Grizzlies on the Phillips River

Another season of salmon enhancement on the Phillips River (north of Bute Inlet on the mainland BC coast) has been completed. This year I was lucky enough to be involved with a Chinook tagging project that the Gillard Pass Fisheries Association started. We tagged fish as they entered the river to spawn this fall and then searched out their bodies after spawning to get an accurate idea of how many Chinook Salmon are in this watershed for the spawning season. Of course, we copied the bears with our search behaviour so there were plenty of encounters with the Grizzlies of this system. One particular young male persistently got to the fish before us as seen in the photo below. If you look carefully at the dorsal (middle back) fin, you can see the green tag signifying a marked fish that is about to become lunch before we could get the number from the tag. Oh well, it was a successful program with a lot of new information gathered about the fish here.