Mountain stream

[water rushing] Wild, churning, teeming with life.

[water rushing] In winter, the majority of the water up in the mountains is frozen as snow and ice, and yet mountain streams rarely freeze completely.

They flow too quickly due to the gradient.

The gorges they carve out of the stone are often so steep that only mountaineering specialists like the chamois can access them safely.

Their streamlined bodies show them to be specialists for rapid currents.

Once they reach their destination, the males court the females.

But why do they take on such an arduous journey? Mountain streams flow so fast that air bubbles are constantly bursting, so the water contains more oxygen than any other body of water.

This makes the spawn develop especially well.

yeah but they it's kind of it's described often as mouse like chirps um so that's why they're nicknamed the sea mouse or the squeaker but that is their sound which i will play here Okay, so now we're getting into the wild facts of what's going on.

So... breeding range they love fast flowing whitewater mountain streams in forested terrain western populations across alaska the yukon and western canada down through the rockies but like the coastal rockies so like think pacific northwest of the u.s kind of thing um and canadian rockies but They do have a small eastern population along rivers in Quebec, Labrador, and Newfoundland, which is on the other side of Canada.

Their non-breeding winter range is rocky, wave-battered coastlines, so Pacific Northwest and Alaskan shores, or Aleutian.

I think Aleutian is different than Alaskan, actually.

Yeah, exactly.

Warming stream temperatures.

So think, remember, they are often mountain streams, mountain rivers.

So warming stream temperatures and earlier snow melt are starting to shift the insect availability and timing for their breeding and everything.