PAT NEAL: Life on the river

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, June 10, 2026

IN LAST WEEK’S episode, we were examining the curious coincidence of an odd little bird, the Swainson’s thrush, that migrates every year from Central and South America to the forests of the Olympic Peninsula to whistle at anyone who cares to listen.

It’s no coincidence the appearance of this drab little bird happens within days of the first ripened salmon berry.

These musical little birds are known as phenological indicators because the arrival of the Swainson’s thrush announces an important seasonal event in the life of the rainforest, the ripening of the salmon berry.

Which is a cause for celebration for wilderness foragers in general and the bears in particular.

It is ironic that visitors to the Olympic Peninsula are often reluctant to eat wild berries having been warned that they might be poison, until they are assured 10,000 bears can’t be wrong and they taste their first exquisite salmon berry.

Our country is full of these relationships that have yet to be destroyed by modern man.

Just last week, I was showing a boatload of tourists some baby salmon that had hatched from the gravel where their parents had spawned them last autumn.

It is hard to believe that the eggs of the salmon can survive a winter of violent floods, tucked into the rocks at the bottom of the river and emerge safely into the water at the first sign of summer.

It’s even more remarkable that a tiny creature the size of a tadpole can survive in a hostile environment, where everything wants to eat them, long enough to migrate out to the ocean — where they undergo a miraculous transformation from fresh to salt water to begin their migration across thousands of miles of trackless ocean to their feeding grounds in the far north.

With any luck at all, the salmon grow to the size of their parents and begin the long migration back to their home river, where the urge to spawn in their home gravel causes one of the greatest migrations left on planet Earth, the salmon run.

That’s when the salmon go through another miraculous transformation from salt water to fresh water and migrate up the river into my smokehouse.

But that’s another story.

This is a story about why a lot of baby salmon don’t make it out to sea.

For, at the exact same time the baby salmon are hatching in the river, the mother merganser is hatching a brood of chicks in the hollow of a cottonwood tree.

The day after the first salmon fry appeared, a mother merganser was herding a family of 10 chicks up the river looking for them.

Coincidence? I think not.

I, and many other right-thinking birdwatchers, contend that the size of the merganser hatch is an indication of the health of the river.

The more salmon there are in the river, the more creatures can live on them.

That mother merganser feeds her brood on a diet of regurgitated fish, while a big batch of predators is trying to eat the baby ducks.

The mother fish duck will give her life defending her chicks.

Sometimes she does, when eagles attack, leaving the baby fish ducks with no one to raise them.

That’s when another mother merganser will adopt orphans into her family.

That’s what I figured happened the time I saw a merganser with 21 chicks following her.

She didn’t lay all those eggs, but she was raising the chicks. Feeding and protecting them all.

Like me, the mergansers are just another critter depending on the salmon.

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Pat Neal is a Hoh River fishing and rafting guide and “wilderness gossip columnist” whose column appears here every Wednesday.

He can be reached at 360-683-9867 or by email via patnealproductions@gmail.com.