Guest post by Yunmin, grade 6 student

Our trip to the Hatchery turned out to be quite interesting. The first day, we all went to a large field with artificial grass and soil for lunch, because we left the school at nutrition break and reached the hatchery at lunchtime. We sat at the bleachers and ate our lunches, and then people started playing capture the flag on the field for about 40 minutes.

That’s when the teachers got everybody to walk down to the hatchery. The guy there (I think his name was Dave) showed us a large chum salmon and another big Coho, but smaller than the chum. He squished milky liquid out of the chum called milt. He squished a single, orange-red egg out of the Coho.

He told us if those two things get mixed and fertilize, it can hatch into a baby salmon. We also learned there is no Sockeye salmon near our area. We walked to the boardwalk and talked about fish. That’s when we spotted a bald eagle! We eventually spotted three and saw them capturing fish.

Our second day was unfortunately canceled because the ending of a hurricane was coming and it was dangerous to go there in that weather. We went to the hatchery again the day after, and like last time, we ate lunch first thing. Then we went down to the hatchery and there Dave was showing us a totally rotten, fly-filled Chum salmon. It was the same chum we saw last time. The salmon had sort of decomposed over the days and boy, did it stink! There probably were at least a thousand flies on it! But then when everybody was about to get interested in the chum, something else caught their attention. It was a great blue heron, on a stone in a stream of water right beside us. Some people were very close to it, but it didn’t seem to really care. Dave said it was so used to people around it, it just didn’t care anymore.

We went to the boardwalk again, but we went farther in, to a place we hadn’t been to before. We eventually landed on a bridge. We were given sensory worksheets to fill out – we had to write what we saw, what we smelled, what we touched, and what we heard. For example, we saw a Heron and Chum salmon, we touched some trees, we smelled the salty smell of the sea, and we heard the sound of water flowing downstream. While we were working on that, we spotted another eagle gliding (it suddenly dropped to the water, and when it was about to touch the water it flew up again)! Dave said the animals there included eagles, chum, heron, weasels, bears, cougars, and more.

People wrote & observed so many things that some of them were way beyond my thoughts. The trip to the hatchery was very fun. We should go to field trips like this more often!