And we leave this scenic place

Tomorrow is our last day of volunteer work here at the Oak Springs Fish Hatchery. We will take a few days to clean the motorhome, etc before leaving Sunday and heading southeast to New Mexico. We have enjoyed our stay here with these awesome views, but we are ready to get on the road again. Life is Good! 

Picking Eggs

Shawn and Sandy working...picking eggs. These eggs were spawned 2 weeks ago. Most of them have their eyes and our job is to remove the ones that are "bad"(dead, only have 1 eye or did not get fertilized). We are using a syphon process to do this. It is very tedious work...kind of like stringing beads. The tray that I was working on had 3 little hatchlings in it...they are starting to hatch. They are so cute. They look like brine shrimp with an orange eggs sack attached. In about a month these little guys will be swimming out in the pond. 

Loading fish

Mike is loading the small fish in the mobile unit. They will be taken to a local lake. At this size they fish will be in the lake a while before they get big enough to be legal. 

Moving Fish

Here the other hosts, John and Sue help move fish. Today they loaded 1000 fish and transported them to an area lake. We did this job last week. 

Hanging out in the office

We spend part of our "work day" just hanging out in the office. 

Hornets Nest

They have been really busy building this nest on the corner of the hatchery office building. Since I took this picture about a week ago the nest has just about doubled is size. So far the hornets have not bothered anyone. 

Oak Springs Fish Hatchery

That's the fish hatchery way down there...I took this picture at the entrance to the hatchery about a mile up the steep hill. If you look really hard, you can see our motorhome. It is in the middle of this picture on the right side of a building...there is also a white strip on the left of the building. 

Spawning Shed

Life begins here in this shed for the trout at Oak Springs Hatchery. Trout in these tanks have been breed to spawn when they reach 3 and 4 years of age. After the 4 yr olds spawn they get sent to lakes in Oregon to be caught by some lucky fisherman. We will spend 1 day a week helping the staff with the spawning. Today was the first day. We helped spawn 74 female trout. We were told that they had over 300,000 eggs....That's a lot of little fry!

Sorting the trout

Here the volunteers and staff work together to sort the "ready" males and females from the "green" not ready ones to spawn. The Oak Springs staff will be doing this once a week every week for the next 3 months. 

Milking sperm

This 3 yr old male trout "gave" his contribution to todays efforts to spawn new trout. 

Gathering Eggs

Ed & I helped harvest the 4 yr old female trout's eggs. After the eggs were harvested from 8-13 females, the eggs were mixed together and sperm from 3-4 males were mixed with the eggs...then off to the incubators. We helped make baby trout today!!! Life is Great!

Angie & TJ

Angie and TJ came to visit this weekend. Sure was great to spend time with them. TJ is in the army and will be sent to Iraq on 9/16. 

Ed, "fishing"?

This is as close to fishing as Ed has gotten here at the fish hatchery. Our door mat blew away in a high wind and he snagged it with his fishing pole and hook! LOL