By high tide on Monday, the sky was overcast and spitting rain. Birds circled cacophonously above the Chilkoot River, and sea lions bellowed downstream. Haines resident Sonny Williams was there, too – posted up on the bridge that straddles the river nine miles outside of town.
They were all there for the same reason: hordes of small black fish wriggling through the current below, a telltale sign of spring. Williams pointed as a school made its way upstream. In one swift motion, it spiraled back and merged with another school that was headed back toward the ocean.
“They’re going up and down, up and down,” he said. “Their bodies are acclimating to the freshwater.”
Williams is 73. He has lived in the Chilkat Valley and harvested hooligan here all his life. The fish — also known as eulachon, or saak in Tlingit — return to the area to spawn each spring. For millennia, the Chilkoot and Chilkat Tlingit people have harvested them and extracted their oil, both to trade and to keep.
Some years, the run is thick. Others, it’s lighter or never comes at all, depending on the river. Why exactly that happens remains uncertain, as does a long list of other questions about the fish, which experts say is understudied and little regulated.
That’s why, about two decades ago, Williams started keeping his own records — and advocating for a more robust data collection effort.
“Nobody was recording when they were coming. What days they were coming on the Chilkat side, and coming over here,” he said. “And I was doing that.”
Williams is still taking notes. He said the information is crucial for protecting the fish for future generations.
But now, so are a handful of researchers across the region. In 2010, the Chilkoot Indian Association launched a study to start tracking the run, prompted by tribal members who wanted more concrete data about how the populations were faring from year to year.
“Runs further south were dramatically declining,” said Meredith Pochart, a fisheries biologist for the tribe. “It’s not really a coincidence that also in 2010, the year we started this study, was the same year that the populations in Washington, Oregon and California were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.”
The study first focused on the Chilkoot River. But Pochart said it became clear that to really gauge population trends, the study needed to branch out. So in 2017, the tribe expanded the project to include the Chilkat, Taiya and Katzehin, among other rivers.
So every day at this time of year, Pochart heads to the Chilkoot to take samples. On a windy, cold morning earlier this week, she knelt down to fill some bottles. Later, the samples would be sent to an out-of-state lab to analyze the DNA that hooligan have shed in the water.
That data helps track the size of the run, when it arrives and how long it lasts. But even 20 years in, it’s not a huge sample size – especially when compared to generations of observations by Tlingit people.
“This is a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of years of traditional knowledge of monitoring these species,” Pochart said.
But there are still plenty of questions about the fish. Pochart said those include how old they are and if they spawn more than once. Another gray area is why they spawn where they do each year – though she and other local experts say factors including human activity and environmental changes can play a key role.
“Obviously the fish have an idea of what’s going on, probably way more than we do,” Pochart said. “We don’t know.”
Williams echoed that point, and added to the list of unknowns.
“One of the things they don’t know is where they go, and how come they’re a species of fish that come and spawn and go back out to the sea,” he said. “Herring come and spawn and they go back. But salmon don’t do this. Salmon come to spawn and they die.”
While Pochart finished taking samples, a flock of gulls took off from a nearby bank. Steller sea lions huffed in the distance. It was an impressive show of the hooligan run’s immense ecological value to the area.
“This is like, the buffet is open,” Pochart said. “Eulachon are a forage fish. They’re the basis of a food web. And so it’s what supports all of this other life.”
The sea lions forage on eulachon just before the females give birth. If they can’t find the nutrient-dense fish at this time of year, it can thwart their ability to nurse their young.
Which is why it’s also important to monitor other species’ activity. Stacie Evans is the science director of the Takshanuk Watershed Council, a local nonprofit that partners with the tribe to track the run on the Chilkat River. Every day when she heads out to get water samples, she also does a wildlife survey.
One day last week, the Chilkat appeared calm when Evans arrived to do her survey. But then she set up a high-powered scope and scoured the opposite bank, where she said the water is deeper and draws more hooligan. Evans estimated that more than 50,000 gulls were there to feast before migrating further north.
“They are going bonkers, all over the estuary here,” Evans said.
“It’s just like life coming back to the valley, in such a big way,” she added. “I’ve really never seen anything quite like it anywhere else, and I’ve worked in a lot of cool places.”
Back on the bridge over the Chilkoot, the fish were coming in thick. Williams grabbed his bucket, made his way down to the riverbank and swung his throw net.
It was heavy with fish when he pulled it back out – enough to fill his small, blue cooler in one go. Over the next few days, he said, he would fillet and smoke just the males. He doesn’t like dealing with the females, which ooze eggs during processing.
Then he’ll eat one hooligan a day, or maybe more if the mood strikes, until he runs out – hopefully, around the same time next year.
