A TEMPORARY REFUGE
Natural History of a
Wild Summer Steelhead Refuge Pool
in the Western Cascades of Oregon
by
Lee Spencer
© Lee Spencer
and
The North Umpqua Foundation
All rights reserved
SEPTEMBER
EARLY SEPTEMBER
We are often early risers, Sis and I, though perhaps it is to be expected that Sis gets up when I do . . . or at least lays watching me from her bed under the table. Believe me though, I am not religiously an early riser. During the first season on the pool, I would occasionally get up in the darkness just to sit at the Perch and watch the fish with the first ambient shadowless light of dawn that seems to correspond with a lightening of the sky more than the actual creep of the sun over any horizon visible to me. As I did this, I began to see that I carried an assumption down to the pool with the flashlight and a carefully, but usually not totally successfully balanced cup of coffee. The assumption was that the steelhead in the pool didn’t sleep.
When I finally confronted this assumption, it tumbled about like a pine cone rolling down a steep slope and then evaporated. As I wrote earlier in this book, steelhead do not have lids to their eyes. Thus whenever you can get a good look at them, their eyes are open.
I have a cousin, Larry Muir, who teaches in Seattle. He told me that a fish biologist once visited his class and was promptly stymied by a question from a student as to whether fish ever slept. When Larry and I discussed eyelids and sleep, we realized that eyelids were a terrestrial adaptation that keep the eyes from drying out and our assumption about eyes-closed sleeping was therefore the bias of a land animal. The next question was whether sleep was a general vertebrate behavior practiced before the first fish moved out onto a bank with a slow finny wobbling or a dramatic jump.
Having by the time of this writing spent many very-early mornings with the summer steelhead in the pool, my assumption now is that fish did sleep prior to this pivotal event and that fish do sleep now, though I have read no studies where this was determined to be the case. Pre-dawns and dawns with the fish tend to support this assumption; however, I realize that a person’s assumptions have a way of being supported by that person’s observations, particularly those assumptions that are relatively difficult prove or to see the data for.
Sitting at the Perch and watching the light come into the space around me so that I could see the steelhead, I noticed that the pod was stationary without the regular pod stirrings and the individual cyclings common during most of the day. On some mornings the fish were active, but when this was the case, I often saw a beaver in the pool or an otter or the wet rocks or the other things that are the sign of an otter’s recent presence.
Gradually, like the day’s light coming to the pool, I came to see that the steelhead remained quiet until the light had built to a certain point and this wasn’t until generally more than an hour after the time that I was first able to see them. Now, I have come to conclude that the first actions I generally see are potentially the equivalent of our yawns and I find it amusing that I watched the steelhead gaping their mouths during these early morning observations for much of a season before I was actually able to see these actions.
These gapes are a single, wide, opening of the jaws that lasts sometimes for a second or three. These gapes are not associated with the sometimes obvious gill flarings and head shakes that accompany pronounced mouth openings at other times. The steelhead are stationary while they carry out these yawnings. A gape may be followed by up to several champings of the jaws which do not open the mouth nearly as wide and they are more quickly accomplished.
When gapings start to happen, they occur in clusters and sporadically. This may be because the gapes are infectious. When a fish gapes, sometimes several fish behind and beside that fish will gape too. Sometimes, I watched carefully enough to see that a fish that gaped once, will occasionally gape again.
Morning gaping seems to occur for several hours and then this behavior pretty much stops. Gaping at midday is rare, but this behavior begins again in the late afternoon and evening. Dusk gaping is common once more, but this action appears to be somewhat less frequent than what occurs in the morning. Once during that first season, while wondering about the nature of the gaping I was seeing, I found that by carefully watching a fish gape through the binoculars, I yawned. Undoubtedly, this is my mind playing games with me.
I do see fish every season that appear to be sleeping during the day too. These steelhead may be recent arrivals and exhausted for, when one sees these fish in the pool, it is always new to the notes. Sleeping? fish are usually positioned in the very slow upcreek-heading currents of one of the pool’s two main eddies and they hold stationary with their heads somewhat lower than their tails, an unusual body angle that is otherwise not seen in the pool. Further, these steelhead do not spook when certain things come near to them, including myself, though I have only walked down for a better look at a stationary head-down/tail-up steelhead that had positioned itself near the left ledge once or twice.
These fish that are holding motionless in the upstream drift of an eddy—and facing downcreek while they do so—will eventually stir when this current eases them into the turbulence the signals the close approach to the main current that flows straightforwardly down through the pool. They then appear to rouse and to swim slowly back to a place near where they first settled. In the left eddy that primarily cycles and recycles the flow of the cooler tributary creek, these drifts by sleeping? steelhead last from ten to twenty minutes and sometimes, with the repositionings, continue all day long for a day or for two or three days. Most of these sleeping? fish occupy the left eddy, but they also use a boulder hollow at the center of the Sweet Spot in the lower pool, or position themselves close the bank on the far side of the lower pool in the right eddy: all places where the water is effectively as stationary as it gets in the pool.
The pool is not a neutral-stimulus environment. The steelhead holding here engage in a suite of environmental and social interactions and a world of scents and sounds travel the currents of the pool too. Perhaps because of one of these stimuli, occasionally, these head-down and tail-up steelhead will rouse and join the pod for a while. Often these fish appear to eventually return to where they were previously holding. When this happens, the steelhead adopts a head-down position again. Now and then, a steelhead or two from the pod will swim over and around one of these stationary fish and appear to urge it back toward the pod.
I cannot say with certainty that this head-down and tail-up position represents a steelhead that is sleeping, but, for now, I think it does.
