A couple of years ago, my sister Sue and I went to Carkeek Park to watch the salmon struggle up the creek to their spawning grounds.
This year, Sue’s main interest in visiting the same spot was to see what the beavers were up to. She’d read about them moving from another location. And, sure enough, they’d built a couple of dams across the creek. Not huge, impressive constructions but adequate. Pipers Creek is small.
Standing Creekside, we started talking with a man sporting a badge on a chain. I think he was either a Carkeek Park Salmon Steward or a Salmon Survey Volunteer. Carkeek Park has lots of volunteers. Everyone in this part of the country loves salmon.
Sue and I didn’t see any beavers, but the volunteer told us a male and female, a yearling and two kits recently had taken up residence.
As we talked, the poor salmon kept leaping and crashing into the dam and turning back for a little rest. Why, we asked, couldn’t someone break a hole in the dam?
Sometimes, he said, the salmon are able to break through. If not, he would count the number of dead salmon and report it to someone who could make that decision. Department of Fish and Wildlife?
The following day my daughter and son-in-law visited the same spot. The whole thing upset her. Those poor beautiful salmon, fighting so hard against what looked like insurmountable odds! And she didn’t like the idea of parents bringing their kids to watch this sad phenomenon.
My sister, on the other hand, wished she could have brought her young grandkids to watch. Such a great educational experience!
Nature is glorious and beautiful. We love to sit out under a tree or walk in the forest.
But nature is also a fight for survival—wild and dangerous.
P.S. Click here to review our 2021 visit to Pipers Creek.
P.P.S. Sue lives near the Ballard Locks. She’s used to seeing salmon struggle to get up the fish ladder—if, that is, they’re able to avoid the seals and sea lions at the entrance, just waiting to gobble them up.
Not so sure about “life lessons for kids” – plenty of time for them to find out how mean life is and about the cruelty of Mother Nature (how come “she” is female?) Fascinating about the beavers
I guess Mother Nature is female because nature keeps giving birth, over and over. Like human women, Mother Nature also has miscarriages.
Re. words, naming, sayings, I understand why we talk about someone being “busy as a beaver.”
That is some leaf your sister Sue is holding!
Nature nurtures . . . but can also be cut-throat. At least the dead salmon had good lives in the wild and would have died a few days after spawning in any event.
Big leaf maple trees have amazing leaves.
Considering how many eggs a salmon lays, you’d think they’d have no trouble reproducing. But these days they have so many obstacles. I’m guessing beavers are the least of their worries.
What an extraordinary experience. Yes, one with complex emotions, but also where nature is seen as its genuine self – both beautiful and desperately sad.
My daughter & her husband were vegetarian for quite a while, and my granddaughter stated that she was now vegetarian on my last visit. How true that is I don’t know – but I can imagine that she’d have been upset by viewing those salmon. A tricky decision to make whether or not to include young children – it is the real world and real life, but…
I guess it depends on the child. My husband was a great believer in exposing children to the “real” world. I suppose he figured that since he lived through the Japanese invasion and occupation of his hometown and came out all right, it would work for them. But you never know what will freak a kid out. My nephew had a few years of nightmares after his dad took him to a scary movie.
My granddaughter is somewhere between vegetarian and flexitarian primarily for environmental reasons. For the same reason, she and her husband have declined to buy a car.
I’m afraid I feel for the salmon – guess I’ve seen too many unrealistic nature shows over the years!
I’m also sympathetic to the salmon. They have sooo many obstacles, many of them caused by man not beaver. I remember the nature show about the overall benefit of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone. Here’s a brief explanation of the benefits of beavers from King County: “Beavers are ecosystem engineers because they create, modify, and maintain habitat and ecosystems. They consequently have a large impact on the biodiversity of an area. They bring wood into the water, and that wood provides food and shelter for insects.” There’s a lot more, though, in that and other articles.
We’ve been visiting Carkeek every few days to observe the salmon vs beaver situation. One steward told us that the past beaver residents were inexperienced dam builders and their dams kept getting washed away with every post-rain high creek situation. This year, he says, these new beavers are talented engineers, building wide, tall, impassable dams, and if part gets washed away, it’s rebuilt overnight. We’re trying to locate the hatchery upstream somewhere where the chum were grown.
The hatchery isn’t very far upstream. If the salmon could just get past the dams, they should be alright.
The quote, “Nature is red in tooth and claw” has always stuck with me. We often see such a sanitized version of nature. And it’s in our nature to anthropomorphize and want to save struggling creatures, even though that means a different creature might starve.
I wish I remembered bits of poems, Autumn. Your comment sent me back to Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” which I vaguely remember reading in high school. Wow! That’s a poem full of all kinds of things to ponder.
Fascinating information bringing home the reality of the struggle
I didn’t think too much about it until I wrote this post. Replying to comments sent me googling articles about beavers. This article from One Earth is fascinating.
I like how you see these things, animals and leaves, in real life. Not on some nature TV show. The gnawed tree trunk is fascinating as are the cute sea lions.
The “cute” sea lions were posing and barking. They’re really loud. And voracious. Here’s a quote about the most famous sea lion at the locks: “A newspaper account from 1985 says Herschel could kill 13 fish in an hour and 20 minutes—that’s about a fish every six minutes. When he was full, Herschel would rip the eggs out of the females, leaving the rest to float away.” The quote is taken from this fun article in Hokai Magazine.
Nicki, it’s lovely to see an actual beaver, rather than the nutria I saw at the Houston Botanic Garden! 😊😊 And how cool to see the sea lions, especially knowing some salmon avoided them.
That’s the rub, L. Marie. If only the salmon could avoid the sea lions. The sea lions ate so many salmon that wildlife managers tried firing off large fireworks to scare them away. They set up an underwater sound system and blasted them with high pitched sounds. They built a fiberglass killer whale. And they captured some and took them back to CA. (They’re California sea lions.) Nothing really worked. Finally, after years of coming and eating, they’d eaten enough fish that they weren’t as attracted to that particular fish run any more.