Monday, May 22, 2006

Fish fall from sky, land on track meet

... the meet's javelin competition was briefly interrupted by 7- to 8-inch coho salmon smolts falling onto the field. The high school is on the Youngs Bay shoreline, where several hundred thousand hatchery coho had just been planted in the bay. ... The track also is located directly under the path of Caspian terns, which hunt the smolts to feed to their young. A combination that day of the large size of the smolts, harassment of the terns by larger gulls and the terns' practice of handing catches off to their mates, caused the hapless baby salmon to drop on the track below." - more

No comments: