Today was a very easy day compared to yesterday. This morning I got to listen to two people who were talking to the interpretive staff. The first person was from the Alaska Game and Fish Department and he is the head of the commercial salmon fishing in the Naknek district. I was shocked at the number of fish is caught in the area. The season starts June 1 and runs to the middle of July. When the sockeye salmon start thier run the Game and Fish department make sure that a million plus fish make it into the Naknek River. They actually hire people to spend the day counting fish from a tower as they enter the river. The rest of the salmon are available for the fisherman to catch. If there aren't enough fish moving up the river then they stop the fishing and give the salmon a chance to move up river. They don't want too many more salmon to enter the river as then the river gets overcrowded and the fish use up all the oxygen in the river and then there are big fish kills. How many fish does that leave for fisherman? Well, local people will take about 60,000 sockeye salmon from the river to live on. Sports fisherman will take another 20,000 sockeyes. The commerical fishermen can take on the average 20 million fish. The record take happened two years ago with a 50 million fish taken. Are you surprised? I was. That is a lot of fish and it is only one species, sockeyes.
He also told us that to get a commercial license it cost $160,000 per boat. When the fish start running you will see the boats fighting for the best spots. It can get pretty violent and Coast Guard may have to come in to help control boaters. He said it is dog eat dog when the fish run and you will see brothers try to kill each other for the best spot. The town of Naknek is only 500 people normally but by June first 20,000 people will be in the area for the salmon run.
The next person to talk was from the Fish and Wildlife Service. He talked about moose, wolves and caribou. He answered a few of the questions I had been wondering about. For instance, there are no deer in the area, only caribou and moose. Craig thinks he saw on of the two run cross the trail he was walking but it moved to fast for him to get a good look at it. The man was 6 foot 2 inches and he said that he was shoulder height for a moose. He also said that he would rather come up on a brown bear than a mother moose and calf. He said a mother moose wants to tramble you down for coming near her calf. He said if you see a moose and its ears lie back you better be running. If you are chased by a moose the best thing to do is to run as fast as you can and put as many obsticles between you and the moose. One of the staff who has grown up in Alaska said you should run in circles because even though they are mad, if you run in circles eventually the moose will forget why its chasing you and give up. He said the moose population for the area was low but very healthy. However, listen up hunters, in the Fairbanks region, they are begging hunters to come moose hunting. They are overpopulated with moose, especially females which make the best eating. (So if any of you want to help at the Fairbanks area decrease the population let me know maybe we can deal on meat as we are still waiting for food boxes.) He said that during the rutting season, the males will get in such battles for the female harems that they will take down spruce trees during the battle. I hope I get a chance to see one. It sounds amazing.
Most of the wolves in the area are the gray colored wolves. The black ones you see in pictures are found mainly in Canada. He said that average litters are 6 pups. In the summer you will see more lone wolves as there is so much prey to eat they do not have to hunt in packs but in the winter when the small prey is gone then they gather together as it is easier to bring down a moose as a pack.
The caribou are in very low numbers in this area. No one has been allowed to hunt them here since 1990. But I learned that the herd is just south of town so tomorrow Craig and I are going to see if we can find them.
Then it was off to do some sightseeing and bird watching. We stopped in one area on the Naknek River where we got to watch Beluga whales. I found out that belugas shed their skin and come into the river to rub their bodies on the rocky shoelines to help get rid of the dead skin. We saw about 15 of them. They are hard to see until you hear them come up for air. They are white and do not do all the moves that say a humpback whale does. But we watched them turn circles in the water and rub back and forth on the rocky shores. It was quite a sight. Then it was off to the beach where we saw more whales and hundres of birds of the tidal flats. When Bristal Bay is in low tide there are long flat areas of mud. Very squishy, suck you under mud. When the tide comes in the water rises 23 feet and the flats disappear. We were at the beach during low tide with the tidal flats out. Shorebirds were everywhere.
After the beach we went to a lake shore near King Salmon. Again we saw hundreds of birds. We saw tundra swans, widgeons, green wing teal, shovelers, mallards, common merganzers, gadwalls, dulins, greater and lesser yellowlegs, whimbrels, golden plovers, semi-palmated plovers. Though seeing all these birds was amazing they have all these birds in North Dakota. I did however cross of the Hudsonian Godwit off my list. I also saw to Northern Harriers do their mating thing in the air which is a sight you don't get to see every day. Overall a good day in Alsaka.
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