The Teddy Bears Picnic.

The day began with the delivery of T-Shirts to Roy while he was at the Lions pancake breakfast at the community hall.

Roy had his truck all decked out with the stream keepers signs on the side for the parade from the Fire Hall to the games field on Powder Point Road. Kaylen was going to meet Roy at the park to help him put the tent and display up. While Roy was putting away a rather large stack or pile of those pancakes I went back down to the railroad crossing to meet the rest of the volunteers to do some fry salvage.

As usual we divided up and went once more from the estuary up and from the highway down . The pools are now very low or non existent, we have taken the bulk of fish from these pools and transported them to the Lake over the past weeks . Today we were able to catch around 150 Wild Coho fry which we released into the big pool at the highway crossing.

This pool extends back upstream the point where surface flow still remains. We expect to be salvaging this reach within a couple of weeks if the present weather pattern sets in for the summer.

The young boys who came with their dad were thrilled to have caught a couple of Trout along with the bulk of the fry that we salvaged today. Cynthia arrived to collect some stream bugs

( invertebrates) to display to the children at the Teddy Bears Picnic teaching them about aquatic life other than just fish. With the help of her son and daughter Cynthia was able to collect a good representation from the pool beneath the highway. Upon completion the older boys wanted to go for a coffee.

After coffee we all went down to the Teddy Bears Picnic to assist with the booth.

Their was a constant floe of families wandering around with curious children eager to see the bugs. One mother had a beautiful Dragonfly pendant hanging on a chain and was quite surprised when it was pointed out that the biggest ugliest bug in the bucket was in fact close to metamorphosing into a beautiful Dragonfly.

Every one was enjoying the day, a couple of hundred happy kids and parents , a smile on every face, fish moved, a perfect day.

Next week we will do another sweep to try and get any more fry then we wait for the big pools to recede. We will be checking further up stream as their are some pools that become isolated from the flow and end up drying, so we will move the fish to wetted habitat adjacent to where we find them.

We always seem to have some activity by the Beavers within the upstream reaches spending their time building small dams forming pools for the summer. In the past they had built a beautiful dam of boulder and cobble with very little wood mainly rock which created a large pool full of Wild Coho fry all summer until winter flows blew it out.