Salmon Watching and Otters

Uncle Chip came over this morning, and after getting some math and a little writing out of the way, we took him along for Salmon Watching. King County and the City of Bellevue have a program where citizens sign up to "watch" a particular waterway and count and identify the salmon returning to spawn. I heard about it in the spring and as we had just decided to homeschool, it sounded like the perfect hands-on science program.

So this morning we went out on our inaugaral "watch". Our creek is Sturtevant Creek, small, shallow and slow-moving, running right by the intersection of 405 and SE 8th Street and right past several large office buildings,perhaps not the most promising of salmon sites. But apparently chinook salmon have been sighted there before, so we move forward in faith that they will show up again. I want the children to be encouraged, so I have prayed that God will bring the salmon, and actually this morning I asked Him to surprise us. I was thinking of a surprise in terms of quantities of salmon, but He had a surprise of another sort.

We got there, put on our special day-glow colored polarized salmon watching glasses, tried not to think about how much this wobbly bridge seemed to be rotting away, and watched. We watched water bugs skating along the surface of the water and an orange Myntz candy box sitting at the bottom, but no fish. We tried to lure the salmon by picking blackberries from the bushes along the bank, and throwing in the ones we didn't eat or squish into Uncle Chip's hands. No fish. So after our obligatory fifteen minutes we filled out our data sheet with the time, date and a zero in the box marked "# of live fish".

Then on a whim we crossed the big into which our creek flows at the north end of Mercer Slough just in case we could spy some salmon lurking there. We still saw no salmon but we did see three creatures frolicking in the water at the far end of the pond. Muskrats, beavers or otters? It was too far away to tell and we lamented not bringing binoculars. But they began to swim in our direction toward the bridge we were standing on. We got down so they couldn't see us but we could look through the slats of the sides of the bridge. They swam right underneath us so we could identify them as three wild river otters. We followed them downstream for a bit, and at one point, one slowed and came toward the bank where we all stood, trying to be extra quiet, except for Zarli who understood the pointing part, but not the quiet part. He looked right at us, and then trod water and craned his neck up for a better view before sliding after his family members. We're guessing either a mother and father and otter child, or a mother with two mostly grown otter kits. A little later, two of them stopped and did the same thing, as curious about us as we were about them.

As we walked back to the car and were all exclaiming at how this was the first time we'd ever seen otters in the wild (if you can call urban Bellevue "the wild"), I asked the kids how many wild otters they thought the kids at their old school saw today. At least we know where the salmon probably are... in the stomachs of the otters.