Canning

With fall settling in and snow on its way, it's time to start preparing for winter. Haines is one of the few towns in Southeast Alaska connected to the interior by the road system. The town is located along the Haines Highway, which travels inland to Haines Junction in the Yukon and links up with the Alcan Highway. Most places in Southeast Alaska are accessible only by ferry or plane. But a road system does little good in winter months when heavy snowfall and ice make crossing mountain passes difficult and dangerous.

Ferries and ships are the most reliable means of transportation during winter months, but these vessels can be hindered by icy waters and bad weather. Groceries and other goods are transported to Haines only once weekly, by barge. If you want to survive in Haines during the winter, you need to make sure you have plenty of firewood and a good supply of food stocked up for the long, dark months ahead.

People in Haines are fortunate to have access to some of the best wild foods available anywhere. Their salmon runs are plentiful. Many subsistence hunters are lucky enough to harvest moose in the fall, or are given part of a moose by friends or relatives (a single moose can yield more than 800 pounds of meat). Wild berries and roots are collected throughout summer and fall, and although the growing season is short and soils are acidic, red potatoes, chard, beets, mixed greens, zucchini, and carrots grow reasonably well in gardens here. It's impractical to rely on the ferry to bring in your groceries every week. Your best bet? Stock up on food when it's available, and can everything you have for winter.

This year, I learned about canning... what else? Salmon!

The canning process is extensive. It all starts with catching the fish. This is a 5 foot long gill net that belongs to our friend Mike, a subsistence fisherman in Haines. Each year Mike fishes along the Chilkat from late spring through early fall, catching and processing Sockeye, Coho, King, and Chum salmon. Salmon swimming upriver to spawn rest in eddies along the banks, and, on their way out of the eddies, become entangled in gill nets like these.

When a fish becomes stuck, the net is removed and the fish is instantly killed. Subsistence fishers must also immediately cut off the dorsal fin of the fish-- this marks it as a subsistence catch so that it cannot be sold to market.

Once the fish is killed, it's time to fillet. Here is Taal at work filleting a fresh-caught salmon:

Salmon fillets can be cooked and eaten immediately, but when salmon are running strong and many fish are caught each day, it's time think about preserving the catch. Fillets can be vacuumed sealed and frozen, or immediately canned. They can also be smoked! Smoking fish is a bit of a luxury, for those who have the time and the energy to build and maintain a smokehouse. Smoked fish has the best flavor of any type of prepared salmon, but smoking can take several days. Smoke levels need to be constantly monitored, and there is always the threat of bears coming by and raiding your entire catch.

The first step in smoking is building a fire. Time to chop some wood!

 

The Tlingit Indians that live in Klukwan, the native village here, typically use black cottonwood in their smokehouses, while others, including Mike, use alder. The salmon fillets are brined in saltwater and then placed or hung in the smokehouse for anywhere from one to three days, depending on the intensity and temperature of the smoke and the desired outcome. Here's the smokehouse on day two of a three-day smoke.

Smoked salmon can be eaten as-is, but won't last long before going bad. (Salmon jerky can also be made this way, and has a longer shelf life, as it is dried almost completely.) In order to preserve the fish to use for winter months, the smoked fish must be canned.

Canning salmon is just about like canning anything else. Glass jars, in pint or half-pint size, are thoroughly cleaned and sterilized in boiling water. If you're really keen on putting in the effort to make your jars nice, you can remove the skin from the fillets. I took the time to do this, and Mike usually does, too, as he cans fish for a lot of other people. Also, the dogs get to eat the skins. :D

Most folks leave the skin on, because it's a lot less time-consuming. The skin almost falls off of canned salmon, and a lot of people, especially the Tlingits, eat it along with everything else-- it has a high nutritional value. Removing it before canning comes down primarily to aesthetics.

