Transcript: Life and Death of Salmon

NARRATOR: For most of their life, salmon travel the North Pacific, foraging the ocean’s rich food supplies.

When a mysterious inner signal draws them back to the coast... they gather at the mouths of their respective home rivers…before turning upstream.

They come in waves, obsessively seeking the streams – often the very gravel beds – where they were born.

DAVID DUNCAN: It’s this orgy of abundance.

For some, home is the coastal rain forest…

For others, it’s a high desert canyon…

And for Idaho’s endangered sockeye, home is deep in the continent’s rugged alpine interior.

Past eight giant dams…

Countless false turns…

Idaho sockeye remain insistent on the unique chemical signature of Redfish Lake – a cold water womb in the Sawtooth Mountains, named for the colorful fish that once spawned here in the tens of thousands.

After excavating a gravel nest… they set the next generation on its way.

Soon after, they die.

DAVID DUNCAN: It’s amazing what they do in order to reach these birth houses of these beautiful wilderness streams, eastern Oregon, eastern Washington, Idaho streams. They give up their lives to put thousands of these little glowing red balls into the stone spine of this continent. It’s this luminous ball. It looks backlit, it looks like the sun. In cold stone, cold water, they find a fire that creates life.