Orcas In Danger: The Biggest Threat To Killer Whales

The whales are 8,000 to 10,000 pounds. They're big animals. They're as big as elephants. You really get the impact that they're the king of beasts in that water world when you see things like them swimming 25 knots, you know, faster than your boat can go, or throwing themselves 18 feet in the air, you know. They're remarkable. It was apparent to other people, not so apparent to me, that I was kind of obsessed with whale stuff. Oh, my first photographs are 1963. That's when I got a 35 millimeter camera and started shooting pictures. My introduction to Orca Survey or the killer whale photo ID program came through Dr. Mike Bigg in Canada. I had heard of him since the early 1970s as being somebody that allegedly knew every individual whale in the Pacific Northwest, and most people didn't believe him. And I can't say that I was necessarily a believer, but I wasn't a disbeliever. By the dorsal fin, size, shape, whether or not it has any nicks, and the saddle pattern, the gray area on the side behind the fin, we can go back 40 years and show you unequivocally the same whale. In 1976, my task was to confirm the identification of all the whales that were in the Salish Sea area, and that we did with Mike's help. We had 70 whales in, and the government, who was interested in finding that number, said, well, that's all they need to know. But Mike and I were both fascinated with the detail that we had, that we could see how long it took to grow up, how many babies they had, how long they lived, and who they hung around with. And that was more fascinating than just how many. Way up in the top left corner is the first roll of film I ever shot. And then all of this top row is basically whale tagging. And this is the beginning of the ORCA survey. There's old Hi8 and Super 8 film rolls. Open up another drawer and it's videotapes computers with terabyte storage of digitized images and movies and so on. This is Silver Bank where we're doing the study. And then every day's notes and sketches. It's fun to watch an individual whale grow up. I just go back in time, back and forth through time. Probably as fun for me doing whale stuff as it is for people doing, watching their grandkids grow up. Well, the first summer that I was here was in 2004. And by serendipitous happenings, I wound up being a docent at Lime Kiln Point State Park, living in a tent. I basically slept with my clothes on and my shoes by the sleeping bag and the whales would come by at night in the middle of the night. And you can hear it. One nice thing about a tent is there's no walls to block out that sound. And I'd be down on the water midnight videotaping them. For me to learn this has taken a tremendous amount of time. I do not do anything else. I do not go off island. I do not go out to eat. I don't go to the movies. All I do are whales 24-7. In the southern resident community, they never leave their mothers their entire lives. It's a matriarchal society, so the females are in charge. Historically, there was a matriarch of each pod, J pod, K pod, or L pod, and then Granny, J2, was the matriarch of the entire southern resident community. Granny was estimated to be 105 when she died. These whales that are living in this community now have never known another leader. Southern residents don't just live here, they live on outer coast as well. They gave them that name, southern residents. Southern means that they were basically off the southern end of Vancouver Island. This is where they come in the spring, in the summer, and into the fall, and feast on salmon. My friends do like orca, but I'm definitely the most whale crazy one. I'm more interested in acoustics, and so I want to figure out what the orca has to say. It just excites everything to people. The sound is everything to the orca. It's how they communicate, it's their location, how they hunt. The southern residents share about 27 different calls with each other, and their basic signature call, I sort of go is, so you can hear that downward, and it could be a two or three syllable, but it always has this little tail going down. L pod goes, you hear that upward tick, and K pod, just like a kitten. Each of the pods have their own different calls, but when they form the super pods, if they want to communicate with each other, they have, they have the shared sounds and shared dialects that they all have. They're like us, where you see kids playing together, you see who's friends with whom, and when you watch them enough, and you know who you're looking at, you can see all of these different types of interactions. Ken has a great story that I think is a little bit of a window onto the incredible minds and the mystery of who these whales are. One day he was following some whales that he'd been following for a couple of days, on a prolonged trip, and he suddenly followed them into this really thick bank of fog, and the fog enveloped him. He was pretty lost, except that he knew what compass direction to head generally toward home. We were with a J pod up in Georgia Strait, and they were out spread out foraging, and then they all lined up, you know, like I think there were 16 whales at the time, and there were eight on each side of us, and we just crossed the strait like we were part of the pod. He followed them for about 15 miles, and when they came out of the fog, his house was right there on the shore. That was one of the most glorious moments of feeling that, wow. Now, what in the world does that say about their minds? It says a lot more than we ever think to give them credit for, right? You know, I can't explain what it is about