Smoked fillets are cut into "fingers" and arranged nicely in the jars (if you're anal-retentive like me) or stuffed in haphazardly (if you're like... most other people here, I guess). At this point you can add in flavoring if you wish. Some people use olive oil or soy sauce, others get fancy and use fruit juices, brown sugar, or spice mixes. We used olive oil.

In the jar they go! The photo below shows me canning fresh-pack salmon-- fish that hasn't been smoked but is canned immediately after filleting. A bit of salt is added to these jars to help preserve the fish. Smoked salmon has better flavor, and can be used in salads, sandwiches, rice or pasta, or eaten straight from the jar. Fresh-pack fish is used more like raw salmon, in salmon patties or chowder, or like tuna fish in sandwiches and dips.

Once the salmon is in the jars, sterilized lids are added, and the jars go into the pressure cooker. A steady pressure is maintained for anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours. Everyone learns the canning process a little bit differently, and so every person who cans fish here has a slightly different brining/smoking/canning/seasoning/cooking method. Mike cooks his smoked fish for an hour and fresh-pack for an hour and a half.

Monitoring the pressure cooker:

Once the pressure cooker finishes its work, we remove the jars and let them cool for an hour or more. We also listen for the sweet sound of jars sealing, the little "plock" of the seal on the lids securing. If the lids don't seal, the fish must be eaten within a few days. Here Mike and I stand next to our first batch out of the pressure cooker. Everything sealed!

Once the jars cool completely, we wash them off and label the lids with the type of fish (sockeye, coho, etc.), preparation (smoked or fresh-pack) and the date. Then completed cans of salmon go into cases for distribution or winter storage. It takes a couple months for the flavors of canned salmon to develop fully, and a properly prepared, sealed, and stored can will last for years.

Mike fishes all spring and summer, so he proxies for several people with subsistence permits who don't otherwise have the time to fish for themselves. This means Mike is often fishing and canning for anywhere from two to seven people at a time. He doesn't deal in money. The people he fishes and cans for trade him canned vegetables, equipment, moose, crab, shrimp, and halibut. He is also very generous with his own subsistence catch, donating cans, or sometimes cases, of fish to friends and neighbors that can't fish, or fresh-caught fish to curious tourists that happen upon his fishing camp.

Typically, Mike likes to set aside five or six cases of fish (anywhere from 60 to 72 pints of salmon) to last him through the winter, subsidized by moose, vacuum packed frozen fillets, canned vegetables, rice and pasta, and the occasional grocery store run. Salmon may only run part of the year, but this way, folks in Haines can eat salmon year-round!

Trail Camera Photos!

These are some of the last of the photos from the cameras we set on the Sockeye runs. Since the Sockeye are tapering off and the run is at its end, there are fewer fish, fewer carcasses, and thus fewer animals coming to visit our cameras. Nevertheless, I found a few photos from our final set of Sockeye cameras worth sharing:

Hey look! A marten! In daylight! Almost all of the marten (and mink) photos we get are at night, with the infrared flash. It's really nice to see them in color.

Crow party!

Here's a new one: This is a varied thrush. Varied thrushes are more or less all over the place out here. They are striking birds, with a very distinct grey and orange pattern accented with black and white. They have little interest in our carcasses, but like all thrushes often feed on the ground. You've probably all seen a thrush before-- American Robin are in the thrush family.

Yet another bear photo. We saw very few bears in this last set of images. Most of the photos of were us (setting the cameras) and of mink and marten, with the occasional red squirrel or thrush thrown in the mix. But we did see a couple of bears, this being one of them.

 

Aaaaaaaaand another wolf photo! I'm very pleased to be seeing wolves in different areas around Haines. The first two photos of wolves I posted were from an area near the confluence of the Kelsall and Chilkat Rivers. This photo was taken near Chilkoot Lake. This appears to be a fairly young animal.

