It’s that time of year again when Squaxin NR staff puts on the chest wadders and walk a number of streams in the the South Puget Sound area counting the returning Chum and Coho salmon. We are in the streams 3 to 4 days out of the week count chum and hopefully finding some Coho too.
We are monitoring about 15 streams. The data collected is used to formulate the overall escapement for chum and coho in each surveyed region.
Also 2009 marks the 10th year of installing a trap on Cranberry Creek. This trap is located above a fish ladder at Lake Limmerick. The target species in this trap is Coho, where we see up to 30 coho a year. A number of Chum also are encountered.