Strong hooligan return on the Chilkoot this year

The Chilkoot Indian Association continues their eulachon study with help from the Takshanuk Watershed Council. Eulachon are commonly known as hooligan. They’re a long loved, but little understood subsistence fish for people in the Chilkat Valley. Experts say this year’s eulachon run is looking healthy.

Tony Strong is using a dip net to catch eulachon, a small smelt fish, in the Chilkoot River.

That rock creates a small back eddy and that’s where the fish will come up and get a  little rest,” he said. “That’s where I can capture them.”

Strong fills his net with a practiced hand. He’s been out in the water for awhile, but his clothes are still dry and clean. His mother and grandmother taught him how to harvest the fish when he was a little boy.

He’s got three fifteen gallon buckets that he’s filling with silver and black fish. The fish have been running for about a week, but they won’t be around much longer.

“So we smoke it, we dry it, we freeze it, and various other things: eat right quick!” said Strong.

Eulachon don’t run everywhere, that’s why a couple of these buckets will be on a plane this afternoon.

“I’m gonna send fifteen gallons down to Juneau to a cousin whose family is from Klukwan,” Strong explained. “Then I’ll come back tomorrow and get for myself.”

He’s not the only one out fishing. Two girls walk barefoot up the bank carrying big buckets of fish and gulls swarm the river. Humpbacks feed in the inlet. Upstream, otters catching eulachon, too.

“As well as being an important subsistence food source they are incredibly important to marine mammals and seabirds,” said Meredith Pochardt, director of the Takshanuk Watershed Council.

“It’s a huge food source for these animals and for sea lions in particular. It’s a really vital piece of our whole ecosystem. So, culturally we’re looking a this from the subsistence side, but also ecologically it’s a very important food source.”

That’s why the Takshanuk Watershed Council partnered with the Chilkoot Indian Association about a decade ago, to help them with their eulachon study.

“Prior to 2010, there was zero population data for northern Lynn Canal,” she said. “And so, that was why the study started. Is just to gather that baseline data.”

Back then NOAA fisheries had just declared the eulachon a threatened species down south. They’re protected under the endangered species act from British Columbia to Northern California.

The populations up here in the Upper Lynn Canal aren’t threatened. They aren’t managed either. So the Chilkoot Indian Association decided to start keeping track.

Hooligan don’t always come back to the same river to spawn.

“It’s interesting to see the dynamic of how rivers fluctuate across the region and which rivers are maybe having larger runs on a given year,” she said.

The Chilkoot is having a big run this year, and she says there’s a lot of activity on the Farabee River and at Taisenki Harbor. The Chilkat and the Katzehin aren’t seeing as many fish.

Counting fish

Mike Binkie, Cory Grant, and Danny Willard catch eulachon for the Chilkoot Indian Association’s population study. They stand over plastic buckets armed with small clippers. The fish wriggle in water that’s milky with eggs.

The eulachon are headed up river to spawn. So when they get caught, they’ll squirm and squirt some eggs out. Every once in awhile, Willard changes out the water, dispersing the eggs into the river.

These fish aren’t to eat. This crew is only clipping the adipose fin, then letting the eulachon swim on upriver. The count each fish they clip.

“So every ten clips, we make a click,” said Binkie. “Then we write all those down and then they find out somehow through that way how many fish are in the river.”

Upriver, another team is netting fish and counting them, too. The count how many clipped fish they find, so they can extrapolate the total number of fish.

“Nobody knows these guys’ lifecycle,” Binkie says. “It’s kinda cool.”

It’s that kind of mystery that keep them out here. Ted Hart is the Fisheries Specialist for CIA.

“Well, we’re trying to get their age, trying to figure out when they spawn, do they spawn multiple times, where do they go…” he said. “It’s still hard to say, so we’re still gathering information and then we’ll start to see these trends will start to become more visible.”

Hart is working on a newer part of the study: he collects environmental DNA, or EDNA. He takes a boat out to gather water samples from other rivers in the region, then sends samples to a lab in Oregon. They can determine how many fish are in the water just by testing it. It’s a way to get a broader regional understanding of where the fish go every year. And it works better on wide or braided rivers, where it’s hard to get a solid count by hand.

Back on the Chilkoot, Tony Strong knows one thing for sure.

“It’s delicious,” he says with a smile. “It’s an acquired taste.”

He shields his eyes against the sun and waves at some friends on the bridge. Gulls sweep overhead, aiming for the dark parts of the river, where the water is black is fish.