Fieldwork Friday

It's #FieldWorkFriday

Last Friday was the first day of spring, and our first salmon of the year! We caught both pink and chum salmon along with a lonely herring. Thanks to everyone who came out to help, it really makes a difference when we have hundreds of fish to count. At Monday's smolts survey we caught a few salmon as well, both pink and chum.

On Sunday we celebrated World Water Day with a shoreline cleanup event at Lily Lake. Eleven wonderful people came to join us, and together we collected 82 kg of garbage and recycling. A huge thank you to everyone who came out to help. We have some amazing environmental stewards in our community!

During our World Water Day event, we also tested our new Water Ranger kits to measure water quality and also did some iNaturalist training for our iNaturalist project called Lily Lake Biodiversity. If you wish to contribute to this project, all you need to do is upload your observations of species from around Lily Lake to the iNaturalist app and they will automatically be added to the project.

Our herring curtains were pulled this week as no more spawning has occurred. We are still monitoring the beaches though as the herring are still around! If you see signs of spawning, we would love to know and can follow up with a survey. Thank you to everyone who took part in piloting the curtain project this year, we had a successful spawn in January and hope to again next year!

This week was also the Coastal Forage Fish Network's Surf Smelt Week. On Wednesday March 25, Surf Smelt Day, we surveyed Baker Beach, the only place where we've found a Surf Smelt egg.

If you're interested in volunteering with the Coastal Waters Monitoring Program, please contact Jenn at Jenn@loonfoundation.org. Our upcoming monitoring schedule is available until the end of April.