Most of this past month of work has been dedicated to monitoring bull trout populations in the Gearhart Mountain Wilderness in eastern Oregon. The Bull trout is a threatened species and we have been electroshocking to capture them in the streams and gathering data on them such as length and weight. We have also been tagging all of this fish that we catch with PIT tags so that we can monitor demographic parameters of the population as well as how far individuals travel within a stream. This effort has been aided by antennas that pick up the PIT tags in the fish as they travel upstream or downstream.

So far this has been my favorite field work as the environment is ideal, especially in hot weather and electroshocking is a very exciting and fun process. You have to be on your toes and ready to capture the fish once they are temporarily stunned from the electroshocking, which has made for many fun and entertaining memories! Bull trout are also an appealing species with beautiful coloration containing cream colored to bright orange spots. It has been a great time to work out in small forested streams with very intact riparian areas which creates the complex habitat that bull trout require to compete and thrive. There has also been restoration work done on some of the streams to see if it increases bull trout numbers and decreases competing fish populations such as the invasive brown trout. The restoration consists of putting large woody debris into the streams to create more pools, riffles, cut-banks and cover for the bull trout. It will be interesting to put the data together from this year and previous years to try and find a trend and to see how far the bull trout are traveling within the stream!

Here are some photos from bull trout monitoring: