KMXT 100.1 FM Public Radio in Kodiak, Alaska
Instragram photo by Erin Harrington / erinfish with caption: “I know i should expect it by now but still excited every time I discover that #babysalmonlivehere. This time in the creek running alongside the highway in #Seward.”
Kayla Desroches/KMXT
You might have noticed the minnows swimming in the rivers around Kodiak, especially as the weather warms up. One project hopes that you’ll not only notice them, but snap a picture and put it online.
Kodiak local, Erin Harrington, is the executive director of the Salmon Project and an organizer behind the state-wide Baby Salmon Live Here campaign. She says the campaign’s goal is to help Alaskans find moments of discovery around small salmon.
“Every Alaskan kid for example can tell you where they see minnows in their neighborhoods, where they’re playing, where they’re exploring with their families, where they’re camping on the weekends,” says Harrington. “But we aren’t always making the connections between what we often call minnows and juvenile salmon, but those places where we see these little itty-bitty fish are in fact part of the larger salmon-scape in Alaska.”
She says the nonprofit launched the campaign last week under the hashtag #BabySalmonLiveHere, and she encourages Alaskans to include that tag in Instagram photos of their minnow finds.
“And in doing that they will be populating a map that we have built and that lives on our website that is, as people add to it, going to become a heat map of the presence of salmon in the Alaska landscape,” says Harrington. “But also the presence of Alaskans in the Alaska landscape and where we’re living our lives and recreating and exploring in the summertime here in this state.”
Harrington says the Baby Salmon Live Here campaign connects to a larger picture.
“The sustainable future of salmon in Alaska is really about a sustainable future of Alaskans,” says Harrington. “It’s about us being able to live the lives that we do knowing that we can support our families, knowing that we can have landscapes that can care for us and resources that can care for us as well as us caring for them.”
Harrington says the Salmon Project will release a series of challenges in the next few weeks to engage people in the campaign.
Josh Bell is a teacher at the Kodiak Baptist Mission Sonshine Preschool and says he’ll integrate the challenges into class time activities.
“What I’m really hoping will happen is I can send this home and that the kids will get excited about these challenges and take them home to their parents so that we continue to spread the awareness and that they can interact with their family and we’ll get more and more people involved throughout the community,” says Bell.
Harrington says the Salmon Project will start releasing the challenges next week. Check out the website to find out more.
