Day 1181: Salmon
Jun. 14th, 2023 11:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eve_primeToday’s trip to campus involved quite a lot of walking – including all around the basement of Klamath Hall, because they’d reorganized the science library (seven years ago!) and it was no longer obvious how to leave. By the time I was finally headed back to my car I realized I felt rather ill. I’m thankful it wasn’t hot today, or I surely would have felt worse! I also hope that rest will take care of it, as D’s graduation is in six days.
My main project these days is tracking down the last little bits I need for the environmental section of my book. Here’s a disturbing fact. My hometown river, the Siuslaw (pronounced sy-YOO-slah), was one of the main rivers for coho salmon before the white settlers came, and even after they did come the salmon runs were quite bountiful. I found a paper from Oregon State University researchers who calculated that the average Siuslaw River salmon run used to be 547,000 each year, in the late 1800s, based on cannery records. A hundred years later, the average was more like 13,600, and 1997 there were only 668 coho salmon! Of course, over-fishing was probably an issue, but damming was not – there are no dams on the Siuslaw. I looked into it further and concluded that clear-cutting and related herbicide use has probably been a lot of it. I hope the Siuslaw tribe, which now has a lot more power than it used to, can do something about it. I saw that a kid I knew in school, the older brother of one of my regular classmates, is the tribal vice-chair.
My main project these days is tracking down the last little bits I need for the environmental section of my book. Here’s a disturbing fact. My hometown river, the Siuslaw (pronounced sy-YOO-slah), was one of the main rivers for coho salmon before the white settlers came, and even after they did come the salmon runs were quite bountiful. I found a paper from Oregon State University researchers who calculated that the average Siuslaw River salmon run used to be 547,000 each year, in the late 1800s, based on cannery records. A hundred years later, the average was more like 13,600, and 1997 there were only 668 coho salmon! Of course, over-fishing was probably an issue, but damming was not – there are no dams on the Siuslaw. I looked into it further and concluded that clear-cutting and related herbicide use has probably been a lot of it. I hope the Siuslaw tribe, which now has a lot more power than it used to, can do something about it. I saw that a kid I knew in school, the older brother of one of my regular classmates, is the tribal vice-chair.
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Date: 2023-06-22 01:48 pm (UTC)