way to start? Exactly, yeah, right into the
deep end. Pun intended.
Elise Brunk: The next day, the weather was really bad, so we
didn't work in the weird trap. Instead, one of the weird texts,
they're taught us how to count salmon from the camera
recordings because they actually have a camera setup in the spot
where the fish have to pass through this like one little
channel, so they get to see everything that moves through
there. It's like, like a motion center. So we learned how to
identify the different species of salmon by this black and
white camera recording, which was really a challenge when we
thought so mistakes at first. So at that time, which was about
mid July, there were chum Sockeye, Chinook, and pink
salmon, all moving through the weir. These fish were all moving
through the same part of their lifecycle. To learn more about
salmon life cycles, we asked Aaron Webber he's the current
acting deputy refuge manager here. Prior to this position, he
was the fisheries biologist and he worked with liquid liquid for
many years. So he's the one to ask. Here's Aaron.
Aaron Webber: Here at the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. We
have five Pacific salmon species, there are the Chinook
Sockeye, chum, pink and coho. Basically, the life history of a
salmon is that they're anadromous, which means they
spawn in freshwater, go and live in the ocean for a time and then
return to the same place that they were hatched, to spawn and
die. And so that's basically what happens. The eggs hatch
sometime in the winter, they emerge as very, very small fish
larval fish, and they can spend anywhere from months to years in
the freshwater before they go out to the ocean. When they are
in the ocean, they can spend anywhere from one to seven years
depending on species, and then they return back to where they
were hatched. And so that life history is really it ranges
depending on what species it is, and all sorts of different
things like environmental conditions, temperature, water,
flood, but that's basically what happens, you hatch, you go to
the ocean, you get big, you come back, and you spawn and die.
Elise Brunk: So that's a summary of life as a salmon. As the fish
migrate from the ocean to freshwater, their appearance
changes and it diverges between species so that they start to
look more different before when they're all ocean going all over
the five species look more or less the same. We learned to
identify them from their spawning colors, patterns and
shapes. And we also learn to identify or tell the difference
between males and females. Males salmon have a distinctive hook
or curve on their lower jaw with develops just prior to their
migration to spawning grounds. This physical feature is called
a kype.
Emma St. John: Yeah, being able to tell the males from the
females was pretty straightforward when we were
actually in the trap itself handling the fish, but
definitely more difficult to determine doing the video
recording. But that's actually not essential data. They're just
counting the number of fish per species. We were just testing
ourselves mostly.
Elise Brunk: Yeah, so they use that data to supplement the data
that they get from actually physically being in the weir and
handling the fish. If you're interested in this, I believe
there's a YouTube video on the Yukon Delta weir. Now that we've
talked about
Emma St. John: what a weir is, you might still be wondering
what the point of all this is, and why we have people doing
this work in the first place. The purpose of weirs is to
estimate annual escapement numbers for salmon runs.
Escaping is the number of fish who complete their migration to
their spawning grounds. Those who are not fished and don't
pass away from other causes. The Kwethluk Weir and other weirs are
strategically placed in tributaries upstream from where
most fishing occurs. So human pressures are not too much of a
factor after they're counted.
Elise Brunk: All in all, the weir is a fascinating and
important operation that enables biologists to measure the
strength of the salmon runs and better understand the human and
the environmental pressures on these fish. Our time there was a
really truly memorable part of our internship on this refuge.
Emma St. John: In closing, we'd like to thank the Fish and
Wildlife Service and the Student Conservation Association for
these wonderful opportunities and for the hard work of all
their employees.