Amid severely restricted fishing on the Kuskokwim River, one bright spot has been abundant sockeye salmon runs at 30,000 fish daily near Bethel.
Biologists do not expect either to reach their goals for fish reaching their spawning grounds.
The booming Bristol Bay salmon run has broken the record set just last year, while on the Yukon River, Chinook are too scarce to harvest.
A decades-long decline in salmon in the Yukon River has reached a crisis this year, forcing harvest closures and prompting emergency shipments of salmon from other regions of Alaska to river residents who are otherwise facing food shortages.
Chum returns are the lowest on record, leaving communities with empty freezers and uncertainty about getting through the winter.
The Kuskokwim River king salmon run does not look particularly strong this year, but chum numbers look even worse. Historically, around 60% of the salmon in the river at this point in the season would be chum or sockeye, but right now Bethel Test Fishery numbers show that just over 20% of the salmon are.
Midnight on Dec. 31 brings the close of 2019 and also the close of the hunting season for Mulchatna Caribou on federal lands. The federal season,
As record high temperatures swept Alaska, many people said that the heat was killing them. For Kuskokwim salmon, it was actually true.
Subsistence families along the Kuskokwim River are cutting open fish to find white balls or white streaks deforming the meat.
Late freeze on the Lower Kuskokwim produced ice conditions unsafe for travel in November.
Kuskokwim River chum salmon numbers remain off-the-charts low. However, sockeyes are still coming in strong. Meanwhile, the summer rain has not been
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