Catching our First Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout!

Hiking in all of our gear

This week we electro-fished the wonderfully named Jackass Creek in Grand Targhee National Park. The sites we were surveying had only been electro-fished once before and the notes on how to find the sights were pretty vague. One description informed us that the beginning of a unit was near a “large split pine”. There were around a million large split pines on the creek. Luckily, we had some GPS coordinates. Unluckily, the first day, we plugged in the wrong coordinates and spent around an extra hour crashing through the woods before we realized we had hiked way too far carrying all of our heavy gear. Oops. On the bright side, the wildlife sightings were great! We saw a baby skunk, some snakes, a bird’s nest, and best of all; Matt found a full set of epic moose antlers!!

Yellowstone Cutthroat!

     
Hands down, the stars of the show at Jackass Creek were the Yellowstone Cutthroat Trout.  These were the first YCT we’ve caught this summer and they are stunning fish. We learned that the population at Jackass creek is unique because it is the only pure and original YCT population left in the Henry’s Fork Watershed. The rest of the watershed has non-native brook or rainbow trout mixed in, or has been seeded from Yellowstone Lake. The fish we caught were incredibly wild and very difficult to measure and keep in the bucket. We also caught more of them than had been caught the last time this creek was surveyed, so that is potentially very good news for the cutthroats.  It was exciting to explore  this remote part of the watershed full of bear signs and cutthroats. 

Matt and the Antlers

Bird’s Nest

Gillnetting Island Park Reservoir

The other day we met up with some great folks from Fish and Game (Greg, Jamie, and Jordan) and helped them survey the fish populations in Island Park Reservoir.  They had put down ten huge nets at various sites the night before, and we pulled them out in the morning.  We brought the nets over to the shore and set about detangling the fish. Gillnets are appropriately named because the fish’s gills get tangled in the holes when they try to swim past. Untangling them without mutilating them was a little tricky, but we had to be careful because we needed to accurately measure the length of each fish.

Fish and Game has been tracking fish populations in the Island Park Reservoir for a while, so the data we were collecting will help them determine population trends. For each fish we weighed and measured them. For the few rainbow trout we caught we also collected the otoliths aka the ear bones. Charlie was able to pull them out in a record 11 seconds! All in all we caught close to 1,000 fish, mostly suckers and chubs. One little kokanee also made it into a net!  Working with Fish and Game was super fun; they treated us to a delicious lunch and taught us the difference between the types of fish.  Hopefully we can grab a few more beautiful days out on the water with them. 

Canoe Craziness

So far it's been one adventure after another out here in Idaho.  A few weeks ago, Spencer, Chase, and I went out on a canoe trip on the Warm River, which was a lot of fun! There was a little whitewater and we saw an osprey and some fish jumping.  The float was nice until we got to the end and realized Chase had left his keys to the car where we pulled out in the Suburban where we put in.  Spencer hitchhiked back to town to grab his car and rescue us, but then his keys were in the Suburban too! Anne Marie was called and gallantly rescued us, which proved for an interesting story, one of many this summer I'm sure!

Findings on the Buffalo

So the interns are starting to move in for work this summer, which I think we are all excited about!!  On the Buffalo River the other day, HFF counted and measured the number of fish in the outmigrant trap and fish ladder trap around the hydroelectric dam. Joining this process with Matt Cahoon and Anne Marie Emery for the first time were me, Kendra Sultzer, and another of Henry's Fork Foundation interns for the summer, Chase Douglas. Along with measuring and counting the number of fish, we encountered a few other species. Collecting the organic matter from the top of the screens leading to the outmigrant trap, we found a giant water bug, or Belostomatidae. We released it back into the river, but it didn't want to leave the pavement and clung to the edge. Watch the video below and keep following to read about more exciting experiences throughout the summer! 

The past couple of days were unique in that we were able to devote the majority of our activities to the educational aspect of the Henry’s Fork Foundation. On Friday, July 15th, we attended the Island Park Craft Fair at the Buffalo Run Campground where we set up a Henry’s Fork Foundation-sponsored craft tent for children. At the tent, children ranging in age from 4 to 12 were able to make and decorate their very own plant presses. The presses each consisted of two pieces of cardboard and newspaper bungeed inside of two pieces of painted plywood-like material to which the children added their own paintings and glitter. While the paint dried on the presses, Ann Marie took the children on a brief nature walk where they could locate their very own wildflowers to press and bring home. The presses ended up being a huge success! Many more children came than anticipated, but there were enough presses to go around and the children went home excited to go out into nature and find more plants to press.



Kids work away at designing individual hand-held flower presses.




Children sort through sediments to find macroinvertebrates.

On Saturday the 16th, we again set up a station at the craft fair. This time, however, we planned a very different sort of activity for the children: bug hunting. Prior to the fair, Anne Marie collected a bucket full of sediments and water from the Buffalo River and then divided it into smaller samples within petri dishes. The children who came to the tent were supplied with tweezers and microscopes so that they could pick out as many bugs from the samples as possible and put them in a separate water-filled container, from which Anne Marie taught them about what they were seeing. Stoneflies, Caddis cases, leeches, snails, and snail eggs were just some of the exciting critters which the children were able to discover and learn about in the context of their life cycles and their importance to river ecosystems.



