Every summer BBEDC holds salmon camps for middle school and high school kids from CDQ communities.
The camps are a mix of a little fun and little education on the region’s number one renewable resource, salmon. Earlier this week, the youngest group of campers visited the Fish and Game counting tower on the Wood River. Jamie Westnegee works at the tower and spent the morning catching some sockeye to show to the kids.
“Now look at this fish, this is a sockeye salmon," said Westnegee after picking up the fish out of a live-box sitting in the river. He holds up the fish to a group of camp kids wearing chest high waders. He asks if the students know if the fish is a male or a female. The students thunder back a response, "female!"
Westnegee has been working at counting towers for three years. He shows the kids how Fish and Game tracks salmon as they move upriver to spawn.
“So what we are going to do, hold that right there, we’re going to measure the fish and Kim’s going to pull a scale right off the back,” said Westnegee.
He tells the kids the scales of a fish are like a birth certificate. It tells the biologist the age of the salmon and how long it’s been in the ocean. Westnegee says the day the campers come to the counting tower is an important part of learning about the lifecycle of salmon.
“The education of very sustainable natural resource that we have here and emphasizing to the kids so as they grow older they can pass on these traditions of fishing and education to their young as well,” explained Westnegee.
After the examination is over, Fish and Game cuts off a small fin towards the tail of the fish, known as the adipose fin. It’s a marker so the biologists make sure to not test the same fish twice. And that lead a few kids to ask the very scientific question if they could eat the fin, or not.
With plunged noses, two brave girls, Laci Andrew and Theresa Savo threw the fins into their mouths. And as quickly as the fins were in their mouths, they were spit out on the ground.
This group is the youngest of three different age groups that make up the salmon camps. As the kids get older they learn more and more about salmon, leading to the high school kids working on research projects and can get college credit for the camp.
Mackenzie Amaya is an 11 year old camper from Dillingham.
“It’s not just a camp where you split fish all day. It’s a camp where you actually get out there and go do stuff, and have fun, and learn about marine biology which is pretty cool,” said Amaya.
She says she wants to be a marine biologist. She says knows a lot more about salmon than she did before the camp.
“I’ve learned where certain parts of the body are and what their names are. I can recognize all the five different salmon species in Bristol Bay now,” said Amaya.
Karl Clark is one of the camp supervisors and he says that is exactly the purpose of the camps.
“What we like to do with this younger group is to give them an overview of salmon all the way from art projects through the commercial industry, subsistence, sport fish, so we kind of give them little projects on each of them,” said Clark.
Clark just wants to make sure that the kids get a full picture of ways they can interact with salmon in the region.
“We want to show them how many jobs are out there that they could do with salmon and different projects they could do with fish. So that’s what we look at and try to get them hooked into something they might want to do when they grow up,” said Clark.
As Westnegee finished up all the fish measurements and he helps the kids release the fish so they can continue their upstream journey.
“Just touch it and let it go very gently into the water. And then it goes on its way,” said Westnegee.
Little Mckenzie Amay is sold. She says she’ll be coming back to salmon camp every year for as long as she can.
Contact Matt Martin at (907)842-2200 or matt@kdlg.org.