Nobody wants to be slaving over a hot computer in the summertime, me included, so yes, I have been slacking off but now it is time to catch up. It has also been very busy as we set up our traps to make sure we removed all the fish and other critters big enough to catch before we brought the excavator in to place all the ‘sticks and stones’ it was felt would be necessary to provide better habitat for the salmon, trout and lamprey. We pulled out around 500 coho and trout before the work started which was a bit of a surprise. The lamprey were more difficult to catch as they aren’t swimming around freely to get caught in nets so once the work started we dried up one channel of the creek which made the amnocoetes surface as their mud dried up and we removed a couple dozen of the slippery little characters. It is amazing how agile the little devils are when they can’t even see since their eyes haven’t developed yet. We also took out some crayfish and some clams, which surprised me as I had never seen these critters in this section of the creek.