Anne Marie explains the life cycle of a stone fly to a group of children.


Yesterday, Monday the 18th, Thomas and Eli spent the day cleaning and monitoring the Thurman Weir and Buffalo River fish traps. Meanwhile, myself and Heidi assisted Anne Marie in designing and going over some of the material for Trout in the Classroom as well as planning and improving an annual fieldtrip that local fifth graders make to the Chester Wetlands. The highlight of the day was definitely making a field trip of our own where we were able to meet with Josh Rydalch, the wildlife biologist working for Idaho Fish and Game at the wetlands. Josh took us on a brief hike of the wetlands which he thought could be added to the field trip program in order to enhance the children’s enjoyment and appreciation of the wetlands. From this little adventure, we were able to get an understanding of the diversity of plants, insects, birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians which are found in the Chester Wetlands, thus enabling us to begin forming a vision of how to build upon the material discussed in the previous years to really emphasize the importance of the Chester Wetlands to the children. The next couple of months will consist of building upon these ideas so that the field trip could potentially take place this coming September, rather than when it ususally occurs in May. This change in timing would be ideal in that the weather will potentially be more enjoyable than in May and the children will hopefully also have a chance to view an endangered orchid which blooms in the wetlands around August/September of each year.

Barbed Wire and Calderas

This being my first post I'm not really sure how to start...so I'm just going to jump right in where Heidi left off. Last Thursday, July 7th, we interns spent our first full day off of the water in a long time to help out Kim Ragotzkie, the Stewardship Director at the foundation, with the very important task of fencing. After dealing with some unanticipated car problems first thing in the morning (aka attempting (and failing) to jump Anne Marie's car at the Shell station) we met Kim by the Mesa Falls exit off of Route 20 so that we could head over to Harriman State Park and begin working. And that's when the real fun began. Now when I heard that we were going to spend the day putting up barbed wire fencing I wasn't really sure how this task would stack up in comparison with our more regular duties; however, the day ended up being beautiful and fencing itself proved to be a task which gave us all a sense of accomplishment. By the end of the day we had replaced the fencing which had to be taken down for the winter (so as to prevent snow-induced damages) next to the portion of the Henry's Fork River running alongside of Route 20. While working with fencing is not something which we interns do all that often, ensuring that effective riparian fencing is in place is essential to the health of the Henry’s Fork in that it prevents cattle grazing from causing degradation to the riverbank. Thus, our day proved to be an extremely well spent break from our usual order of business.



After the weekend, we returned to work today for a field trip! Seriously though, who gets to go on field trips while at work…how awesome is that?! We were fortunate enough to spend the day with Dr. Bill Hackett, a local geologist, in order to learn about the unique geological history of Island Park and its surroundings. The highlights of the trip included stops at Mesa Falls, Big Springs, a location near the Island Park Reservoir, and various outcrops in the area primarily to discuss how the Henry’s Fork Caldera formed. We learned a lot of really technical stuff, but essentially continental drift along a hotspot, which is now in Yellowstone, combined with a series of volcanic activities roughly 2.1 million, 1.3 million, and 600 thousand years ago, are the things which have formed both the roughly 20-mile wide caldera in which Island Park lies as well as the neighboring caldera in Yellowstone. It was super interesting to be able to see Island Park from the perspective of a professional geologist, who looks at a landscape and sees things in a completely different way from most people. Today was truly a unique and informative experience for us interns to learn about this area where we are spending our summer.

Biocontrol, electrofishing, and feminine crawdads

Last Friday, Katie and I accompanied Kim around Harriman State Park to release bio-control flies. The flies were designed to control the Canada thistle that is invasive in the area. They had really pretty wings with a black and white striped pattern. We got to see new areas of the park and climb through sagebrush to place the flies on the thistle. Apparently the flies are a more efficient and cost-effective method of controlling the thistle and don’t involve putting chemicals in the park. They have been thoroughly tested and don’t attack the native thistle. It seemed like an ideal solution.

After a long Fourth of July weekend, we went to Thurman Creek to go electrofishing yesterday for the first time. All of the interns were there working, but it was definitely hard work! Two people were carrying the electrofishing equipment and shocking the fish while two others had nets to catch the fish and two more had buckets to carry the fish we caught. We were all learning how to do it (except Anne Marie, of course) so we had a couple more fish fatalities than we had hoped for. It was fun to see the number of fish swimming in the creek. We saw larger ones than we had seen before there. Because we were so new at electrofishing, we saw a couple big fish that we didn’t end up catching, but I am sure with practice we will get more efficient.

While we were waiting for everyone to get to the weir earlier in the day, Katie and I counted the fish and crawdads in the trap. The number of fish was much lower than it has been for the last few weeks, but the number of crawdads was huge. We counted more than 400 of them! We decided to try informally tracking the crawdads to see if they move much in the creek, so we took a random sample and painted them with coral colored nail polish on their shells. We don’t know if the nail polish will stay on or if tracking them will change anything, but it will make counting them in the future more fun.