(babbling brook)
-Hello! See any salmon?
-There's a ton. -Oh, cool!
-We do get some first time
visitors that come here just because they're like,
I want to go to a Seattle park,
and then they stumble upon that there are salmon running.
(child cheering)
It's typically the hearing.
They hear a lot of splashing
and they're like,
"What's going on?" And then they're just like in awe.
There's a lot of like: "Ahh, this is so cool."
Or like cheering when they
get up the little waterfalls, they're like, "Gooooo!"
Hi everyone, my name is Julia
Glassy and I am a volunteer at Salmon Steward.
I just can never get enough of them.
I'm always like, yay, they're back. And so excited.
And I have to like share with family and friends.
I mean, think about how hard it is to swim against
a current
and make their way back from the Pacific Ocean
all the way to their home stream.
That's got to be some hard work.
♪♪
(train rumbling over tracks)
We are here at
Carkeek Park where we're watching
the salmon return from the Puget Sound,
which is behind me.
They're entering back into their spawning time,
which is going through these culverts
underneath the train tracks.
Once they enter this fresh water,
their body stops doing a lot of different things,
including eating.
They don't replenish their scales.
Their main focus is strictly finding a mate.
♪♪
In the late '70s,
the environmental movement kind of got started.
And so that is when some community members
formed the Carkeek Watershed Community
Action Project.
♪♪
Here,
we have one of our egg tanks, our self-releasing egg tanks.
And so this is where
those eggs are that we do get from the Suquamish Tribe.
They actually get to self-release
because they're swimming in that water
and then they get into Venema Creek.
My hope is that,
in fact, if we did stop in putting chum salmon,
that there might be
a little bit of a natural run that does occur.
It really depends on who you ask.
Really, a lot of it is that this is a huge
education piece to community members.
There is such a story that salmon
can tell and such
an environmental awareness that they can show us.
And so doing this over and over, yeah,
it is a lot of work,
but there is such an awe that people get from it.
They can come and visit and then they can take steps
in their lives to really help.
Down at the creek today,
we might be seeing some
spawning pairs, which is usually when a male
and female are next to each other
and they're doing kind of a swimming dance.
The female has a horizontal stripe.
The male will have kind of
dashes along, up and down from like the top.
Yeah. On its side.
The female,
she flips on her side and then splashes quite a bit
with her tail
to create like a little dip
in that gravel, which is then when she deposits her eggs.
We might also be seeing two males fighting each other.
This is very normal for this time of year.
They are maybe fighting for space
or for a female that they are trying to spawn with.
Earlier this
fall in October, there is a coho salmon run
that does happen every year and it is in the Cedar River
system which does come out of Lake Washington.
And that is a natural run.
The chum salmon run here at Piper's Creek
in Carkeek Park is really special to me
because that
yes human influences area, but they also are taking steps
to also be the helpers to the system
and to take actions to help that as well.
♪♪