As senior year creeps closer and closer, each of us Environmental Studies students must constantly work towards our ultimate goal: graduating. Just kidding. We’ll see if we get there. But first! we culminate our studies in a capstone or thesis project, and this post is about how I’ve inched incrementally closer to that wonderful, looming cumulonimbus cloud of a senior year. Lovely.
Much of this week was spent preparing for the first Lamprey and Steelhead surveys for Saturday. After the training session the week before, it was up to the individual volunteers to coordinate with their partners on obtaining surveying gear and other logistics; before I knew it and after a Friday night far too reminiscent of freshman year, I rose to to a sunless 6:30 AM Saturday morning and drove up to the East Moreland Golf Course to creep on some fishes.
I would spend the next 4 hours walking alongside and inside this stream with Alan Lumpkin, my dear survey partner who admirably chain smoked through the entire survey. Even I didn’t smoke that much as a high schooler! After adjusting our eyes to the kinds of substrate preferred by spawning steelhead and lamprey, we began more confidently observing the rocky substrate of this section of stream, which stretched from the golf course all the way up to Reed Lake on the Reed College campus. At the end of the next two hours of surveys, we noticed that beavers had created a natural dam, just below a shallow pool; according to Alan, this would prevent the anadromous steelhead and Pacific lamprey from migrating any further upstream, for they would lack the depth needed to obtain a “running (or swimming?) start.”
With our hopes of seeing these seemingly mythical creatures dashed, we reluctantly had to continue the rest of the survey until Reed Lake in case there were fish carcasses, which provide valuable information for the Johnson Creek Watershed Council (JCWC). We began seeing more and more appropriately-sized rocky substrate, and noticing this, I began looking more intensely for small movements in the water. A good birder understands that windy days add the challenge of moving landscapes and diminish one’s sense of hearing (listening to a bird’s call is one way to identify its species). I found that surveying in the water is much the same; the water itself is moving and has glare/reflections from the sky and its surroundings, thus making it harder to pick out wildlife movement, and it’s already challenging enough to “hear” fish without the creek or stream’s ambient noise.
As a field-going worker in the summers, looking for micro-movements by wildlife in “busy” terrain is something I’m quite used to. The stream passed under a raised Reed College building. Alan had mentioned before that many freshwater fish species seemed to prefer shaded areas for its increased cover from predators, and with this in mind, I decided to give this section under the building a second look. As I turned around and looked down, I gave my signature “oh shit!” well known to my previous survey partners from the Forest Service. I’d just found the first Brook Lampreys of this watershed-wide survey of Johnson Creek, and Alan, reaching for his pack of ciggs, was overjoyed.
Check out an underwater video I took of these cuties.
The five individuals in total seemed to be actively creating spawning grounds, known as redds, to lay eggs in eventually. As seen in the video, the lamprey do this by attaching their mouth-parts to rocks and using the force created by flapping their body around to move them. Just after the brook lamprey discovery, I also found a school of roughly 50 fish that seemed as though they were coho salmon fry, although I am very uncertain of which species they actually were. Overall, we finished the survey with officially documented cases of beaver activity, suitable redd substrate, brook lamprey presence, and unidentified fry presence. Not too shabby.
My reason for volunteering to survey this watershed is to supplement field work with my mainly indoor research regarding salmon, but I realized that this survey, an example of anadromous fish conservation in its early stages, is a wonderful situated example of how a small Portland non-profit organization is working across multiple boundaries and collaborating agency partners, local landowners, and community scientists and volunteers. The ultimate result may be the conservation of these threatened species, and in the following weeks, I aim to interview some of the key figures in this effort by the JCWC to understand the evolution of this project.
Connecting the dots back to my capstone/thesis project, I can dig deeper into this evolution and possibly break down the individual components. The result would be a model of approaching watershed conservation within city limits, and this could have large implications for cities dealing with similar situations.
Ariel Moyal says
Wow! This sounds like a very cool opportunity for applied research. Awesome work! I would love to hear more explicitly about how this specific research project connects to your concentration/thesis?
Tarun Bishop says
I like how you tie this into fish conservation, and take this experience and apply it to the broader world. It is certainly true that much collaboration is needed to find policy solutions to these problems. I like how you went out and did field research. Your conversational tone is good; just make sure the reader understands how your points connect toward the beginning, when you talk about your coursework, and then start telling your story.