“After 1991 we eliminated the fish weir, because they tend to delay the run,” said Mark Hampton of the Department of Fish and Game. “If we could eliminate the weir we wouldn’t have to handle the fish, and, if we don’t have to handle them’ there’s less chance of disease or interrupting that migration.”

How do you tell how many fish are in the river? You get in there and count. This basic idea has been put into practice throughout the Klamath Basin. Two main tributaries, the Salmon and Scott Rivers, are cooperative survey streams where the community gets involved in keeping track of “their” salmon.

On the Salmon River there are three counts every year. Winter counts keep track of the nests dug by salmon that spawned in the fall. Spring/Summer counts are the most popular, bringing many volunteers (most of them local residents) out to strap on snorkels and drift downriver while counting all the Steelhead and Chinook they see. Fall count is a little more complicated due to the rising water level, falling temperatures, and the fact that many of the subjects are dead.

Chinook salmon spawn once in the streams where they were born. They travel hundreds of miles fighting the current, predators, deadly high water temperatures, and each other before finally dropping eggs and milt into carefully constructed underwater rock nests called redds. After all that, their deaths are sort of anticlimactic. They hang around the redds listlessly defending them until they give into exhaustion and die. Their bodies wash up on the shores to breed countless insects, completing a cycle that guarantees food for the next generation.  

Fall count consists of walking the shores of the river, finding the spawned-out bodies of these heroes, and following one of four “paths”. In Path 1 the fish’s vital statistics are written down, and a small metal tag is put on the fish’s jaw. The body is then thrown back into the river to wash up somewhere else. Path 2 fish have been dead too long to tag. Their decomposing bodies are chopped in half (to prevent recounting) and thrown into the river after recording their information. Path 3 consists of finding a tagged fish, recording the number of the tag and removing it before chopping the carcass and leaving it for the bears. Path 4 is known among counters as the “path of shame”: a carcass is seen, but can not be reached by the crew.

This complicated and slightly gruesome ritual is done for a reason. Many of the salmon that spawn are not counted – they die in inaccessible places, get eaten, or for some other reason escape the counters’ hooked poles. All the tagging and recapturing of decaying salmon is an attempt to estimate the population’s total size. By the ratio of tags recovered to unmarked salmon found, the number of spawners can be guessed. The numbers recorded by the counters are fed into an equation resulting in the Peterson Mark and Recapture Estimate. This number is used to set next year’s allocations of salmon for commercial fishermen, sport fishermen, and the Tribes.
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