them that touches people's hearts so much. I'm gonna cry now when I talk about it. I can't think of a better way to spend a lifetime, really. Are you going to study the Southern Residents when you grow up? Well, that really just depends if the Southern Residents are still around when I grow up. If they haven't gone extinct by the time that I'm grown up. Unfortunately, the current status of our Southern Resident killer whale population is a downward trend since being declared endangered. There are almost 100 whales in the mid-90s, and we're down to 74. Oh, there's been a horrific decline, but not only in the numbers, but it's also in their behavior. They used to really play a lot in really big groups. You know, they'd have an extended family gathering. We call it a super pod, and they'd frolic and play. And the chattering, my god, you put a hydrophone in the water, it was like 15 cocktail parties at once, and everybody's loud. I mean, it was just an incredible experience. You could feel the enthusiasm and the joy of them being together. What we didn't know in the early years is what species of salmon they were eating. And rather than eating minnows, they went for the big fish. 80% of their diet was Chinook. When we began the study in 76, there were 50-60 pound fish right in front of this house all the time. It only takes three of these fish a day to make a meal. Now, you can see the statistics of weight per fish over the years has diminished. We've seen that when they don't have sufficient Chinook salmon, that they have issues with their survival. When I was 18, four girlfriends planned a trip for me up to the San Juans from California to see the whales. We did the thing that now I hate, which is we saw whales, and we stopped in the middle of the road and jumped out of the car. And so I got to see them on my 18th birthday from the San Juan County Park all day long, and I was just transfixed. I was sold. And it took me 11 years to get up here and start researching, and I've been really studying them intensively since 2005. The biggest threat to the southern residents is the lack of prey, specifically salmon and most specifically Chinook salmon. You can see that the whales are thin. Compared to their mammal-eating cousins, these whales are fairly puny. You can sometimes see their ribs. In dire cases, you can see the outline of their skull and what's known as peanut head. You should never see outlines of bones on a healthy killer whale. Overall, the population has been shrinking. We can tell that by looking at photogrammetry, so by measuring the length and girth of the animals. So the babies are born smaller, and the females and males are not getting as big as past animals. The overall shrinking of the population is directly attributable to the fact that females are not getting enough to eat when they're gestating their fetuses. My first favorite was J-28 Polaris. She died. My second favorite was J-34 Double Stuff. He died. So right now my favorite whale is J-16 Slick. She seems like a healthy whale, so I'm hoping that she doesn't die. That would be just depressing. Yeah, I don't know. They're starving, so it's in the realm of possibility. We're losing the males that would be the next generation of breeders. They're not getting to that older age, which is horrifying. What alarms me the most is we have a serious lack of productive matrilines, mother-offspring families. We're down to one breeding male alive and five breeding females. Even though you have others in the population, you have a total of 27 females that are of reproductive age, but only 14 of them have had a baby in the last 10 years, and only five of them in the last five years. We utilize conservation canines on the front of our boat, and the dog is trained to locate killer whale feces in the water. Based on the fecal matter that's been collected in the last couple of years, Dr. Sam Wasser's lab has been able to figure out how to tell whether or not the females are pregnant, and what the preliminary analysis is showing is that 50 percent of the whales that leave in the winter that are pregnant are not coming back with calves and are not pregnant any longer. For those females that do carry their calves to full term, especially for first mothers, up to 50 percent of those calves die within the first couple of weeks or months of life. They're almost into a functional reproductive extinction right now, but if we can give them enough food so they can bring up another generation, and that generation can bring up another, we can bring them back to good numbers. I think it's important that we try to save them because they're an important living creature. You can't just let them die off. That's just cruel. The number of whales that we have in the population right now, they require just to sustain themselves somewhere between 600,000 and 730,000 fish per year. In order to grow that population, clearly, there needs to be more fish. That really should be the goal of everybody that's involved and invested in these whales, is to try and figure out how to get more salmon into the water for the whales to find throughout their entire range, throughout the entire year. We've been looking at this very carefully for a couple of years, taken every river system in the eastern north pacific and looked at what its historic production of Chinook salmon has been, what the harvest has been, what the chances of recovery are, and selected a few that have the biggest bang for the buck. And the biggest overall is the Snake River system. Good morning, sir. How you doing? I'm Ken. Ken Galpin. Salmon will, even if they've been virtually decimated, almost