On a brilliant week in August, as the chum salmon spawned in the Eagle River outside of Juneau, we stop to listen to the great Alaskan wilderness.
From the shore, the signs of a lurking bear are everywhere. Some beast has pressed fresh prints into the mud and dropped piles of scat along the path, like Hansel and Gretel’s breadcrumbs. Overhead, we hear the distinctive shriek of a bald eagle riding a column of warm air in tight circles, eagle-eye open for its next meal.
Bob Armstrong, a naturalist who has written and photographed several books on Alaska’s wildlife, came to Juneau in the 1960s. It was a year after Alaska became the 49th state. He fished off the coast for halibut and king salmon. “I thought I was in heaven,” he says, “and then the people came.”
Now in his 90s, Armstrong takes his time in the forest. He walks slowly, or just sits alone near the riverbank “quietly, without talking” because “when a human isn’t around, animal behavior is quite different.”
“Listen,” he says.
It’s an armada of blowflies swarming a mound of bear scat. They’re laying eggs in the waste for a new generation. So much rot, mixed in with so much life.
Salmon in the trees
The Eagle River may share a name with the birds, but everything in this ecosystem is connected to salmon.
The water is murky with silt scoured by glaciers from the mountains upstream. A flash of silvery scales erupts midstream, a reminder that below the surface is a frenzy of spawning fish.
These salmon have come home. They begin their lives in freshwater, then swim to sea and gorge on the bounty of the ocean, transforming into burly predators. Their life ends with an odyssey, as they return to the same stream where they hatched to mate and die. In their last act the fish fertilize the forest, nourishing the soil with their decaying bodies.
“They’re really beautiful in their life cycle,” says Lindsey Bloom, a commercial fisherman who also works for the nonprofit SalmonState. “Some of them are going to go hundreds of miles inland and then deposit those marine nutrients up in the streams.”
In a few hours, the tide will come in and quite literally raise the roof on this salmon spawning party. When the water goes out again, new fish carcasses will come to rest in the meadow – that’s nature’s dinner bell for the lurking eagles and bears, who will carry their feast further into the woods.
Scientists have documented the impact of this biological conveyor belt, tracing isotopes from fish to spruce, and measuring how their nutrients help the forest grow.
As Bloom puts it, there is salmon in the trees. Humans, too, depend on the fish.
“It’s food security and what so many people live off of, especially in rural communities in Alaska that aren’t connected to a road system,” Bloom says. “Having wild salmon is critical to just getting through the winter.”
In some parts of Alaska, climate change has endangered that way of life. Marine heat waves and warming rivers have decimated salmon runs in the Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers. On the other hand, melting glaciers could open up new salmon habitat.
Wild salmon runs were once common from New England to California. Their demise is a long story of industrialization, pollution and overfishing. Alaska is not immune from any of that, but at least so far, humans have not crowded out the salmon.
“They do so many things that are just so awe-inspiring and incredible that I just kind of have to believe that salmon are going to persevere,” Bloom says, “although I do think we should do as much as we can to protect that opportunity.”
Salmon, she says, are an essential part of Alaska.
“Salmon bring Alaskans together and get us outside and sustain us in so many ways. Their DNA is in the trees. It’s in the bears. It’s in the people,” she says, “and I really hope to never see that change.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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