Salmon Haiku

When considering the label for COHO, we worked with a wonderful Bay Area artist (and long-time friend) Chanda Williams. We shared the Salmon of Knowledge story and asked her to come up with various ideas. Chanda presented six or seven initial drawings. All four COHO partners studied them and gave input as how to refine them. However there was one very clean rendition that didn’t need much in the way of change. As we considered the other updated drawings, we each were drawn back to the simplicity of that one label that didn’t need alteration. We began to call it our “Zen” label, and soon all agreed that this was to be COHO’s face to the world.

Inspired by the Zen nature of the label we created the Haiku that is on our back label:

Swim against the flow
Lightning glimpsed through water
Sustain the species

Several months ago we met Dr. Peter Moyle, head of the Wildlife, Fish, and Conservation Biology Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. Much of the research and field work that Peter and his students are doing is pointing the way to how we can preserve habitat in California for all the creatures we share it with. In addition Peter is a writer of Haiku, and often writes salmon related haiku on the blackboard before class, and asks his students to contribute their own. Here’s one Peter recently wrote that expresses his concern about the spread of West Nile virus that is reducing the local crow and magpie populations:

Are noisy black crows
Streaming across morning sky
Becoming salmon?