 

Wolves have a tough time living around Haines. There are no deer or elk here. The only large game for packs to hunt is moose, and most of the available moose habitat is much farther up the Chilkat and Chilkoot Rivers and up at higher elevations. Moose are hunted here, and although the moose population is managed to sustain hunting, it is not managed to sustain wolf packs. There is also a lengthy wolf hunting season-- nearly year-round, with a three-month hiatus during summer-- with a limit of five animals. Dedicated wolf hunters could easily disrupt an entire pack.

Many people in the United States are still strong advocates of predator control, and would prefer that wolves aren't around. Some of this is anti-wolf sentiment is interest-based (many game hunters believe that wolves kill a lot of the available prey in an area, meaning fewer animals available for harvest in the fall). Some is likely symbolic (wolves have been portrayed for centuries as something to be feared and destroyed).

Whatever the case, I'm happy to be seeing wolves on our trail cameras. Wolves help sustain healthy populations of their prey, which in turn impacts the vegetation on which herbivores feed. Wolves are often called keystone species-- species which have a disproportionally large impact on their environment, and whose presence helps to balance food webs. A large part of our research involves better understanding the impacts large carnivores, like bears and wolves, have on the environment, and why they are important.

Sockeye

Sockeye salmon (Oncorhynchus nerka) are one of the more desirable species of salmon in Alaska. Sockeye tend to have rich, fatty meat, and their muscle ranges from pink to deep red in color, making it the preferred fish of canneries. In this region, most people that eat fish think King is king-- King salmon have the best flavor of them all-- but Sockeye probably comes a close second.

Sockeye are, in my opinion, the prettiest of the bunch when they're breeding. Males and females both take on a deep red hue, with green heads and tails. They only develop this color scheme when they're spawning. When living in the ocean, and before they begin to spawn, Sockeye are silvery blue. Check out this video of Sockeye on their spawning grounds in Chilkoot Lake:

Remember that Sockeye (like all the salmon we study) are anadromous fishes. Anadromous comes from the Greek word anadromos, meaning "running upward." Anadromous fish spend most of their lives at sea before migrating to freshwater streams and running upriver to breed and die. Most Sockeye spawn between July and August, so we're just seeing the tail end of the Sockeye run around Haines.

Imagine seeing hundreds of fish swimming together in a narrow stream bed or shallow pond just off of a major river:

The setting seems idyllic. Tree boughs overhang the creek, providing shade. The rocky bottom, interspersed with sandy patches, is a great place for a female Sockeye to build a redd (nest), lay her eggs, and attract a male to fertilize her brood. In the spring, her eggs will hatch, and the fry (young fish) will spend up to three years living in this stream, growing, before migrating out to sea*.

But before too long, the strain of migrating anywhere from hundreds to thousands of kilometers, breeding, defending territories and redds, and chasing off competing fish, all without eating, begins to take its toll. During spawning, salmon put all of their energy into breeding. All the normal things that we do on a day-to-day basis to stay alive (eating, for example), and all the things our bodies do to keep us healthy (fight off infections, destroy damaged cells, etc.) salmon neglect in favor of procreation. In fact, by the time salmon reach their spawning grounds, they've already begun the descent to senescence. The salmon start rotting before they've even died.

Can you see this white patches on these salmon? Those are parts of their skin that have died and begun to decompose. Some salmon appear in relatively good condition before they die; others are heavily mottled with patches of decaying flesh. In a short period of time, the idyllic creek filled with spawning fish turns into a apocalyptic wasteland of decomposing salmon carcasses. Bears get to many of them:

Others are left in the stream to decay:

Just one week ago, Jenn and I set our trail cameras in this area and recorded the video of the peaceful stream above. When we returned, seven days later, to check the cameras, we walked into a wasteland of salmon carcasses. What a difference a single week makes! Very quickly the salmon in these areas are finishing their breeding cycle and dying off. It may seem unpleasant (and in fact they do smell terrible) but it is endlessly fascinating. The carcasses these decomposing salmon leave behind will provide valuable nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, to both the stream bed and surrounding terrestrial vegetation. And, of course, they also provide plenty of food for the carnivores!

