Spring is the easy season to love: flowers begin to bloom, butterflies begin to flutter by, birds rejoice at every dawn, and the fecundity of the natural world comes streaming back but, the mornings are still crisp and cool, the biting bugs are still absent, and a fire in the wood stove is still a pleasant comfort to come home to after a day outdoors. The weather may be a bit on the unpredictable side during this season, but overall it is a time of hope, expectations, and renewal.
Spring is still struggling to spring here in SE Alaska this year, it is still on the cold side of the thermometer and the higher elevations still have a fresh coating of new snow in the mornings but the Robins and Varied Thrushes and Song Sparrows are doing their best to sing spring into being. So far this spring we have had the usual migrants passing through: Snow Geese, Sandhill Cranes, some shorebirds like Western Sandpipers, the Rufous Hummingbirds are here, Snipe, Harriers, etc. representing the avian world and for the last few weeks, the annual temporary increase in the Bald Eagle and Steller Sea Lion populations as they come to feast on the subject of this post.
For those of us living here at the mouth of the last river of its kind in North America, the Stikine, spring also brings aquatic migrants in the form of a small but immensely important fish known by many names: the eulachon or hooligan. These fish, a type of smelt, are a bit of a mystery to science, much is known about them but there is nearly an equal amount that is not known about them. Some of the knowns is the fact that they are such an important food source after the winter season that the Stikine River has the second largest congregation of Bald Eagles in North America during this time. We know when there are hooligan running up the river because there is an obvious absence of Eagles in town. Bald Eagles, being as common here as crows in other parts of the country, are a normal daily bird to see, not seeing them is what becomes an unusual event and at this time of year, not seeing them around their normal haunts in town means there are hooligan in the river. When there are hooligan in the river, we Two Legs also begin to spend more time up the river in small skiffs with jetdrive outboards capable of navigating the shallow channels while the mighty Stikine is a little less mighty with most of its future waters still held fast in the mountains as snow and ice.
The history of humans, hooligan, the Stikine River, and the town of Wrangell is very intertwined. These small fish are one of the many incredibly rich and important natural resources that the Stikine provides and supports which was, and still is, why humans hold this river so dear. While there is currently no real commercial industry around hooligan, in the past they were a very valuable commodity of trade and commerce as dried food or rendered down into a very rich and nutritious oil or "grease" consumed by people all along the NW Pacific coast. Hooligan are still a coveted seasonal food for many people although they seem to have a "love 'em or hate 'em" reputation among most people I know. Being in the "love 'em" camp, I make an effort to catch as many as I can every spring as I enjoy eating them but enjoy giving them away to others in the "love 'em" camp even more. It is very easy to give out hundreds of pounds of hooligan once word has spread in town that there are hooligan available!
This is my friend Martin successfully fishing for hooligan with a cast net. Beach seines, dip nets, and cast nets are all effective means of harvesting these fish although cast netting is my preferred method - I like the exercise it provides, the needed skill for the actual throwing of the net, and how clean the fish are when put into the cooler. The first photo in this post was of an unsuccessful drag along a stretch of beach with a beach seine, it is good to have several different hooligan catching tools at your disposal as sometimes one is more effective than another. On this day, the cast nets were the most effective.
A pretty decent catch on that throw! We were consistently getting a couple dozen fish per throw and in about one hour, we harvested at least 300 pounds of hooligan.
That is what all the fuss is about, those slender, delicate little fish. Thousands of sea gulls and Bald Eagles and hundreds upon hundreds of seals and sea lions congregate in the Stikine just for the nutritious benefit of these creatures. Hooligan are a type of smelt, they are in the smelt family, but are much different than the other smelts in some ways. The predominant way is the amount of oil they contain within their bodies. Samples of hooligan have been found to contain 18-20% oil. Compared to the oil contents of other similar food fishes, this is double to triple the amount of oil found in fish like capelin, sand lance, and herring! The oils in hooligan are mostly mono-unsaturated fats, particularly oleic acid. Oleic acid is an extremely beneficial compound that has been proven to lower blood pressure, increase HDL, the "good" cholesterol, increase brain and nerve function, and a whole host of other good things. There is also an interesting connection between oliec acid and fire ants which I will let you research on your own if you are interested. Hooligan are also high in Vitamins A and E as well as calcium, iron, and zinc so it isn't hard to guess why so many creatures come from so far away to feast on these little packages of energy and nutrition.
Another interesting fact about hooligan is that the males and females seem to segregate themselves into separate waves of returning schools. On my first hooligan fishing trip this year in early April, about 99% of the fish we caught were female. On the next two trips later in the month, every single fish that I personally processed, which numbered over 1,000 fish, 100% of them were male. There are distinct morphological differences between the males and females: the males pectoral fins are noticeably larger for one and they have a pronounced ridge of muscle running the length of their bodies just above the lateral line. There are some other less distinctive differences but the two I mentioned are the most obvious.
This is a small bowl of hooligan cleaned and gutted with the heads and tails removed waiting to be processed. My preferred methods of processing and preserving them is by canning them in a way similar to sardines with either mustard or hot sauce, drying them in a food dehydrator, or pickling them.
This is a packed half pint jar of hooligan ready to be canned. It takes about 5 fish to fill a half pint jar; about 9 fish for a pint jar.
One rack of cleaned hooligan ready to go into the dehydrator.
A batch of hooligan out of the dehydrator. I then put them in Ziploc bags in the freezer and eat them as is as a snack or rehydrate them as a sort of fish stock for soups or other dishes. In this form, they present a high energy, nutritious, tasty, and easy snack: fish chips!
48 half pint jars fresh out of the canner ready for the pantry! I did this batch half with brown mustard and half with hipster ketchup (sriracha sauce). Canning is a lot of work and is a time consuming process so, for me, usually is spread out over the course of 2 or 3 days for the cleaning of fish, prepping fish and ingredients, packing jars, and then the actual canning. As you can see in the left of this photo, there is a french press of coffee cocked and loaded waiting to be consumed because I unloaded the canners in the morning before work after spending several hours the previous evening doing the canning.
The finished product. I don't know how to describe the amount of pleasure and fulfillment I get from opening my cabinets and seeing jar after jar after jar of food that I gathered, fished, or hunted. These jars represent so much more than sustenance: there are memories, experiences, effort, knowledge, wisdom, and risk contained within these jars in addition to the food. The matter in these jars not only sustain my physical self, they also provide some sort of spiritual nutrition as well. Occasionally I will open my cupboard doors and spend several minutes just looking at the bounty on the shelves. Some store bought box or bag of "food" with a long list of ingredients, half of which we don't know what they are, can't give this same feeling of contentment and security.
Jars of hooligan about to go in the refrigerator to become pickled hooligan. This was my first time pickling them and after a week in the refrigerator, I now declare them a new favorite method of eating hooligan!
