GARY BLANCHARD: You think those are all Coho, huh?
THAD SPRINGER: Yeah. Yeah it's all Coho.
GB: Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Look at them.
TS: Look, there's a commotion taking place down there.
GB: Right? At least five of them in there.
TS: Yeah. Oh, yeah.
GB: You think those are all males? One female and the rest are male?
TS: Well, there may be a couple of females. This one that got up here was a
female who's a little worn to be creating that much interest. She's probably out of eggs by now. All that battle, usually only for a fresh female and you get a flop and you'll see when the spawn takes place if she's in there.GB: Oh just because she's digging the red. Yeah. Yeah.
TS: Because she's turned on her side. Yeah. I see that in more female than male
activities. I'm going to take a bet that the fight's going to start here pretty quick. Here comes somebody upstream to join the crowd. That one up there, they fend all flared up, they want to fight so he puffs up to try to make himself look big to block that other one out.GB: How many years have you been watching these fish, Thad?
TS: All my life. There's a female of us by now behind them. They're all around.
GB: It's a little harder to see.
TS: She didn't have much red on her. Doesn't try to blow up out of the water too
much either.GB: Yeah, that's right. Dead center in the picture there. But she doesn't show
up very well.TS: Very hard to see them. Another male showed up behind them now.
GB: You think they're just sparring, huh? The two males they're.
TS: Yeah, they're just looking for who's going to be boss. I'm really kind of
surprised they're hanging around that female given how worn she seems to be. It was a good place to hang out and fight, I guess. Probably dig again and keep on doing it even after we're out of eggs. I think they protect the spawn, keep the eggs protected. I suppose that action washes the soil out and fills it in with eggs. I haven't seen anyone up here that could identify the fin or dorsal fin back there. All these are so-called wild fish. As far as I know that just means that they didn't get their fins taken off. Cause I'm sure some of them came from a hatchery.GB: Sure. So if these are silvers, then my understanding is they're three years
old, probably.TS: Yeah. They spend one year in the river and two in the ocean. They had a good
ocean here, apparently, because a lot of these are really big like big males down there and they're really good fish for that age.GB: Well, that fish is over two feet long that we're looking at.
TS: I saw one or two down there came out early lower in my orchard the first
time I saw a lot of that. I thought that must be a Chinook because it don't look too big, you know. And then I see the big old red male showed up, he was really big too. I used to fish with a guy, 00:01:00Now on the lower end of Drift Creek, along the Alsea Bay, tidewater portion, he caught a Coho that weighed eighteen pounds. After he got home, he drained the blood away. I think that thing weighed eighteen pounds when he got home. That's a big Coho. Like new territory going on about now.GB: Oh, this is getting exciting right here.
TS: All the activities down here.
GB: Yeah, they're pretty, they're pretty fired up. So when you guys are watching
this, it looks like the bigger the male, the more dominant position. The little guys wait for their turn, but they --TS: Pretty much. They just hang around the females in the hopes they get lucky.
Small males stay around after the big ones have left. Not much of the big ones were there when none of the eggs were left. Pretty low on eggs.GB: Coming right together there.
TS: There's one parked there on a hideout. Gary, if you get a little closer up
there, that big one's come back to run him off again. Here you go. Maybe I'll come down here. That's a pretty big old fish. That big red male, he's getting ready to fight. So, yeah.GB: He's doing his thing there.
TS: I'm trying to dig underneath that [?] hanging in the creek. We are located
on Johnson Creek, which is a tributary to the equator, runs into the Big Elk, Harlan, about three miles downstream from here.I'm Thad Springer. I was born on this property and now I raise trees, or am
trying to. I've been watching generations of these fish go through and do this ever since I was old enough to look in a creek and fall in it, which I did too. So we're kind of looking at history going on here. They just keep on coming through. We reached a fairly low point for a few years, a while back, during some bad ocean conditions and had a few trick females spawn through this stretch per year. At this point this year, they're still coming in fresh. I think today's count will put us to nearly twenty females formed in a short stretch, a good spot and they'll travel on the lower end of Johnson Creek.Eighty-seven years I've been doing this and after, well, soon as I was able to
walk, born in 1924 on this property. So it's been a lot of fish gone under the bridge in that period of time. During my lifetime here. This was my area and my dad was trying to farm all of it. In fact, a little piece of ground was standing on right here. Rocky as it was, he tried to grow potatoes on it at one time during the Depression, when potatoes got a dollar for a hundred pounds, the number ones or number two. But anyway, after that time, the roads got gravel and the mills began to come in to utilize the timber that had grown up here after you quite a burn had gone through, which at that time was all we were looking at 80 year old timber I guess, or 90, and there was a mill located.I'm standing just not four upstream from the upper end of what was a mill pond
during the forties for a few years. And there were three different commercial operations, all sawmills and this little drainage of, of Johnson Creek and Spark Creek, which as a matter of about eight miles total. So there was a lot of usage of various kinds in here and it's all mills, mills days. They built the mill right on the stream, dammed up the stream to make a mill pond. And where the water ran over that, the fish couldn't make it up. So by all expectations of our experts down the road, we shouldn't have a fish in here anywhere. But they persevered and the mills went out the back, came back in and hanging out and run build up again. So we still got fish and we're still growing trees. Farming's pretty much a thing of the past in this local area. Not most farm ground to lay down near the main Big Elk [?], but maybe not bode well for a big run next year. They say a lot of jacks. One year you may get a big run of fish the next year, but I don't recall a lot of jack salmon last year. And we definitely have a good run of fish this year.That fish in the lens right now on the screen as a fish has been spawning here
for quite a while; it's a female. And they make the reds that they lay their eggs in by turning on their sides and fanning the gravel to get the filtered small stuff out and the process where a lot of the scales are still off of their tails and then turn white like that one is just as evidence of what happens when they've been here spawning for quite a while and eventually little and just a cover stub that they had it long enough. The fish will stay on the spawn where they lay their eggs, or most females will until they die, which is usually be in two weeks, maybe three at the very most. After this one more eggs are. There's a little competition going on right there for that spawn because that big female originally found it in a little, and that's trying to spawn right behind her. But the male is having to make do what's left of the gravel downstream because, you know, the other one chases her off. That's really a small one, that one, about the smallest one I've seen, it weighs maybe five pounds and maybe not even that much. That's you get the scales and everything worn off. Posing pretty nice for you. 00:02:00