For those of you who've never had the chance to see salmon returning upstream to spawn, thought you might find this video clip interesting. This is at a weir we pass on the way to our house, and the other day Andrew even got to help net the fish to pass through the counter up the river!
(FYI: A weir is a fence of sorts, built in the waterway so that the fish are diverted into a holding area that is actually a lift/elevator enclosure that the fish swim into. When it's full of fish, the biologist raises it up to within the building built right on the bank. Then they net the fish out of the elevator to release through a chute in the wall that empties them out to the area upstream where they would have ended up on their own anyway, counting how many each of gender. That way, the biologists can keep track of how healthy the populations are, and monitor fishing regulations that way. While we were there the other afternoon, there had been over 200 females and over 300 males...or maybe vice versa...that had passed through that day).
PS: The "whoo" sound in the background of the video is Jacob!
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