September seems to me to be a particularly fluid boundary between summer and winter, however, this may be the fundamental confusion of a person being transplanted to the Pacific Northwest whose formative ideas of seasons were shaped in Minnesota and Maine with their distinctively different climate and weather patterns. This month has always seemed to be the doorway through which winter approaches, but on the west coast with its Mediterranean climate, winter is a different entity than it is to the east of the Rockies.
Partly though, this fluidity certainly has to do with the way in which all generalizations about natural systems are fluid, there are few that can stand being looked at closely. If there is a singular aspect to September, it is that, unlike July or August, temperatures can drop fifty degrees or more and bring on winter-like conditions . . . short duration winter-like conditions.
At the simplest level, the earth revolves on its tilted axis while making its elliptical annual orbit around sun, a fusion furnace with a certain variability in its output and finite fuel. The nature of the earth is variable too. She is of a certain age as are the biotic and abiotic systems interacting on and in her mobile surface, in her atmosphere, in her oceans, or in her mantle and core. Because of a wide variety of factors, our seasons change, a cyclic variability which is based on the relative lengths of day and night, how far to the south or north the apparent path of the sun is across the sky, how cold or warm it gets, and the amount and the state of the precipitation. Overlaid on this are the often-dependant biologic responses to these changes that range among new growth, leaf fall, migrations, reproduction, hibernation and dormancy, and death.
Seasons change, a simple annual observational reality here well to the north of the equator. What we see as the recognizable changes of the annual cycle of seasons may be itself undergoing a process of change so gradual as to be visible only from the vantage of an awareness that encompasses the twenty to forty thousand year spans of the glacial cycles. For the last six to seven million years—the geologic eras known as the Pliocene and the Pleistocene—these glacial cycles (which we also are unable to explain) have regularly been creating ice masses that spanned continents, dropping the level of the sea by hundreds of feet, ice masses that have cooled while themselves being a possible result of the cooling earth.
Studies suggest that these glacial episodes have been quickening with the most recent of them spanning forty thousand years or so. This apparent quickening may well be an artifact of the observational difficulty inherent in seeing the signs of the more ancient glacial episodes. That is, the signs left behind by the older episodes are naturally obscured with the passage of time and more obscured by the succeeding erasures of the more recent glacial cycles. This means that the details of the newer glacial advances and retreats, which include the evidence of when a glaciation began and ended, are less wiped away and clearer than those that went before.
From the perspective of human history, a telling of variably symbolic tales spanning no more than six to eight thousand years at the very longest, even the most recent of these glacial episodes is largely invisible. From the perspective of our piecemeal environmental record keeping of the last few hundred years, we haven’t yet even developed baseline data that will let us know what the differences between natural and unnatural variations in the various biosphere-wide or even the continental systems of our mother planet are. In most cases, this inadequacy of our record keeping and knowledge is true on even regional and watershed levels.
An individual human consciousness spans less than a century, yet built into our awareness seems to be the assumption that we know what reality is and what time offers us. At the most mundane of levels, this causes us to do things. With reference to the Pacific salmon, if the last fifty years have shown us anything, hasn’t it been that to do things to fix problems that we don’t really comprehend is dangerous, if not directly lethal, to these natural interdependent systems we are trying to fix.
I wonder if, at some fundamental level, we are aware that the world we encounter in our daily lives is dynamic seemingly beyond our ability to statically deal with. It may be for this reason that we cleave to our systems of thought that may serve just this purpose, that of convincing us that we have something changeless and secure to hang on to.
In this mundane book, all of this is another roundabout way of saying that when we get to early September on the pool, we have come to a comparatively volatile time and whatever regularities are presented here are really especially dependant on patterned environmental changes that are producing generally slightly increased amounts of precipitation and a slight cooling. That said, it seems as though nighttime temperatures are dropping into the fifties and forties and the days are blue skied and hot. By the end of the period, late afternoon temperatures of the main creek may have dropped fifteen or even twenty degrees from the seasonal highs probably recorded in late July. If the main creek temperatures continue to reach into the proximity of 75º, it will be during the first part of September that this will happen and it will be for the final time. Further, the sun is now far enough south in the sky that the shadow of the left-bank riparian vegetation that is fifteen to forty feet tall—not just those of the large trees between the path of the sun and the creek—is on the pool until noon. Things are cooling off.
When there have been spring chinook present in the pool, it has been during September that the males have gotten unambiguously aggressive and the females have dug their redds. When males and females have found each other, spawning has occurred. This is somewhat earlier than they do so in the North Umpqua River itself, or the peak numbers of them do so at any rate. As I have said above somewhere, for some reason—a potentially adaptive reason—the first spring chinook in the pool have so far invariably been male. By the time the first part of September rolls around, these male spring chinook intensify their dominance interactions with both male and female steelhead. It often seems as though the male spring chinook pay more aggressive attention to the male steelhead, but I think that this may be an artifact of the males being generally the more obviously aggressive gender in Pacific salmon. By this time, the male summer steelhead in the pool are now and then engaging in dominance actions of their own.
While occasionally there are high energy encounters between the spring chinook and the steelhead, when this happens it usually seems to be a matter of having a particularly aggressive steelhead that initiates these dominance displays. Generally speaking, steelhead appear to be easily cowed or influenced by the spring chinook and little emphasis by the chinook is necessary.
