Work may stink, but it's great for the environment

What I won't do for my readers. Week after week, we let you know where you can volunteer your time: Hand out goods at a food bank, read to schoolchildren, weed gardens for the elderly. 

Michael V. Martina / The Herald Kristin Marshall, an AmeriCorps intern with the Stilly-Snohomish Fisheries Enhancement Task Force, tosses dead salmon into a creek near Arlington to provide nutrients for hatching fish.

Or toss dead fish.

Do you like the outdoors, saving salmon and whacking things with a machete? If so, your dream volunteer job is right around the corner.

The Stilly-Snohomish Fisheries Enhancement Task Force needs volunteers for carcass distribution. The task force aims to ensure a bright future for salmon in the Stillaguamish and Snohomish river and Island County watersheds by developing ways to improve fisheries.

Throwing salmon into streams returns important nutrients to the food web.

Volunteers are needed to dump chum salmon at Rock, Kuntz and Harvey creeks near Bryant at 2:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday. For more information, call 425-252-6686.

On Tuesday, volunteers met at the Stillaguamish Tribal Hatchery in Arlington. It was a sad day at the old stream. I had a general idea that fish are born, swim to the ocean, have a great few years with friends like Nemo, then return to their birth spot, spawn and die.

 

Volunteers are needed to dump chum salmon at Rock, Kuntz and Harvey creeks at 2:30 p.m. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday near Bryant. For more information, call 425-252-6686.

What a miracle that they can find their way home. We get lost at the mall.

Unlike most creatures, girls are the pretty ones in the chum world. Boys have hooked noses and fierce scowls. Tuesday was the end of the line for this batch. Huge 25-pounders thrashed in the shallow water, girls on their sides laying eggs and boys fertilizing the deposits.

They do the mating dance once in their life, then it's off to the big river in the sky.

Dead fish were sprinkled where they had succumbed on the banks and in the creek. White spots on their sides meant the dying hulks were already decaying. I'd earlier thought that I might want a nice salmon patty for dinner. Now I'll actually never eat fish again.

Workers had already filled a hot tub-sized bin in the back of a truck with about 100 dead salmon. We drove to a nearby stream. Wearing heavy rain gear, work began in the snow near Bryant. My garden gloves were a poor choice, so I was given yellow rubber gloves, the better to battle slime with.

Jesse Scott, a member of the Evergreen Fly Fishing Club, hopped in the back of the trailer and speared dead fish with a pitchfork. He heaved them overboard so those with machetes could become mutilators.

We hacked at the caudal peduncle (tail) of the chum, to mark the corpse so those with another great job, counting dead fish in streams, could tell which ones were hand delivered.

While I bent over to grab a slippery tail, Scott dropped the slime bomb that exploded on my face. It was all my fault. I was just so enthralled wielding the huge knife like a jungle explorer, I got right in the way. We chop-chopped on both sides of the bodies to leave matching marks.

The slashing was quite invigorating.

Some of the bloody bodies in the bin were already falling apart, with slabs of liver and innards oozing out like the props in a really bad horror movie.

Other volunteers, such as Lyndsey Arntzen of Seattle, dropped disfigured fish into a wheelbarrow. The 25-year-old owns a tree farm in Alaska and often donates time for environmental causes.

This was an environmental doozy. Decayed fish make great buffets for bugs. The insects, in turn, feed baby fish. Dead fish help provide nutrients for more fish.

Kristin Marshall, a restoration technician with the task force, encouraged me to follow the wheelbarrow to the stream. It was along the creek that my dart-throwing prowess became a real boon to the project.

I shoved my hand inside gills, thrust up toward sharp teeth, hefted the carcass, aimed and flung it into the water. After pitching only a few stinky missiles, I felt I had garnered ample experience for my column.

The group moved to another stream with the goopy fish bin, and I put my smelly rain gear in the trunk of my 1993 Toyota for the trip home. Even plastic gloves didn't keep my hands from stinking like chum cadavers, but it was worth the annoyance to help save salmon.

We had roast beef for dinner.

No one tosses dead cows in streams, but I would give it a try to plug a nifty volunteer opportunity.

Columnist Kristi O'Harran: 425-339-3451 or oharran@heraldnet.com.