Fifth-grade students from Heritage Elementary School crowded around a large bucket. Behind them, water from Camanche Reservoir rushed into the Mokelumne River and downstream, but the students weren’t looking at the river. Their eyes were on the bucket.
They were trying to count how many little salmon fry were swimming around in the bucket.
“We keep telling them to hold still, but they won’t,” teacher Janine Jacinto joked.
The students had received a few dozen salmon eggs 31 days earlier. A tank on loan from the Delta Fly Fishers housed the eggs until they hatched and the little salmon grew to “fry,” or juvenile, stage.
Now, the students were saying goodbye to their scaled friends.