Most of these dominance interactions occur at the front of the pod for the position of lead fish, that is, the fish that holds furthest forward yet in association with the pod. The interactions consist mostly of jockeying, that is, two fish moving very slowly up the pool side-by-side until one gives up and swims down into the pod or allows the other fish to move ahead without attempting to keep up. After the decision by a male steelhead to hold as lead fish, jockeying is the lowest level of dominance interaction and is the commonest with either the steelhead or the spring chinook in the pool. At times this dominance action is so subtle that a pair of fish need to be watched for several minutes to be sure it either is or isn’t happening.
If the spring chinook appears to feel the need to increase the level of aggression during a dominance encounter with a steelhead or another spring chinook, that chinook opens its mouth enough to show the contrast between its black gums with its otherwise white mouth. The inside of a steelhead's mouth is cottony white throughout and steelhead also at times seem to ratchet up the intensity of a dominance encounter by opening their mouths, though this is practiced more with other steelhead. The affect on the other fish is usually pronounced when either species of Pacific salmon opens its mouth during an encounter.
To a degree it seems as though the wider the mouth is opened, the more intimidating the display becomes. I am unsure of this observation however.
The first full-size spring chinook to arrive and to take up residence in the pool appears to be the dominant fish based on the few seasons of observation Sis and I have carried out at the pool with a very small number of spring chinook (many of which have been artificial fish). This first full-size fish has so far been the largest male so it is difficult to say whether size or whether being first in the pool means more to the chinook. On the other hand, size seems to be of secondary importance to success in those dominance encounters between steelhead in the pool.
With both the spring chinook and the steelhead, the fundamental premise of all dominance encounters over the last six seasons seems to be the acquisition of the lead fish position and the maintenance of this position . . . while these fish are holding in the refuge pool. In the case of the male spring chinook, being the dominant pool chinook appeared to translate to being the obviously preferred partner in the one and only chinook mating that has taken place on the spawning gravels just below the pool during the second season.
This September increase in what are generally low-level dominance encounters is of more interest to the spring chinook than to the steelhead. The spawning time of the spring chinook is upon them, that of the steelhead remains yet four to six months in the future.
Generally, the interactions between these two Pacific salmon species can be characterized as a matter of the chinook controlling how the steelhead position themselves in the pool. This control is apparently exercised primarily by changes in the intensity and the area of the cycling behavior on the part of the chinook. Before their spawning time in September, the spring chinook that used the pool held with the steelhead and did what the steelhead did. Occasionally, the chinook would cycle around and through the pod but little effort appeared to be expended in corralling the steelhead. That is, whether there were individual steelhead inside or outside the area encompassed by the chinook cycling seemed to be a matter of indifference to the spring chinook. Sometimes a chinook would show a tendency to hide in the shadows created by various overhangs in the pool, particularly during midday.
With the arrival of their spawning time in September, a more regular cycling begins by the spring chinook that, among other things, seems to involve some level of control over the coherence of the steelhead pod. If an outlier steelhead is observed, the spring chinook will usually swim over to and outside that outlier. Not all the time, but generally, the steelhead in question will swim closer to the pod, if not into the pod.
It does not appear to matter where in the pool the steelhead pod is, just that they are well corralled . . . and in the pool somewhere. Spring chinook, however, do appear to be interested in keeping the steelhead out of the riffle above the pool and out of the channels below.
Even discounting the greater frequency of dominance encounters at the front of the pod, the spring chinook in the pool remain otherwise more active than the average steelhead. The spring chinook may, as well, absent themselves from the pool for variable lengths of time.
One of the more amazing signs that their spawning time is upon the spring chinook is a sudden and dramatic change in skin color to a rich and undifferentiated yellow gold. The change appears to happen over the course of a day or two and seems to progress forward from the rear of the fish. I have watched this change occur during three seasons and it has happened between the 27th of August and the 18th of September. On some of these seasons, there have also been spring chinook that were this undifferentiated gold color when they first arrived in the pool around this time. I assume that these spring chinook had already undergone this color change prior to entering the pool.
Not all spring chinook appear to exhibit this color change since some of these fish seem to remain the generally dark color that appears when their marine colors fade. It is hard for me to say more since I see only a few spring chinook in the pool in any season.
While this color change of the chinook may well have to do with sexual selection, this change to gold appears to be better camouflage too. During the balance of the time spring chinook are in the North Umpqua Basin, they hold in groups in deeper holes. When spawning time comes around, the spring chinook leave the deep holes and hold in the relatively quite shallow waters where reproduction occurs. This gold color blends them well with the brownish algae coating of the substrate in the river and this coating is present in the main creek too.
While the presence of spring chinook appears to have a damping affect on the steelhead pod, the individual steelhead appear to be more active in this first part of September than they were previously. This increase in activity is not the flicking of a switch, however. Sis and I gradually become aware of it in late August and it may have been present incrementally before that. It is quite likely that part of this increase may be an artifact of the summer steelhead being particularly inactive during the times of lethal and near-lethal stream temperatures of July and August.
Now that late summer has come, the steelhead are also holding higher in the water column and there appears to be an increase in milling. The steelhead are approaching items in the flow more often and there appears to be an increase in pseudo redd-making flaps too. Dominance behaviors are also more frequent, but still uncommon. These steelhead dominance activities at this time, however, can probably be ascribed in large part to sexual readiness of the spring chinook. As stated previously, based on what I see, sexual selection behaviors and pheromones appear to be quite similar with both these species, the steelhead and the chinook.
An additional factor in the increased activity of the steelhead is that, with the cooling of the creek, the steelhead have once more moved down into the pool proper and out of the riffle. This certainly gives them more room to carry out the activities they may have a desire to carry out.
