It’s almost 11pm as Sooz Green pulls up in a skiff to a 30 foot tall counting tower on the Wood River. It’s her third season as a counter with the Department of Fish and Game, and she skillfully and quickly ties the boat up and scrambles up the rungs of the tower.
At the top, Green watches the river intently for the next ten minutes, counting each salmon that swims by.
Green records each fish with a hand-held counter, sometimes called a “tallywhacker.”
“I think my biggest count this year was over 4,500,” she said. “So, if you multiply that by six, that's over 25,000 fish in an hour.”
Tracking fish for an hour straight borders on the impossible, so the counters record numbers in 10 minute intervals each hour–starting with a count on the right bank tower, then quickly motoring across the left bank tower. Counters then multiply those numbers by six to estimate how many fish swam by those towers in an hour.
“I'll have one in my left hand that I'll be my ten count and then one in my right hand that'll be my five count or my one count,” Green said.
The Wood River counting tower is one of nine tower sites across Bristol Bay, where the Alaska Department of Fish and Game tracks salmon escapement, to ensure millions of sockeye spawners return for future runs. The Department has used counting towers to monitor escapement since 1955.
This tower is tethered by ratchet straps rising up from the river bed to its four corners. On top, there’s just about room for two to sit under a tiny tarp for a front row seat of the Wood River run.
Green climbs up and down each tower eight times a day for counts at the top of the hour. She’s part of a team of three techs rotating eight hour shifts, so that the Wood River salmon are counted for 20 minutes every hour, of every day, for the duration of Bristol Bay’s sockeye season.
“It's not always just like this on a sunny, beautiful day,” Green said. “You have to be okay with staying up all night and having bears walk around your tower in the middle of the night and drive a boat across a river in the dark and stand in 20 mile an hour wind and rain for eight hours.”
The Wood River current moves quickly, but sockeye swim steadily upstream, hugging the shore. On a big enough tide, Green says the river runs backwards, flowing back into lake Alekganek. With the changing current, the team pays careful attention to both upstream and downstream fish.
“And that gets interesting when you're trying to count. You end up having a tallywhacker for fish going downstream and a tallywhacker for fish that are going upstream and then you subtract whatever goes down,” said Green.
This evening, the salmon are all swimming in the same direction. Green says it’s been a slow day so far. She wears polarized lenses to more easily see the dozens of sockeye below. Most still bear their salty scales, but a few are starting to don their spawning colors.
“You see that dark one right there?” she says, pointing below. “That's a male that's starting to turn, who's got like a dark green head and a red body.”
Others have white markings across their heads and along their sides, remnants of a close call with a gillnet.
“We call them zombie fish,” she said.
Every morning, Green and her team call in the last 24 hours of sockeye counts to Tim Sands, the westside management biologist for the Department of Fish and Game for the Nushagak district. These numbers, along with sonar and aerial surveys, help managers determine openers, assess escapement, and make predictions for future runs.
“It's funny to be doing what's kind of like menial labor, but to be such an important cog in the machine, calling in these numbers that predict everything or determine everything is kind of crazy,” she said.
Green and her fellow counters also sample salmon, using a seine net from the beach.
“Everything that we catch, we pull out and we measure it,” she explained. “We pull a scale, put it on a scale card, and that's how they age them.”
Those scales get sent to a lab to determine a sockeye’s age, along with data on fish sex and length, to help managing biologists learn more about this year’s run.
The Wood River team is focused on counting sockeye escapement, but they make note and report any other species caught in the nets, such as chinook, chum , and dolly vardens.
But Green says the best part of the job is the front row seat for wildlife viewing.
“The other day I saw an osprey soaring through the air with a fish and its talons, and an eagle chased it and made it drop its fish. And the eagle swooped down and grabbed the fish out of the air and I was like this is the most quintessential Alaska moment ever,” she said laughing.
And of course where there’s salmon…there’s bears. She points to a bell hanging from the beam next to her.
“The bell is the dinner bell to tell the bears that we're here.”
Working in remote locations with bears, towers, and boats, Green says her favorite tool of the trade is what’s called a p-style. It’s a rigid funnel made from recycled plastic, that allows female-bodied folks to pee standing up, and fully clothed.
“I got it because I'm a climber. So there's a lot of situations where I need to be able to go,” she said. “And I live in the desert, so there's never a tree to squat and pee behind. So I get to pee like a dude and it's really liberating.”
She says as someone who does a lot of fieldwork, it’s a game changer.
Right at the end of her final count, a big wave of sockeye swims by the tower. She clicks the counter quickly, then the timer goes off.
“373!” she said. It’s the highest count of the evening.
It’s nearing midnight, and the end of Green’s shift. She turns off the floodlights, clambers down the tower, and motors the four minute boat ride back to the Fish and Game cabin on the shore of Lake Aleknagik. Evan Hummel is the next tower counter, taking on the night shift, from midnight to 8 am.
“I will go put my numbers into our spreadsheet and then the morning person, Evan, when he gets off his shifts he'll call in those numbers to Tim Sands,” she said.
Back at the cabin, Green gives her shift report to Hummel.
“What were the fish like?” Hummel asked. “Pretty low counts until the end on left bank when we had 373. That was my biggest count,” she replied. “But yeah, pretty slow. Saw a bear at the sampling area, right before FRI came over. Just hanging out really quietly.”
Hummel then heads down to the dock and into the skiff, to continue the night’s count of Wood River sockeye salmon.
Get in touch with the author at jessie@kdlg.org or 907-842-2200.
