We all follow the salmon

It is hard to have an Eagle Festival without eagles. If the eagles don’t flock upriver, to the headwaters of the Skagit River at the dawn of the new year, people – birders, families, retirees and folks with free time on their weekends – will not follow. This January they have not. Neither eagles not tourists have been kind to the Skagit’s upriver communities.

Hardly two handfuls of people were seated Saturday afternoon for Andy Koch’s, as Badd Dog, rhythm and blues set in Marblemount’s Community Hall for that community’s annual Skagit Eagle Festival. Yes, it was a rainy day, but it was raining everywhere. Like the eagles, Skagitonians from downriver landed elsewhere.

Festivals can’t bring their communities together for days of bonding, fellowship, fun and fundraising if out-of-town visitors are not a part of the festivities. When festivals fade and fail, a little bit of the heart of the community weakens also.

People come for the eagles, first and last, of course. And the eagles come to feed

Like so much else in the Salish Sea ecosystem, salmon are key. No salmon, no eagles. A few salmon, a few eagles. A low chum salmon run in December brought a matching low number of eagles. When the chum were exhausted, too soon for there were too few, the eagles moved on.

The people upriver depend on the river year round, whether they’re fishing it, guiding others or hoping eagles are perching above it, feeding in it or scavenging salmon from banks, sandbars and islands.

Too few salmon for too many years and over time orcas are history, extinct. The salmon go, the orcas go, our fishermen, commercial and recreational, go, the characters of our communities change. If eagle festivals disappear, a piece of those upriver communities diminish. In the long run, but not before we are dead, will many of us drift away from our Salish Sea communities, wherever in the Skagit we are presently roosting? – Ken Stern