By early in September, steelhead are just beginning to hold with the tops of their dorsal fins and tails often visible above the surface, particularly as they turn and stir about within the pod. Prior to this time—when the steelhead were holding in the pool and not in the riffle—they seemed to choose to hold several feet below the surface. This meant that in water shallower than say five feet, most of the steelhead were apparently holding closer to the substrate. In water over ten feet deep, which characterizes about half the pool—mostly the upper end—most of the steelhead were holding closer to the surface.
It took me a while and surprised me to see that the balance of the steelhead seem to generally prefer to hold within five to six feet of the surface in the refuge pool. This surprise was due in large part to the traditions of steelhead angling I’d absorbed during the first years of my steelhead fishing which unequivocally stated that steelhead prefer to hold close to the bottom. As with most other areas of human endeavor, anglers—myself included—mostly see what they expect to see, that is, their minds are waving, not the flags or the wind. Perhaps, though, this tradition boils down to the fact that the water in which steelhead can actually be seen with any reliability from the bank is generally no more than a few feet deep.
Anyway, steelhead—and spring chinook—begin to hold much closer to the surface at this time of year and I am not sure why they make this decision. I do know that for a steelhead to hold so high in the flow that its fins bob above the surface when it turns or these fins and its body create a commotion on the surface when they move, their air bladders must be just about full.
The only other time when steelhead consistently hold this high in the water column is when they are occupying what is called a rain querencia in the notes. Commonly, when the creek is rising significantly, the steelhead will abandon the deeper waters for holds in the riffle above the pool or the head of the channel to the right of the central bar below the pool, these are the rain querencias. It is worth observing that this shift in the location of the pod also repositions the steelhead out of the path of the main currents and these fish hold very close to the surface in these areas.
Steelhead holding in the refuge pool have shown themselves to be quite interested in shifting around in the middle basin of the main creek when precipitation causes the creek to rise around five inches or more. During and just after such a rise, it is not unusual to have a hundred or more steelhead leave the pool in a twelve hour period and a hundred or more steelhead re-enter it during the next twenty-four hours.
If full air bladders and fins out of the water characterize the fish holding in the rain querencias, perhaps the common sight of fish holding very high in the water starting in September represents an involuntary response to an increased urge to seek out their specific spawning gravels which means leaving the pool, a pool that is simply a temporary refuge. This is, of course, a highly speculative interpretation.
One of the interesting things that Sis and I have seen in our time on the pool is that, while steelhead become generally more active for a variety of reasons—not the least of which is, again, probably, the cooling of the water temperatures—potentially it is the female summer steelhead that are carrying out far more of these actions. The more obvious of the dominance actions alone appear to be the primary province of the long-jawed steelhead. That said, often dominance actions by long-jawed steelhead appear to attract short-jawed steelhead over to them.
During August of the second season Sis and I were on the pool, I noticed that the steelhead were becoming more active and that most of this action seemed to be by short-jawed fish. Now because a specific short-jawed steelhead may be an unmetamorphosed male fish, calling an individual short-jawed steelhead a female is climbing out on a limb. Late August and September is a time when most of the North Umpqua summer steelhead populations left the ocean behind several months before and it can be stated that the balance of the steelhead in the pool that continue to have short jaws are probably female. To say a given short-jawed individual is a female is very different than saying most of the short jaws in the pool are female once September has rolled around.
During the second season, once I had noticed that many more actions seemed to be by short-jawed fish, I decided to test whether this was a subjective projection or real and, if real, how real. The water is low and clear at this time of year and by then I had had enough time on the pool to easily differentiate the short jaws from the long jaws without using my binoculars. As luck would have it, September was a cool month that season and most of the steelhead actions were played out across from my perch in the viewing area, a juxtaposition of observer and steelhead that was good for making jaw-length comparisons.
On the 8th, 9th, and 10th of September in 2000, I made a point of documenting the jaw length of the fish that had just jumped, risen, flashed, or accelerated up or down the pool . . . if I was able too. If the jaw length of the active fish was not capable of being determined, the action in question was not considered. During these three days, short-jawed steelhead carried out 90% of the 131 actions documented for which jaw length could be differentiated. Seven percent (7%) of the actions were performed by fish with ambiguous appearing jaws and 3% of the actions were carried out by steelhead that were clearly long-jawed fish. Based on a loose assessment at this time, there were about six times the number of short jaws in the pool than there were long-jawed steelhead. Even when taking this larger number of short-jawed steelhead into account, an action remained five times as likely to be carried out by a short-jawed as a long-jawed fish.
Unfortunately, I have not tried to document jaw-length frequencies among those fish which approach items in the flow. It is my impression that most of the time these actions are carried out by short-jawed fish too; however, that is what I would expect, so this impression is suspect.
An observation I made in another pool located about a mile and a half downcreek from the refuge pool, suggests however that female steelhead may be more interested in rising to food items than are the males . . . by the time winter has arrived anyway. On February 10th, 2001, there were three steelhead, a female and two males, holding in two or three feet of water over a finger of gravel between two substrate-level bedrock exposures. The female held with one of the males about eight feet ahead of the other male. Both males were fully long-jawed with visible kypes on the tips of their mandibles.
A hatch of gray one-centimeter-long mayflies was drifting over the fish and it was the female that rose to and cleanly took seven of these struggling mayflies in as many minutes. Sometimes she turned downcreek after a rise, but usually she simply drifted back down to her place. Her rises moved her about a body length forward as a rule. Neither of the male steelhead showed any interest in the mayflies of any kind. The water temperature was 39°.