extirpated completely, you give them some water and spawning habitat, they'll get there and they will spawn and some of them will make it back to the ocean. They have a will to live that's just amazing. Here we are in Moose Creek at the convergence of the Selway and Moose Creek River in Idaho. Flew in with Dick Walker and here I am in paradise. Well, we came here because this is where the salmon spawn. Well, the salmon life cycle starts in the upper reaches of rivers where the eggs have been deposited and they hatch into fry and they live in the stream for a year and then they head out to the ocean. They go downstream and spend time in the estuary getting used to salt water and then they go on out in salt water and they run for their lives. Generally, salmon come out of their natal river and go right. They hang a right and go to Alaska. After they've spent anywhere from three to five years in Alaska getting big, they make their southern migration down with the intention of spawning and it's at that point that killer whales can intercept them on their return migration south. In the history of the Columbia before settlement of Europeans, there were probably 30 million fish coming into the Columbia. Salmon of different species and destination. That's a far cry from today. At one time, the estimate was that the Snake River produced approximately 50 percent of the salmon in the Columbia Basin. It was highly productive. It still could be highly productive because most of the area upstream on the Salmon River and the Clearwater and all, most of this is pristine area. I wanted to put my eyes on the habitat. I've heard that it's pristine and available to the salmon if they were allowed to come here and I totally believe it. If it's not the most intact anadromous fisheries habitat left in the lower 48, it's one of because there's no human interruption in this whole system from Selway Falls up. This is where life begins. The forest is fed by these fish and in the ocean the whales are fed by these fish. The habitat is not the question. It's the access that is the question and the lower Snake River dams are the primary interruption. A man or a woman off the street in the central part of this country, they're pretty familiar with a dam and they say, well what's the problem? They have fish ladders. Well, that's not the problem. The problem is on the other half of their life cycle when the juveniles are migrating from their freshwater spawning and rearing habitat in the Idaho Mountains and trying to get to the Pacific Ocean. It's that part of their life history where all the mortality takes place. Before the dams were there, a fish could leave Stanley, Idaho and be to Astoria in a week. Now with eight hydroelectric dams in position, four in the Snake, four in the lower Columbia, it can take a month to six weeks. These juvenile salmon get to the ocean past the biological window where they can transform from a freshwater fish to a saltwater fish. Up in Moose Creek where we just were, those little smolts when they start down river travels are facing upstream and flowing with the current downstream and they hit the slack water of the reservoirs and basically they have to swim. And not only is there no current, but there are all these predator fish in there, the bass and the pike minnow. They're just gobbling them up. You also have the sun baking down on these reservoirs creating temperatures that are above the threshold for salmon survival. When they get to the dam, all of a sudden there's this giant piece of concrete in the way. They mill around for three or four or five days. It takes them a long time to try to figure out how to get to the dam. And then if they go through the powerhouse, the turbine mortality associated with going through the turbine blades is devastating to a fish. The mortality that these juveniles face is so high that they're no longer replacing themselves. And that's been happening for over 40 years. They're not recovering at all. I am very uncertain about the future of all these fish. The Fish Passage Center, which is kind of the gold standard in terms of fish data, produced a study that showed that if the Snake River dams were removed, that we would have two and a half times the present level of salmon production in the Snake River. Well, if the dams are gone, the snake portion of their migration corridor is going to return to a free-flowing river. The mortalities associated with the powerhouse, the spillways, the increased predator population living in the slack water reservoirs, that's all going to disappear. From all indications, the best opportunity that we have to get more fish into the water for these whales to be able to find is to breach the lower four Snake River dams. If we are to control the restless Columbia, we must first develop it. Develop it for all its values, from the glacial headwaters to the Pacific. Government engineers say it can be done, and water power is the magic partner in making this development possible. The lower Snake River dams were authorized in the 40s and were built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 60s and early 70s. Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose, and Lower Granite dams blocked the migrations of the salmon, and they were built despite a lot of opposition from tribes that were displaced from their traditional lands and from fisheries biologists. But we went ahead, confident the power would be needed in the years to come. I had the most glorious life any child could ever live. I lived waking up and going to bed and taking all of my sustenance and my very being to the roar of the Snake River. We had the best water to drink, wasn't contaminated. We pulled out some of the biggest salmon, salmon that weighed over 100 pounds. We had no need of anything else. The earth sustained us. It's very different today. We knew something important was going on because of how serious everybody became. There were weeks on end when my mother and my tiller would be gone, and what they were doing was trying to ask the Corps of Engineers to reconsider the plans. I remember the day when we had to move, and that's when I finally realized that my life was going to change, and I would never again wake up by the falls because, um, excuse me. A group of anthropology students from the University of Washington and Washington State University showed up. My mother's eyesight was already failing, and so was my grandpa's, and they couldn't quite make out what they were lifting out of the earth, and I said, they're taking a canoe. What they were doing was they were actually removing her grandfather's burial, and he had been buried in a canoe. That's one of the agreements that the Corps of Engineers entered into with the University of Washington and Washoe was to be able to do their anthropological studies before the water buried them. And then finally there were sheriff's cars. That's when they escorted us off, and we were never allowed to come back to our village, and even right after that, we seen the water coming up right to where our road, and it started covering our road. That's how fast the buildup was of that water once they closed that dam off. That's how right to the very end my mother and my grandfather hung on to our site. That as we got over that ridge, I could see our logs that we played with. They were floating now, and it's all underwater now. I was with the Army Corps of Engineers for over 35 years. I started off in Charleston District in 1975 as a GS-5 and moved up the ranks very quickly and ended up retiring around 2013 out of Atlanta, Georgia. The Lower Snake Feasibility Report was a report that was basically started in Walla Walla District at the direction of a federal judge who said we needed to look at the alternative of breaching dams versus keeping dams and come up with the cost-benefit economics and biological benefits. The report was started in 1995. I actually arrived on the scene in 1999, so I was at sort of the tail end of that report and catching the final drafts and so forth. What I began to notice was that there was this sort of built-in inherent bias in any kind of discussion. It seemed to always be, you know, the dams are providing great benefit to the country and they're not really that bad a deal for salmon and all this kind of stuff, but I didn't really know anything about the Lower Snake. I mean, I didn't know anything about salmon. You know, all I knew about it was it comes in a can and you eat it every now and then, and so I didn't, you know, have any preconceived notions about the study or anything like that. It was my judgment, professional judgment, based on the input I had from the report that the dam should be breached. The lieutenant colonel, who was the commander of the district at the time, was, I think when I told him that, he was pretty much in panic. He assumed that keeping the dams was the answer he was going to get, and then that report basically was completed in 2002. The decision at that point was, it had already been made. It was a decision made by the division anyway, the politicians, Bonneville Power Administration, and even National Marine Fisheries, and so I was just a, you know, ripple in the process, and they, you know, figured out just, well, just ignore this guy and move on. Anybody that had read that report would seriously wonder how we could make a decision to keep the dams, and while I was there, I felt like, okay, well, at least it's here. If I couldn't get the decision made inside the Corps, somebody outside the Corps, environmental organizations and the public at large, could read this, and they would have the ammunition they needed to come after that decision and, and win. One of the major reasons for constructing the Lower Snake River dams was to bring barge transportation to Lewiston, and people believed that this was going to be a great boon to the economy. Lewiston was going to prosper. Some people even predicted that it would grow larger than Spokane. On the Snake River itself, there's no longer any shipment of logs, of lumber, of petroleum. The only commodity being shipped is wheat or grain, basically. The reason that grain continues to be shipped is because that transportation is highly subsidized by the federal government. If there were not the big subsidy, farmers would switch to rail rapidly. The Port of Lewiston has been in deficit spending for the last five years. In the red, about 1.5 million dollars. The cost of operation for the locks just on the Lower Snake runs about 10 to 12 million a year. They have to dredge the channel to keep the Port of Lewiston open. The Corps says every three to five years. The last dredging job costs just shy of 10 million dollars. Then you have major repairs and rehab to those locks and dams. When you put this all together, every barge that leaves the Port of Lewiston has a taxpayer subsidy of about $21,000. That's for every barge. It would be much, much cheaper to just pay the farmers the difference between rail and barge and ship by rail. The question sometimes arises about, gee, what would happen if we lost the power of the Snake River dams? The bottom line answer is nothing. All of the power produced by the Lower Snake River dams is surplus to the system. In other words, if the Snake River dams were shut down tomorrow, Bonneville Power would not need to replace that energy at all. Bonneville Power is an agency charged with marketing power generated by Corps of Engineer projects. The surplus they historically market to off-system customers, things like British Columbia, other utilities in the Northwest, and California via the Northwest Intertie. For 30, 40, 50 years, that was a very lucrative business because in the middle of the day, California would run short of power. The price per megawatt hour would go $50, $60, $70, as high as $100 a megawatt hour. But starting in 2009, that changed. Wind turbines started becoming economical. Solar panels started becoming economical. And instead of the prices coming up in the middle of the daytime, they started coming down. So what used to be $50, $60, $70 megawatt hour power in the afternoons is now $30, $20, $10. And occasionally, you will see the prices even go negative because, and this is kind of critical, because sometimes there is now so much power being produced that the companies are actually paying people to take it. When Bonneville Power says its power costs $36 megawatt hour, what they used to sell for $50 is now being sold at $20 or less. So what used to be profitable power for Bonneville Power is now a money-losing situation. When you look at what's been going on the last few years, with the pressure on our revenue streams, with the pressure on our cost structure, with the changes in the industry, the collapsing wholesale electricity prices, I think that the commercial pressures on Bonneville have become much more significant. Everybody knows we've taken huge hits in the secondary revenue market, just like every other hydro provider up here. It's been a bloodbath for folks in the wholesale market. That situation is not going to turn around. The amount of solar and wind energy coming into the market is increasing steadily. And in fact, today, wind and solar in the Pacific Northwest has replaced the energy produced by the Lower Snake River dams six times over. Bonneville's rates have gone up 30 percent since 2008. And, you know, I have heard it since the day I took the job that we've got to get ourselves off of this unsustainable rate trajectory. I will tell you that today, with the PF rate at around $36 per megawatt hour and market in the $21, $22, $23 range, you know, we are not strictly competitive on a pure price point basis. Bonneville Power Administration is approaching a fiscal cliff. They have exhausted their reserves. They've raised their rates. They charge their preference customers by 30 percent. And they have this big surplus of energy that they can't market. You know, it's tough for me to have to point this out. But, you know, after over the last decade, Bonneville has burned through about $800 million of cash. We're down close to zero in terms of cash reserves on the power business line. So Bonneville Power has a serious problem. And consequently, so does the Pacific Northwest. Whether you're a family paying your power bill or a business that uses power, reckoning day is coming, so to speak. Can Bonneville Power survive without making changes? Probably not. I think it's important that we don't get into a panic mode. I'm not in a panic mode, but I'm in a very, very significant sense of urgency mode. And I do think that the risks facing Bonneville are real. And I feel that even though we've got 10 years left in our long-term contracts until 2028, that the time for action and I think real action is now. We're not getting what we paid for out of these dams. I'm paying for fish killing machines rather than anything useful to me or to my society, really. I know the four Lower Snake Dams should be removed. If a private entity, rather than the Corps of Engineers, owned those dams and was paying the bills on the dams, you'd have a backhoe up there taking them down tomorrow afternoon. They are that bad. These four dams are crucial to meet BPA's peak loads during those hottest days in the summer when the wind doesn't blow or the coldest days in the winter when we do not have sunlight. I can't express how important this hydro system is for the entire Northwest. I've heard you couldn't match the energy produced by these dams with six or more coal-fired power plants. None of us want to return to that. If they go away, what happens? It means more natural gas, more fossil fuels. It makes no sense. It's not uncommon for the pro-dam contingent to make statements that are literally unsupportable. That would be one of them. They're just lying. More total salmon have returned this year than before the dams were actually put in place. We've seen several years of record or near-record returns of adult salmon. Both politicians and some fisheries biologists have said that there are record runs of salmon returning to the Columbia Basin. I actually don't know how to rectify that with what I know to be true. Just go ask any Idaho steelhead fisherman or salmon fisherman how much he's enjoying these record runs and you'll have your answer. You should let the experts in U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Bonneville Power, NOAA, NMFS lead the way. This is a 50-year PR program of misinformation to tell people the dams would bring prosperity to the whole region and it hasn't. 1753, is that 47? Two o'clock position, still in sight. Beginning to rise now. Yep. I think it was July 24th, 2018. One of my colleagues called from Victoria. He was out on the boat and saw a brand new baby in JPOD and he called excitedly, you know, a new baby. And we had a boat on the water so I sent Dave over and said check