la rutina diaria: Otras cosas que osos

Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. –Chief Seattle of the Suquamish and Duwamish

And when you stand in the Blackfoot during a rising of fish and falling of joy like this, I don’t care how urban you are, you feel it: immersed in the muscles of the wild river’s flow, you feel in your 78-percent liquid body and steadfast heart how even you, even now, are part of the same wildness and flow. –David James Duncan

Suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. –Norman Maclean

Last Saturday was pretty salmon-heavy. It was a damp day that kept temperatures cool and invited a few bears out of the woods that had been hunkered down waiting for weather more typical to Southeast Alaska to return. I was at work, watching wildness do its thing. Coastal brown bears patrolled up and down the creek searching for wild runs of spawning chum salmon. Discarded fish heads and skeletons were immediately snatched up by one or more of the eight bald eagles waiting in hungry anticipation of a free lunch. A solitary mink and a few dozen gulls snuck onto the scene to collect any scraps that slipped from the eagle-grip. As we motored back to camp in our little Boston Whaler after work, we saw a pod of orca surfacing and breaching more than a mile away. They eventually made their way nearer to us, pausing to breach, breathe, and feed at the mouth of our creek, and continued through the saltwaters that separate the creek and our camp. We’d made it back to the island and found ourselves standing on the rock outcropping watching this pod of six to eight orca pass within 75 yards of us. In Alaska, there are two types of orca: resident orca that feed primarily on salmonids, and transient orca that feed primarily on marine mammals. After observing this pod’s behavior for half an hour or more, we determined that they were exploiting the congregating salmon near the creek’s outflow. Yet the local harbor seals couldn’t tell the difference between resident and transient, consequently sending several of them into the shallow waters near our camp to seek safety from the orca. Since the water below us was clear, we could follow a few seals and watch them feed on schools of young salmon. Later that afternoon we pulled in our crab pot, which had been baited with salmon remnants and salmon skin from previous dinners at camp. And for dinner that night, we ate the crab we had caught with salmon remains alongside a few wild sockeye filets.
Salmon were the tasty keystone that made the day so interesting and interconnected. In that one day alone, I physically observed the following animals feeding on fresh, spawning, or decaying salmon:

Brown bears
Bald eagles
One mink
Orca
Harbor seals
Dungeness crab
Ourselves

David James Duncan would be pleased.

Joe Flannery might introduce this tall drink to you simply as: GBH