It is also in September that regular approaches to items in the flow occur and also when multiple fish are often moving to the same object. A simple statistic shows this. During August of 1999 through 2007, my notes document that 100 items were approached by 166 steelhead. During September of the same seasons, 293 items were approached by 636 steelhead. This is an increase from 1.7 steelhead per item in August to 2.2 steelhead per item in September.
Approaches to an item by multiple steelhead are a common sight. These multiple approaches are often to the first of a variety of floating deciduous leaves with shapes and colors that are different from what I have been seeing heretofore in the pool. Multiple approaches may be more likely if the leaves are one of the many hues of red or orange like the dogwood and the vine maple leaves commonly are. For instance, I documented forty-three steelhead as they rose to fifteen red dogwood leaves during the fifth season on the pool.
Dead sticks with and without bits of lichen attached are also regularly approached by more than one steelhead. The all-time high number of steelhead approaches to an item so far documented by Sis and I moved to a slender three-inch-long dead stick. Thirty-four steelhead were counted when they came toward this stick as it drifted down through the pool and only the obvious approaches were counted. About twelve of the fish took the stick in their mouths and then they either appeared push it out with their tongues or to shake their heads to rid themselves of it.
The young-of-the-year steelhead that are in the pool now measure approximately two-and-a-half inches long.
The tall purple asters continue to bloom from the edges of the creek. The one to two-foot-long and drooping sedges are beginning to lose their greenness and the hazels and the rare copses of ash trees are also beginning to yellow. Airborne plant seeds, the items termed plant down in the notes, remain common as they are carried by breezes up or down the creek. Mature steelhead, steelhead fry, and cutthroat trout continue to be attracted to these seeds if they touch down and roll on the surface of the pool in proximity to them.
This is the real beginning of the coloring of the deciduous leaves and a dogwood or a vine maple here and there begins to show its characteristic hues. This coloring of leaves will achieve its peak a month from now during October. Among the most attractive of the colors, though by no means the only color the variable dogwood shows, is a particular deep rosy-crimson red. This color more closely matches the reds that are developed on the sides and the gill plates of the male steelhead than any other environmental source of these colors that I am aware of. In the case of the tree and the fish both, the substantial presence of these colors signal of the arrival of late summer and early fall to the Pacific Northwest.
The similarity in the colors of the metamorphosed steelhead and dogwood may account for red dogwood leaves being so regularly risen to in the pool. Pileated woodpeckers too become especially noisy, active, and visible starting at this time of year and these large woodpeckers, and also the robins, are paying particular attention to the ripe dogwood fruits.
My good friend, Carroll Kirk, who grew up in a small Coast Range valley outside Eugene, told me a story about his father and a pileated woodpecker that had happened before 1909 when he was born. Carroll’s father heard a thudding that one of these crow-size birds was making as it worked on a chest-high stump—Carroll’s hand went to about five feet off the ground. He slipped up on the bird which was so intent on what it was doing that it allowed him to grab it with both hands around the wings and body. Carroll chuckled then and made a diving motion with his thumb. The bird had craned around once to look at his father and then drove its bill deep into the thumb muscles of one of his hands.
Two other things that Carroll’s father was known for were being able to call geese down from the sky using only his vocal cords and playing the spoons.
The dark blue-black berries of the viburnum are ripe and chipmunks, to name one animal, are gathering them. As I have indicated elsewhere in this book, the local chipmunks strip the thin flesh from the berry, discarding it, before jamming amazing numbers of the seeds into their cheeks.
Another dark berry that is ripe on this middle portion of the main creek now is the salal berry, perhaps the most common berry in the Western Cascades though overlooked by many people who go out of their way to gather huckleberries. Compared with blue huckleberries, salal berries are mealy and not as sweet, but I like them and will spend time collecting them. Around this time of year, Sis and I come across bear scat that are made up completely of blue berries and nothing else, and many of the berries appear to have been swallowed whole. My notes indicate that I was unsure whether the berries were blue huckleberries or salal berries.
The blue elderberries are ripe now too and the local currents. Rose hips are reddening.
Juncos remain active about the pool and are flying and catching termites. Blue herons continue to be regular visitors though they are a shy or cautious bird and commonly visit at first and last light, a bowing to Sis and my presence I am reasonably sure. Often, during the first exit of the trailer in the morning, the steps creaking, I catch a glimpse of the large slate-blue wings in slow flight as the heron takes off up or down the creek, sometimes accompanied by the bird’s harsh gravelly croaks. If the weather is cool and rainy, winter wrens may return to the pool, though this is a bit early for them to regularly appear as yet.
This is a time of crawdad abundance and virtually every predator on the creek is harvesting them from herons and kingfishers and mergansers, to otters. Around six o’clock on two evenings in early September during our fourth season, I saw ravens that appeared to be specifically hunting crawdads, though, perhaps, they were on the lookout for salmon carcasses too. After hearing a raven’s loud and raucous calls from downcreek and looking for it with binoculars, I spotted one of these great black birds on top of a large mossy boulder well down the creek from the pool. It was pulling at something that it had pinned to the rock with its foot and I shortly saw that it was a crawdad, one of the larger orange ones. There were such rich purple highlights glinting from the back feathers of the raven that I mention this color in the notes.
After the raven finished the crawdad, it leaped from the boulder into the streamside brush and then back to the rock. The raven glided down to the creek then, almost immediately pulling another crawdad from the shallow rocky flat there and hopping boulder-to-boulder back up to the top of the same mossy boulder with the creature in its bill.
