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By Matt Jenkins
Carol Ann Woody is hip deep in an Alaska stream, and beeping. She and biologist Daniel Chythlook, a Native Yup’ik, work their way up a tangle of creeks so small that the two of them can barely fit in the water together. For the better part of a week, Woody’s team of six biologists has been helicoptering in and out of the headwaters of the Nushagak and Kvichak (kwee-jack) rivers in search of juvenile salmon.
As Woody thrashes through a thicket of willows, the strobe light on a boxy contraption strapped to her back flashes red, and the unit beeps like a backhoe moving in reverse. The device is an electroshocker, which mildly stuns fish so that Chythlook, following close behind with a net at the ready, can scoop them up for measurement.
Woody nudges the shocker’s business end — an elongated wand that looks like a clunky World War II land-mine detector — under an overhang on the stream’s edge. Then she cackles like the Wicked Witch of the West: “Come out, come out, wherever you are.”
Suddenly she begins yelling like a maniac.
“Oh! Yes! Coho!!”
“Daniel!”
Chythlook deftly stabs his net into the water — “Get it, get it, get it! Get it! There! There! Yes!” — and catches a tiny, two-and-a-half-inch-long coho salmon.
“We got a ho-ho!” Woody sings triumphantly.
A few minutes later, another scientist pays out a water-sampling meter into the stream, while Woody measures and weighs the fish. “Look how fat it is,” she says. “It’s a porker!”
Chythlook jots down the length and weight of the fish on his clipboard.
The stream survey is part of an effort by The Nature Conservancy to document salmon’s presence in the remote headwaters of Bristol Bay, as each stream found to support salmon must be afforded protections under state law. Alaska plays a singularly important role in the future of salmon. The state has some of the last pristine habitat for a number of salmon species — coho, sockeye, chum, pink and chinook — not just in North America but in the world. And the watershed here, which feeds Bristol Bay, is a legendary stronghold for sockeye salmon; in fact, it is home to the largest salmon runs on Earth.
At 40,000 square miles, the Bristol Bay watershed is bigger than South Korea and about the same size as Ohio. It is a world out of a dream, a land of caribou, moose and wolves. Time here unfolds under a constantly shifting interplay of light and cloud over the tundra and the rugged mountains that ring the watershed on three sides. But above all, the place feels liquid and sinuous. The water here — from the braided, shimmering necklaces of streams that cut through the landscape to the wide, muddy expanses where the rivers ultimately empty into Bristol Bay — runs free.
In the Lower 48’s salmon country of California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington, streams and rivers have been choked and sullied by dam building, mining, farming and urbanization, each of which has taken big bites out of salmon habitat. “Here,” Woody says, “these ecosystems are still complete and whole. And we’ve got the greatest clean water source that anybody could hope for.”
But even as she says this, her words are drowned out by a floatplane motoring overhead. The aircraft is loaded with fuel for a fleet of helicopters operating nearby, and its arrival is a reminder that her team isn’t the only one assaying the hidden worth of this corner of the world.
Just a quarter mile away, eight teams of drillers are working around the clock to gauge the moneymaking potential of an enormous mineral deposit that could soon become the site of the world’s biggest copper mine. Woody’s band of scientists is racing to take the first measure of whether the construction of a mine would unravel the tightly woven ecological tapestry that sustains the 7,000-year-old subsistence lifestyles of Native villagers — and the future of Bristol Bay.
Nature picture credits: Photos © Bridget Besaw
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