Sweet Home Junior High students got a first-hand look at salmon spawning in the South Santiam River in a Salmon Watch field trip last week.
With the assistance of scientists and volunteers from Oregon State University, the U.S. Forest Service Sweet Home Ranger District and Hewlett-Packard, they also took water quality samples for testing and gathered data on the riparian zone and aquatic insects.
“Our objective was to watch salmon spawn,” science teacher Alice Eldredge said. “Students learned about factors that influence salmon survival.”
The salmon they watched included both wild and hatchery fish, Eldredge said. “Todd (Buchholz, Forest Service fish biologist) took us down a little bit west of Wiley Creek. There were females creating ‘reds,’ creating nests and males just churning around out there.”
The students had to don special polarized sunglasses to see the fish just beneath the surface in the gravel bar, although “their dorsal fins were sticking out of the water,” Eldredge said. “That was probably the coolest part was being able to see how thick the salmon were out there.”
Mixed in among the salmon were also steelhead.
In addition to their activities on the lake, the 16 junior high students on the trip also got a chance to tour the South Santiam Fish Hatchery, where hatchery workers and volunteers recently have been spawning hatchery salmon, harvesting eggs and sperm from the fish.
Their water quality testing showed that the water looked pretty good, Eldredge said.
Eldredge’s eighth graders studied fish last year, she said. The field trip gave them a “chance to see the reality of what they learned in the classroom … a chance to see that sciences is all around us. The kids that chose to come on the trip this year were so well-behaved. They were so interested. A lot of kids were saying, ‘I’m coming back here after school,’ or ‘I’m going to bring my parents out here this weekend.’ If there were more things like this, we’d take advantage of them.”
Eldredge did the same field trip last year. She noted that there was a lot less trash on the banks of the river this year than last.
Volunteers assisting with the field trip were Buchholz, Angie Schwab of OSU, Dee Brausch of Hewlett-Packard and Paula Miner of OSU.