*Not all salmon species spend extended periods of time as frys in freshwater areas before migrating to sea. Some species spend more time (upwards of four years for some Sockeye), and others, less. Chum salmon, for example, are born in freshwater streams and migrate to sea immediately.

Setting Cameras

These last couple weeks, we've been busy! We finished up scouting out areas, and selected three different spots for our first round of camera trapping using our trail cameras. This past week, Jenn, Quark, Rigby, and I set 20 trail cameras on Sockeye spawning grounds: one site in a pond off the Chilkat River and two sites at creek drainages along the banks of Chilkoot Lake. This pond near the Chilkat River is just upstream of one of our camera trapping sites. If I were a Sockeye, I might spawn here, too. Look how pretty it is!

There are many different ways to set trail cameras. If you want to maximize your chances of getting lots of photos of varied wildlife, it's a good idea to place them in areas wildlife are likely to be traveling. The most straightforward location is to set them on actual trails. Most animals have dedicated home ranges and travel the same areas frequently using trails, whether they be deer trails, bear trails, or roads or hiking paths made by humans. They can also be placed near a resource, such as a good water source (creeks, springs, ponds) or food source (berry patches, grassy areas, squirrel middens) that animals are likely to stop by. In this picture, the clearing on the ground is an intersection of two narrow game trails-- a great spot to set a camera!

Yet another way to set trail cameras is to bait them-- set out food or a scent lure to attract animals to the vicinity of the camera. We're interested in figuring out not only what types of animals live in this area, but also how many of them might rely on salmon as a food source during late summer and autumn. For that reason, Jenn and I are baiting our trail cameras with salmon carcasses.

After salmon spawn, they die. Many salmon are predated by bears before they have a chance to spawn. Bears prefer eating the fatty, energy-rich roe, sexual organs, or brains of the fish. Less desirable tissue, like muscle, is often left for other scavengers. Although bears are more likely to target and feed on fish that haven't yet spawned, salmon carcasses are attractants for most carnivores. Even if they find that the salmon staked in front of our trail cameras won't make a decent meal, the smell of decomposing fish acts as a strong lure for any passers-by.

Here, Quark poses next to one of our assembled trail cameras. The salmon carcass, which we pulled from a nearby creek, is staked in front. Note the steel casing, intended to protect the camera from curious bears. The branch wedged between the camera housing and the tree acts to both stabilize the unit and direct the lens of the camera downward, so that the fish and the ground surrounding it are in the field of view.

Despite most of our gear smelling like rotting fish, Jenn and I had a great week hiking into these areas and setting up our cameras. We were able to avoid rainy days, find plenty of spawning activity and carcasses to use as bait, and didn't meet up with any bears on the trail. Hiking into these areas is not something to be taken lightly. We head straight into prime brown bear habitat-- this time of year, bears don't stray far from spawning grounds. It's a nerve-wracking experience walking through brushy areas knowing bears could be very close by. We take every precaution to keep ourselves and the bears safe. I'll post more about this soon.

We'll leave the cameras up for two weeks. This coming week, Jenn and I will return to each of our three sites and check up on the cameras. Many things can go wrong with trail cameras, and we want to ensure we're getting the best data possible. Curious bears can shift camera angles away from the intended view, or occasionally, knock them off trees completely. Dirt, bird poop, and vegetation can block camera lenses. Salmon carcasses, although staked to the ground, can be carried away by hungry scavengers. SD cards can fail. In this photo, Jenn is securing one of our cameras to a tree with a cable lock, an additional method to stabilize the camera, and one that will hopefully deter theft.

By checking our cameras this coming week, we can address any problems, and, more importantly, get a sneak peek at what may be stopping by. We'll be revisiting our first field site tomorrow, so in a few days we'll hopefully have some great photos to share!