For Zo Ann Morten, 30 years of unfailing volunteer work began with a single, uninformed request.
Her children’s elementary school was planning to put a salmon box in Keith Creek and they needed somebody to keep an eye on it during weekends.
“I was asked as a non-working mother,” Morten recalls. “Of course, there is no such thing as a non-working mother,” she adds.
But in the habit of mothers everywhere, Morten took on one more responsibility, checking the temperature of the creek after church or her child’s soccer practice. She quickly found an immense pleasure in being outside and walking the banks of the creek. And as luck would have it, the Pacific Salmon Foundation had just been created to conserve the salmon populations in B.C. and the Yukon.
As a volunteer streamkeeper you get to do a bit of everything, Morten notes. She’s chronicled the bugs in the creek, counted the invertebrates and worked with engineers. Sometimes, she said, you even “get to be a mad scientist,” mixing chemicals to gauge water quality.
“I love the work itself but the people are just amazing – there’s two that aren’t that great,” she jokes.
In surveys of streamkeepers, Morten says many don hip waders to protect the environment or to learn something new, but most volunteers are involved for a simpler reason.
“The No. 1 answer for getting involved: friendship,” she says.
The work is also a way to connect with nature, Morten explains.
“I always tell people: ‘Before you put that thermometer in the water, put your finger in first,’” she says.
The excursions to the river are an escape from technology and a way to rejuvenate, she says. “If you’re ever, ever, feeling tired, just go and sit on a rock near a creek,” she advises. “It’s like the cheapest oxygen bar you’ll ever go to.”
But as enjoyable as the work can be, Morten also has deep concerns about the health of returning salmon.
“We’re getting cancerous lesion in them now,” she says. “There’s some messed up stuff happening.”
However, Morten notes volunteers have a role in chronicling the fish population, but not diagnosing individual fish.
“We’re volunteers, we don’t know anything. We’ve been told,” she adds with a laugh.
On Oct. 16, the Pacific Salmon Foundation awarded Morten the George Hungerford Award for dedicating her “personal and professional life to the recovery and conservation of wild salmon.”
The award includes $10,000 that Morten plans to donate right back to water quality studies and salmon habitat evaluations, according to a press release from the Pacific Salmon Foundation.
Morten might have gotten the award years earlier but was ineligible because she was on the foundation’s board of directors; a post she jokingly offered to resign only to be repeatedly rebuffed.
Asked if she has any closing thoughts about the award or the foundation, Morten notes the evening’s forecast is for rain and offers three words:
Clear your drains, she says.