it out, document this baby right now. And by the time he got there the baby was dead. And the mother started pushing this baby all the way over to San Juan Island from Victoria, up Harrow Strait. That evening I expected she'd lose it sometime. Next day she was pushing it again. And the day after, and the fourth day, I began taking video of this tragic event and we started spreading it in the news media. A mother orca whose calf died after birth is still carrying her baby 17 days later. Researchers say that they're now concerned for the mother's health. This is a mother that has lost her baby and she is going through the intense mourning process. To carry her calf around she would have to dump the calf off of her head and then take a breath and then go down underwater and pick the sinking calf up and come back up to the surface and swim with that dead calf draped across the front of her head and sometimes over the her blow hole. So whenever she would need to take another breath she would have to drop the calf off again. And so that was absolutely heartbreaking to see and to know that that was a conscious choice. Every time she had to take a breath she knew she was going to have to drop her calf and it was a conscious choice every time for her to go down and retrieve it. And just to think about that from the perspective of a grieving individual, it's a really horrifying thing to have to consider. But she did it. She considered it for every breath for 17 days. I know you've seen these pictures, Governor. What's your reaction to it? Well it's the same as seven million Washingtonians, which is heartbreak. It touches us all very deeply and I am hopeful it's going to inspire all of us to put our shoulders to the wheel to do what is necessary to save the Orcas. But a lot of people are saying in order to make a real move in the right direction for Chinook salmon we need to breach the lower four snake dams. Do you take a position on that? Yeah my position is we should consider the science and that is a decision that is being considered. What we have to do is get our political leaders to go the same direction and start taking down these dams. The public has to provide the political backing for these leaders who are unwilling to make a decision to do what has to be done. I wonder if you could be kind enough to circle back to one of the themes which was take action. Can you talk about actions that everyone could take? Carla and I went to the offices of the Senators Murray and Cantwell today and if we had all been there they would have been real impressed. We got to just let them know, let them know, let them know. Yeah and never confuse process with progress or progress with success. The biggest single bang for the buck for getting Habitat and Salmon back is remove these four deadbeat money-sucking taxpayer leeching dams that never should have been put there in the first place and do all the other nice things you can do but don't let your focus be diluted. Look at this my god this is so beautiful. This is beautiful and it is so what we need to do. The missing link in saving these whales is the masses of people that are interested in them and love them to have a voice, speak up, start doing things. You've got to get everybody wearing a button and knowing these whales and they're voting, they're pressing for solve this problem. We're not only here for ourselves but for those who don't have a voice the way that you and I do and who can't speak up for themselves like you and I can. I'm very sad about the damage that my generation has done to this ecosystem and I'm angry with the people who have allowed that to happen. Mr. Governor you have heard from over 700,000 of your constituents who are unwilling to postpone the removal of the lower floor snake river dam. I'm trying to spread awareness to people my age and kids and teens. I do public speaking and also writing to our senators. Enough people do that I think that it can make a big difference. They can't really do it without the will of the people, without this, without us, without the pressure, without the words. This is what is going to make it happen. We're not talking about removing all the dams on the Columbia River system. We've got four lower snake river dams that are the most egregious of all. And those dams they had a good run. They had a great run but the run's over. We messed it up and we need to do everything we can to clean it up. It's all one body of water from the top of the mountain and the continental divide to the bottom of the ocean it's all one water. I want our grandchildren, our great great grandchildren to know and see an orca, see the lamprey, see the salmon, see us. The more that people become aware the more a chance there is for these whales to survive. This is probably the most important project I've undertaken in my life to try and do something for these animals. There's a lot of opposition. This is a world treasure. We can't let it go, the salmon or the whales. It's time to act. We feel your power, great river. Let your salmon guide us upstream, gotta keep your waters clean. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let your salmon guide us upstream, gotta keep your waters free. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let our lives feed the next generation. Feel your power, great river. Let your salmon guide us upstream, gotta keep your waters clean. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let your salmon guide us upstream, gotta keep your waters free. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let our lives feed the next generation. Let our lives feed the next generation.