(Photo courtesy Puget Soundkeeper)

By Hayden Yu Andersen
Reporting for West Seattle Blog

Nearly 60 volunteers gathered Saturday at Dragonfly Pavilion for a salmon-season Longfellow Creek cleanup event hosted by Puget Soundkeeper and Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association. The event was a way for community members to become stewards of their environment, said Tanya Balaji, a Stewardship and Education Manager with Puget Soundkeeper.

Balaji, who has a background in oceanography and biology, has been working with Puget Soundkeeper for just over a year, and says it’s been a great experience. Volunteers were signing up through Friday night, even during the downpour, and according to Balaji, there were surprisingly few cancellations.

(WSB photos from here down)

The cleanup had two goals. First, to help clean up the waterway and surrounding area ahead of winter. “Restoration work helps nurture a better habitat,” Balaji said. It is also a chance to highlight the yearly Salmon Survey, involving a rotating group of volunteers who check on Longfellow Creek every day of spawning season, counting live and dead salmon. (We’re expecting the total seasonal count to be made public on Monday.)

During the event, volunteers were encouraged to stop by and chat with the survey teams, to learn more about vital conservation efforts. In addition to keeping track of the population, the survey teams are on the lookout for Urban Runoff Mortality Syndrome (URMS), a sometimes devastating condition caused by chemical runoff from car tires. URMS is specifically dangerous to coho salmon, and Puget Soundkeeper’s teams are monitoring it as a key step toward protecting waterways.

A team of four survey members, including Puget Soundkeeper volunteer Tallie, found two salmon, a male and a female, just before noon Saturday. After wading into the creek and retrieving the fish, survey members perform a quick necropsy on the salmon.

Tallie said they’re searching for three key features. First, whether or not the tail is still present. Because survey teams work on different days, they mark salmon they’ve already recorded by severing the end of the tail. If the salmon still has a tail, they check for an adipose fin, a small fin located on the back of the fish. Salmon grown in hatcheries have this fin removed, which allows the team to determine which salmon are wild, and which trace to hatcheries.

Finally, and in a show that drew a crowd of volunteers, they check each salmon to see if it’s spawned. Here’s Tallie, holding up a small female salmon to cheering from the crowd, as she revealed that it did manage to spawn.

“I didn’t think I would like it at first,” said Tallie, who’s been volunteering for two years, “but it’s kinda cool to see.” Overall, she says the season has been good, though Saturday was an outlier, with no living salmon spotted by noon.

Beyond keeping the environment clean, events at Longfellow Creek also help keep younger people active in their communities, said Mark Dorsey, who attended Saturday with a group of students from Unleash the Brilliance. Founded in 2008 by Mark’s brother Terrell, Unleash the Brilliance is a nonprofit that aims to help youth stay engaged with their education, especially youth facing challenges that may result in reckless behavior, said Dorsey.

He says it’s been incredibly rewarding to see younger people get involved in stewarding their environment. “Before, you’d see kids just standing around on their phones,” Dorsey said, “But now they’re competing to see who can pick up the most trash, or plant the most trees. They’re all competing to see who can do better.”

For more information, to donate, or to volunteer with Puget Soundkeeper, check their website here. For more information about Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association, go here.