This, I should have written a week or two ago, is the time of year when the salmon come back to spawn. The Bear, the Boyne, the Jordan, the Elk—the rivers that flow into Torch Lake, or Lake Charlevoix, or Elk Lake, and on into the bay or the big lake itself—are full of big fish swimming upstream with fierce abandon. The life force is at work.
Now it is a bit later, and the salmon are dead. Such a thought, eh? But that is how it works. (If you click on a photo, the gallery will turn into a self-timed slideshow.)
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- Swimming upstream
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- Jockeying for position
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- Fishy chaos
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- Fish fight
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- Dying salmon
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- Dead salmon
If you are a salmon, you must survive the gelatinous spawn stage, get to be a fingerling, lay low in the weeds, learn to avoid the muskies and the otters. Then you can swim out into the great world, learn to avoid the gulls and the Canada geese and the great eagles. Learn to tell food from a lie wrapped around a steel hook. Spend a couple or three summers out there in Big Blue. Become one of the biggest things in your world. One day, feel a certain pull to return. In fact, you find that you will do anything to return. You will fight, you will gasp, you will spend your last ounce of life force to return – and spawn, and die. That is what salmon do.
Except for this.
There are almost no naturally reproduced salmon in these waters. The streams are too warm for the fingerlings. Nearly all of the salmon are the product of fish hatcheries operated by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.
Nevertheless, salmon will do what they do. And sometimes it may be that a natural-born salmon will make it all the way into the big lake, and begin the cycle all over again. Imagine that.
Torch Lake Views 
Sybil
November 16, 2011
If the river is too warm for the fingerlings … how do they survive to be big fish ? I’d love to see spawning salmon …
Gerry
November 16, 2011
Good question. Salmon aren’t native to these waters, but were introduced. I left out one important piece of the puzzle – a lot of sediment (much of it sand) gets deposited over the fertilized eggs so they don’t hatch to begin with. Then the water is warmer than ideal, so the survivors don’t thrive. Enter the hatcheries. Naturally I’m way out of my depth here, but you can learn an amazing amount from that DNR website.
The truly amazing thing to me is that the salmon behave like salmon even though everything about their reproduction is managed as surely as if they were farmed.
Heather
November 16, 2011
They are a sight to behold, aren’t they? And now they are strewn all over the beaches in Elk Rapids.
Also, how did you get your slideshow to load like that? Cool 🙂
Gerry
November 16, 2011
Are they really? I didn’t see them on the beaches, just in the river–where the gulls were going to town. I’ll have to go look.
[Slideshow: WP changed the gallery feature so that clicking on a gallery thumbnail opens a carousel. Viewers can move at their own pace or just look at the one and ESCape. It is kinda cool, isn’t it! And it’s already working on any post where you used the gallery feature.]
Joss
November 17, 2011
I wonder if the farmed salmon have the same instincts to swim upstream and spawn. How frustrating for them if so.
Gerry
November 17, 2011
I want to make sure I haven’t confused you about hatcheries. Fish raised there are released into rivers. It turns out, based on quite a lot of research, that those fish return to those rivers to spawn.
Farmed salmon are raised, just like chickens and beef cattle, to be slaughtered for food and never get out into the big world. They are where they’ve always been.
Kate
November 18, 2011
We have them here too — they struggle up the American River until they hit the weir, and then they’re harvested at the fish hatchery. Of course, if they got beyond the weir they’d soon run into the damn dam, which would stop them just as effectively.
There’s the beginnings of movement to remove obstacles in the local streams, & maybe create a way they can go beyond the dam. Out here on the West Coast, there’s real worry (& real evidence) that we may have pushed too far, resulting in extinction of the wild salmon. Dear Lord, I pray that’s wrong, or that it can be corrected in time! A dreary old world without wild salmon running free!
Gerry
November 18, 2011
Our species has so many talents, but we’ve never figured out how to use them without stumbling into Unintended Consequences. In this region we’re in the process of eliminating dams along the Boardman River. They’ve been there a long time. There are risks associated with removal–and with leaving them in place, too.
When I was very young, everything in life seemed complicated but turned out to be a lot easier than I thought. Now that I am an old bat, most of the things that I think should be simple turn out to be a lot more complicated than I thought. Bugger.
shoreacres
November 19, 2011
My gosh. Even after all those National Geographic specials and all, I missed the part about them dying. What did I think? That they went upstream, spawned, went back down and repeated the cycle, I guess.
It seems sad, but then I can’t quite get over what happens to baby mallards around here, either. Obviously, too much of anything isn’t good. If the ducks didn’t get culled, we’d be up to our hips in ducks. Too many deer means that some starve. And I suppose the same applies to the salmon. There’s only so much river and food to share.
Here in Texas, especially in the hill country, it’s rainbow trout that are being released. Fly-fishing is becoming quite the thing – lots of folks are surprised to discover we have cold, shallow and fast-running streams that are perfect for trout.
Gerry
November 19, 2011
Some fish do live to spawn again–not our salmon, though.
I’m tempted to remark that all this fish farming and fish hatching and releasing can lead to Unintended Consequences–like Asian Carp cruising up the Mississippi with designs on Lake Michigan.
We have Deer Management Plans and Wild Turkey Management Plans–you’d think we’d figured out how to manage our ownselves perfectly and had to go on to the rest of the animal kingdom out of sheer boredom.