Salmon Run - October 2024
In 2022 I moved much closer to the Humber River. That meant that for the first time living in Toronto I was aware of the salmon run: how close it was and how accessible it was.
That autumn I was totally struck by it. A place I considered to be basically my back yard - and the back yard of thousands of other city-folk - was also the site of these huge, abundant fish really just hanging out in the shallow waters of the river. There’s lots of things I like about Toronto, but I never thought of it as ‘wild’. It had green facsimiles of wilderness to tide you over until you could get to the real outdoors. But the sight of the salmon run really messed with that presumption. Here was a mass migration of wildlife straight through the city. It was surreal.
So I started learning all about them - trying to go beyond the stuff you get from a generic nature documentary. That led to me doing an early halloween-themed episode on this notion of ‘zombie salmon’ biologically breaking down as they approach their spawning grounds.
I was pretty happy with it, but I always felt like this could have been served by a more expansive video. There was a lot more to say. So, two years later, I almost accidentally set out to make that happen.
I wasn’t ready for the salmon run this year. It’s hard to predict exactly when they’ll be most abundant. And in 2024, that abundance turned out to be right in the midst of a frantic month for me. I was travelling every weekend and under a work crunch.
But again I leaned on the gift of living so close to the Humber River. I was able to carve out time from the chaos in the very early mornings to visit them and watch them try to leap the dams. It became incredibly therapeutic amongst the insanity to steal a couple blissful hours to film it all - the fish, the jumps, the egrets and herons, the gathering of gulls, the river itself.
This was all part of an ongoing attempt to start working longer videos into the Canadianimals mix (while, admittedly, I’m already having trouble keeping up a disciplined release schedule on the shorter ones). The salmon run feels like a very conveniently pre-packaged experiment for this. I already had a lot of footage from 2022 - back when I was still shooting most everything landscape - and it all felt reasonably self-contained. You could tell the story via this one stretch of the Humber River near where it crosses Bloor Street.
So. That’s all in the pipeline as I settle back in from a month of insane travel and want to believe that I can get back to a more routine release schedule!