Again the raven held the crawdad pinned to the mossy surface and tore it into pieces which it swallowed. This is the only bird that I see that captures crawdads and tears them apart. Even a blue heron clamps the crustaceans repeatedly in its bill before swallowing them whole or whole minus whatever parts had fallen away in the clamping process.
Two minutes later, after finishing this second crawdad, the raven moved off downcreek leaping boulder to boulder, sometimes half spreading its wings during a longer hop.
The next night I saw the same thing again at about the same time of the early evening. A raven flew down the course of the creek, twenty to thirty feet in the air and obviously looking at the water as it went. This bird landed at the edge of the water well downcreek from the pool and immediately picked up a large red crawdad. The raven flew with this creature to a mossy boulder and pulled it apart, consuming it over a period of about two minutes. This bird too went on its way, hopping rock to rock, out of sight and heading downstream. Over the course of the next week, I regularly saw or heard a raven or two in the late afternoon or early evening flying downcreek. On one occasion, two ravens landed at the side of the creek well below the viewing area, but this time no crawdad was harvested.
Hummingbirds continue to examine leaves and bark around the pool obviously looking for small insects and arachnids. Mergansers are flying now, both the juveniles and adult birds.
Sharp-shin hawks are semi-regular visitors too. During the second and third seasons, a juvenile goshawk was also observed around this time at the pool.
During walks, Sis and I continue to find hornet nests scattered around by bears. Like the hummingbirds and the hornets themselves, the bears are more active and visible now that summer is ending. The bears anyway are looking in earnest for the food that will supply the fat to carry them through their time of hibernation.
Chipmunks, besides harvesting viburnum berries, are now also paying attention to the fruit of the dogwood.
The small brown bats are appearing around eight in the evening by the first of September and now the large autumn caddis are in the air too. Usually, I have had a day or two of seeing a rare and relatively fast, quite erratically flying insect about the area before I realize the large burnt-orange colored caddis flies are in the air once more.
Since both the autumn caddis and the bat are dusk fliers, I spent a season or two expecting to see an encounter between them. Finally, I realized that in virtually every case, the caddis were gone from the air over the pool by the time the bats began their pirouettes close over the water. Sometimes the two creatures missed each other by less than a minute.
The absence of the big caddis and the small bat from the air at the same time was so consistent that I convinced myself there was an adaptive reason for it, either the bats were death on the autumn caddis or the autumn caddis were death on the bats. When I eventually saw autumn caddis and bats at the same time, on two occasions I watched a bat grab a caddis in the air and in both cases the caddis was either released or it got away. I have since found out that bats will occasionally eviscerate larger insects in the air, consuming their insides. Potentially, the autumn caddis I watch fly away from a grappling with a bat are inside-less.
Interestingly, once true dark has come, the autumn caddis flies reappear attracted to the lights of the trailer. Does this middle to late dusk disappearance correspond to primarily a middle to late dusk flying by these small brown bats?
Large red flying termites (ochre colored really), the darners and other dragonflies, and the big mayflies continue to use the air over the pool too. The darners are ovipositing at this time during some seasons. The various crickets and katydids are now calling all day long, as well as in the evenings. Often there are very fresh looking California sister butterflies about. While not always the case, generally as the nights lengthen and air and water temperatures cool, the admirals seem to give way to the California sisters. Other butterflies that remain common are whites, tortoise shells, great spangled fritillaries, occasional mourning cloaks, and a sulphur now and then.
In the cool of the evenings and mornings now, gnats are out, though for several days after they first appear they do not seem to bite. There are not clouds of these insects, but they are so consistently present that—once they begin to bite—I will often bring gloves to wear while sitting at the pool. Small two to three millimeter wood boring beetles, two or three different kinds, are also common at this time of year. Both the tiny beetles and the gnats are present early and late in the season, apparently missing midsummer at the pool. One evening I inadvertently discovered that miniscule beetles appeared to be attracted to me by the whiteness shown by the pages of the notebook I was writing in.
At this time of year, often after a rain, while the ground is still wet yet the sun is out, hundreds of four to five-millimeter termites with long opalescent wings swarm from the ground and take wing for half a day or so. They are called subterranean termites (Family Rhinotermitidae). The winged forms of these termites are black, but the other castes are apparently white or yellowish. When I first saw these creatures, I was at a loss for what they were. Since I have learned to identify them, I see them as far away as New Mexico near the Sandia Mountains. Even there they seem to swarm into the air when there is sunshine right after rains, though it occurs in the early spring as well as potentially at other times. I have yet to spend a summer or fall in New Mexico or, for that matter, an early spring at the pool.
Even if I miss seeing the subterranean swarms on the ground and in the air, if I happen to be gone from the pool when they have swarmed, I can usually tell if they have been about their business. The wings of these creatures are so loosely attached that if they make contact with a wet leaf or other relatively slick wet surface, the wings stick and the termites have, I suppose, to gnaw themselves free. Several times now, I have returned to camp after a rain to find hundreds of small glimmering wings stuck to every suitable surface.
Great numbers of tortoise shell butterflies are in the air now if the sun is out. I have counted as many as twenty-six in the air over fresh otter scat on the far bank territory-marking rock.
It is during late August and early September that I see—rarely—two to three-inch-long bright-green or straw-colored praying mantis in the area of the pool. Autumn is apparently the maturing and mating time for these creatures, which may explain my seeing them at all. These creatures have very flexible necks so that, unique to the insects according to the field guide I use, they can turn their triangular heads and look behind them. Late summer and fall is when they lay their frost tolerant eggs in masses on twigs and other vegetation. In the spring the small pale nymphs hatch. These juvenile mantids look just like the bigger adults though without the sometimes vibrant green color.
