I left Victoria on May 13th in an old skool VW campervan, which I rented at Base Camp Adventure Rentals in Victoria. After a quick tour of the ’85 Westfalia Vanagon I was on my way to the ferry, heading for Vancouver on the mainland! Right now I’m staying at Peace Arch RV Park in Surrey, one of Vancouver’s many suburbs. Wi-Fi isn’t great at the campsite, so it will be a while to get the next video uploaded. Probably that will have to wait until I get back home. I’ll put some images up for now instead.
Yesterday morning, at 7:00 am sharp, I met Dave Scott & Misty MacDuffee at Ladner Harbour. They work for the Raincoast Conservation Foundation. During the summer months, they go out onto the Fraser River estuary every other week. There’s always a couple of volunteers there. They’re mostly students, but this week I am a volunteer too! We quickly left the harbour in two small speedboats filled with fishing gear, off to find salmon. The idea is to find out where the young chinook species of salmon came from, as we catch them at different sites throughout the estuary (copying the locations from a study in the ’70s) and take fin clips for DNA analysis to figure out which salmon population they originated from. Catching the fish is done in two different ways: by setting a fyke net and by hand dragging a beach net. Fish are then sorted by species and counted. Chinook salmon are measured for size, and from a number of them a fin clip is taken for analysis. Then they are set free again. On a normal day we set the fyke net at one location at high tide, do the beach net fishing at two other sites (three runs per site) and come back to the fyke net at low tide to check what’s in there. It’s a little hard sometimes because of the muddy riverbanks and marshes of the estuary. You sink into the mud quite deep most of the time! I’m having a great time helping out with this research. It’s really cool to do this kind of work in a place like this. Early in the morning, when we leave the harbour in the boats and all is still quiet, it’s absolutely beautiful out here. You can see the Vancouver downtown area on the horizon, and behind it the mountains. Looking over to the other side you see the Strait of Georgia – the waterway between Vancouver Island and the mainland coast, with the Gulf Islands and the mountains of Vancouver Island on the horizon. Bald eagles soar overhead in the sky above as a seal swims by, curious about what we’re doing there. Over the marshes it’s a feast for barn swallows and violet-green swallows, and we also see red-winged blackbirds shooting by. Today in the early morning hours we even saw a huge flock of snow geese. Well, you’ve probably guessed it – I consider this trip a success!
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In May 2017, I will spend some time in Victoria & Vancouver, British Columbia, as part of a 'Teacher's Internship'. You can follow my adventures in this blog. Archives
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