Our work at Sixty Lakes Basin began with mending the summer gill nets from 2010 from the five lakes SEKI is currently working at restoring. Dozens of nets, some with very large holes, were mended to the point that our backs ached – but I really don’t think any of us minded, especially when the Musician brought out his mp3 player with speakers! When all the nets were mended (two days later) we went to the first of our lakes and got trained in how to pull in nets (in this case, the nets that had been in the lakes all winter) and set out the newly mended nets. This involved getting into really warm clothes (the lakes are very cold!), then into waders, fins, and a personal floatation device (life vest) and sitting in fly-fisherman’s tube – inflated on three sides with a seat and a strap to keep you from falling out the front side. The person in the tube would then paddle around the lake and bring in the old nets and put out the new ones, while the people on the bank would pick out the fish stuck in the net and mend the winter nets. The worst part was picking out the fish – most of which were probably from the early winter, based on their condition. After the first fish I just had to stop thinking about the nastiness of what I was picking out and just do it. The decayed fishy smell would get on your hands and stay the rest of the day, despite trying to rub the smell off using sand in the water and snow.
Our boss also taught the Musician and I how to electrofish, which involves sending out a low current of electricity through the water that stuns the fish long enough for the non-electrofisher to nab the fish with a net. We do this in the streams that run between the lakes with the gill nets, to ensure that no fish escapes! Electrofishing was also quite fun – I will enjoy doing that quite a bit.
The last thing we were taught was how to do frog surveys. One of the reasons the lakes are being restored (ie, the non-native fish are being removed) is because the fish eat the eggs, larvae, and frogs of mountain yellow legged frogs as well as the aquatic invertebrates that the frogs need to eat. Lakes with fish have no frogs and very few aquatic insects. In the places where the lakes are being restored the fish are small and starving – you would need a couple dozen to even think of making a meal of them. One of the biggest outcries from the public about this project is that people are concerned that their fishing lakes will be affected; these people don’t realize that the lakes that are being targeted are ones that no one would ever fish from due to the fish being so small.
Anyway – frog surveys. These were fun to learn how to do, in part because we were actually looking for frogs (always a favorite of mine) but also because SEKI’s frog survey techniques were so different from the ones I am used to back home – it is always fun to learn new methods, especially when they relate to frogs. When we were trained, there was still a considerable amount of snow and ice in and around the lake we were at; probably too cold for frogs to be out. It will be interesting to see if there are more frogs out when the ice and snow thaws.
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