I don’t know whether the praying mantises that I see along the creek are one of the introduced Asian species or whether they are those that are native to the area.
By now there has been a change in the assemblage of larger and more visible or audible insects at the pool. The present assemblage includes: wooly bears, flying red termites, autumn caddis flies, large mayflies, crickets, mourning cloak-like locusts, blue-green darners, tortoise shells, and California sisters and sometimes admirals too.
Occasionally, I continue to see garter snakes and other snakes, western skinks, and, in 2004, fence swifts. The lizards may go to ground sooner than the snakes do, for, unless it freezes and there is an early winter and even then sometimes, Sis and I often see snakes of various kinds into October. This is the time of year when snakes are once more making use of roads at the end of the day for the warmth they are radiating. During the sixth season, I came upon a twelve to fourteen-inch-long ring-necked snake on the road near camp. This one had a bright rich salmon-orange belly and neck ring. As I walked up to it, it turned the brightly colored rear several inches of its tail belly-up and began to tightly curl it into a ball which it lifted into the air. After this distraction was complete, and it was a fiercely colored ball, the snake crawled carefully off the road with its tightly coiled tail held in the air. The low-angled sunlight caught rich slate-blue highlights on the back of this snake that, prior to this, I hadn’t noticed.
By early in our second September on the pool, after seeing lots of steelhead rise to leaves, twigs, plant down, and pass up thousands of insects of various kinds, I decided to put these observations into operation by fishing things that no self-respecting fly angler would ever try to bring a steelhead to, or such was my thinking anyway. A fishing buddy, Ed Kikumoto, and I decided that we would have what we decided to call a Detritus Day when we just tied detritus from the bank to the ends of our tippets. For instance, detritus could take the form of leaves, twigs, elk pellets, pine cone scales, rose hips, products of the natural world rather than tied flies.
The first run we went to that morning was well up the river above the Dry Creek Store. This was a run that Ed was most familiar with and he had a barkless-stick knotted to his tippet. It had been broken from a chunk of driftwood and was about two-inches long and a light tan color. The drawing of it in my pocket pad shows a slightly curved twig with a thick end and a thinner, forked end. The fork had a span of maybe about a quarter of an inch and the tippet was attached just below it.
Ed waded in at the appropriate place and began to cast a bit before eight in the morning. The water was 52°. After it had swung out of the creases of current that coil past the jut of bedrock at the top, the stick waked well in the very deep, smooth, almost glassy water that characterizes that run. After a few casts, the twig had settled quite low from having absorbed water and only the more projecting end of the fork was above the surface and leaving its own crease in the soft turbulence of the wake as the stick swung.
After a few more casts into the run, about right where Ed said he thought—if a fish was present and interested—it would take, the side of a steelhead showed as it rolled up on the twig, the fish moving right to left. It had appeared to be a bright, average-size fish. Ed felt a jerk.
When a few more casts did not bring the steelhead back, the twig was brought in and we were able to make out fine parallel scratches produced by the steelhead’s teeth on the convex surface of the thicker end. The scratches were oriented oblique to the grain of the twig and were spaced a bit more than a millimeter apart.
Later that morning, in a long run overhung by a prismatic basalt wall, Ed said that he saw a steelhead move to a pistachio shell I had perforated and tied to the end of my line. I neither saw nor felt anything.
As I made notes on the fishing later in the day, I realized that nothing unanticipated had happened, that I had simply not expected to have the theory supported so quickly. The theory: It doesn’t matter what you cast to a steelhead, if you can present it on a floating fly line, a steelhead will come to it.
A bit later in September the following season, at midmorning, I saw a large spotted skunk walking through the viewing area and heading upcreek. It was the size of a small cat and appeared to be checking under things. Later, as I wandered about the edges of the flat with binoculars looking for a bird that was a making a strange-to-me piping call, I stumbled onto the skunk twice. This small attractive animal has what seems like an odd habit of standing on its front paws and raising its rear end to aim over its head when it is about to cut loose with its scent glands.
The second time I surprised it—my eyes were well up on the trees and I was really paying very little attention to where I was going—the skunk stood or attempted to stand on its forepaws from about five feet away. As fortune would have it, the vibrantly black and white animal was standing too close to the lower branches of a small fir at the time and they kept it from getting its butt-end up and aimed.
I was lucky. I’ve been sprayed by a skunk before, a striped skunk, and while I hear the spotted skunk has a scent that is somewhat less offensive, I’m sure I don’t want to be able to judge that assertion. I never did spot the bird making the strange call.
Early on the morning of September 3rd, 2004, just after I got down to the Perch and entered in the notes that an otter had recently visited because of fresh scat present on a far bank rock, I saw an otter hugging and chewing on a fresh steelhead carcass. They were in the shallows of the right side of the riffle and just above the tumble of large mossy rocks that roof a den, or lair, that beavers and otters use. This was the third steelhead taken by otters during this season and the first that I actually saw an otter eating.
There was a carcass remnant of another steelhead nearby. It consisted of white-tissue-coated bone, the tissue apparently what the otters could not pluck from the back bone. Undoubtedly, the creek insects and crayfish took care of this tissue eventually, if this remnant ended up in the creek.
The otter was chewing and tearing at the skin and digging down into the pink flesh too. The head had been separated from the body and was laying to the side against another rock. This feeding that the otter was doing was an energetic process, but I guess my feeding would be energetic too if I was eating an uncooked steelhead without the benefit of a sharp knife.
Kingfishers were flying around the pool and caterwauling and jays were squalling too. The pod appeared to be easy. From the condition of the carcass, it seemed likely that the kill had taken place the previous evening at least an hour earlier and possibly much earlier than that.
After about ten minutes of feeding, the otter picked up the fresh carcass and dove with it into the entrance to the den. It returned and examined the area, picked up a scrap, and again dove with it into the opening between two of the den boulders.
With some accelerations and a rise or two, the steelhead pod appeared to respond to the presence of the otter in the water by stirring lazily down the pool, where the pod immediately reformed.
Shortly, the otter appeared on the territory-marking rock where it stamped out a fluid scat that is light in color and unlike the red scat that are full of crawdad parts. It dove into the pool and then hauled out on one of the rocks that roof the den and rubbed on the moss there and groomed. The otter dove into the pool a final time and I last saw it as it swam in the riffle.
The notes indicate that there was a raven chortle from overhead about then.
Three days later, on the morning of the 6th of September and even earlier in the morning, around six-thirty, there was a large otter grooming and chewing on itself on one of the den rocks. It was an alert creature, looking around and staring at the slightest of sounds I or other creatures around the pool made. Primarily, though, the otter was chewing on and scratching itself.
The steelhead were making both quiet and splashy rises, the latter indicating they were spooked to some degree and the former that the spooking event was somewhat in the past, say at least a half and hour to an hour and a half previously.
After about fifteen minutes of grooming, the otter dove from the den rock and climbed out onto a shallow shelf formed by a rock on the lower right pool. The steelhead didn’t seem particularly stirred up in response to having the otter in the pool with them. The front of the pod had simply stirred downpool and reformed.
The otter dove in again and disappeared. Two minutes later it surfaced swimming upcreek over the subsurface peninsula that marks—in my mind—the bottom of the pool. The otter was towing a freshly killed steelhead along with it. I could tell the steelhead was a recent kill because it wasn’t stiff with rigor mortis. It had to have been killed earlier and stashed near the old growth fir that had fallen across the creek on the first day of summer that season.
The otter brought the steelhead to the slightly submerged rock above the uppermost of the den rocks. This rock seemed to be the feeding platform for otters during at least the sixth season. The otter began to pull flesh from a part of the carcass where it had previously been eating. Exposed milt sacks clearly showed this steelhead to have been a male.
Kingfishers flew noisily around the area while the otter ate. As it plucked a chunk of flesh loose from the body, it raised its head to chew. Each mouthful was thoroughly chewed and, though about a hundred feet separated the otter from the Perch, I could hear this chewing which sounded like small sharp lappings of water.
Ten minutes later, the otter looked up and stepped into the water where it turned and took the carcass by the tail. It dove and swam down to the far side of a very large submerged boulder in the lower right riffle, just off the place where it had been feeding. When it surfaced again without the fish, it became clear the otter had stashed the body in a pocket at the base of the boulder. The otter picked up the head with its still attached milt sacks and apparently stashed it in the same location. As it climbed out again onto the feeding rock, it seemed to look carefully around, shortly disappearing.
The otter appeared to have eaten approximately half of the steelhead minus the head. Seeing as how the steelhead was of average size, this is a meal of nearly three pounds of flesh.
This fourth killing of a steelhead marked evidence of at least three steelhead taken over an approximate ten day period. The various natural history references I looked at suggest that this ten day period in late summer might correspond to when mother otters wean their young. The time just prior to weaning is when female mammals experience their greatest need of nutrition; however, this is a speculative correlation.
During 2003, on the morning of the 7th of September, a morning of a seven-inch creek rise from rain that had fallen the day before, I was drawn outside by the loud sounds of breaking shrubberies and thuds. The fifth season was the first year since 1999 that the sugar pines along the creek had produced a good crop of their Brobdingnagian cones, cones that are up to, sometimes, twenty-inches long. The cones weren’t open yet and looked like scaly, nut brown, pointed and large bananas. All or most of the cones held by the huge sugar pine forty yards from the trailer appeared to be dropping to the ground at this one time. Later in the morning when I looked, other sugar pines in the area continued to hang onto their cones so the event was an anomaly local to the big pool sugar pine.
The reason this tree at the edge of the flat lost its cones remains a mystery. I wonder if this was a way of ridding itself of certain local seed eaters. Creatures as large as chipmunks, small squirrels, or Steller’s jays could have been seriously hurt if not killed by a direct hit from one of the large falling cones. Even a raven would know it had been struck. This is also a speculation.
At midday in early September of 2004, I returned to the pool after fishing in the morning with Herb H. and his fishing buddy Mike. We saw something in the bottom of the pool that at first appeared to be garbage, a bright white can or large paper cup. When I changed my angle of view, this apparent litter became a small bright steelhead belly up, its body curled into the substrate boulders, tail high.
With a certain trepidation, I swam out and dove for what turned out to be a wild, short-jawed, six-pound steelhead that had lodged beside the largest substrate boulder in the center of the pool. Until I looked it over, I was concerned that it was a fish that had been killed during a poaching event that had left no other sign at the pool. The fish, though, was virtually without a mark. Only the edges of the dorsal and the adipose fins were slightly frayed as though worked on a bit by crawdads. The fish had stiffened into a moderate leftward curve.
This fish died and drifted to its location, nosed into the cobble bottom in the current-lee of the large boulder, since I had last looked into the pool the night before. After looking the carcass over and not seeing any signs of violence or other obvious damage, I tossed the fish into the creek below the pool. It came up against the fir that had fallen across the creek and there it rested, eventually becoming an empty skin as it was cleaned of its flesh and bone in place over a period of around two weeks.