In the beginning, the salmon are in little pink eggs no bigger than a pea that lie in a gravel nest called a redd. The nest is in a fresh water stream.

In late winter or early spring, the eggs will begin to hatch. When the salmon eggs hatch, the tiny see-through fish are called alevins. On the stomach of the alevin there is a round hanging sac called a yolk sac. For the first few weeks after hatching, the salmon does not eat. Instead it draws nourishment from its yolk sac.

After a few weeks, the alevins start to grow restless down in the gravel of their stream or river bed. Little by little they begin to wriggle up toward open water.

As time passes, the alevins' yolk sacs become smaller and smaller until they have disappeard altogether. Once the baby salmon lose their yolk sacs, they are no longer called alevins. They are now called fry. The salmon fry, although only about an inch long, look much more like fish now. After a while the salmon become quick, strong hunters. They soon learn to leap high out of the water after their prey.

Soon the teenage salmon leaves the stream or river where it hatched. It swims downstream toward the ocean with about hundreds of its own kind. Somtimes the salmon's journey is as long as 1800 miles long.

At last the salmon reach the bay where the ocean meets the stream or river. They stay at this point for a little while almost as if they are deciding whether to go on or not. Finally they set out into the ocean where they spend most of their adult lives.

The salmon spend a few years in the ocean and then return to the fresh water.They head straiaght to the stream that they hatched in. People still can't figure out how the salmon can find its way back over all those miles.

Thousands of small pink eggs are now growing inside of the female salmon causing her to look fat. The male on the other hand is getting long and skinny and is developing a hooked jaw.

After the salmon mate, the female begins building a nest. She finds a spot in the gravel where oxygen flows well and the rocks are somewhat loose.She lowers herself onto the gravel and swishes her tail against it, digging a hole or a nest called a redd. She lays her eggs, then moves to another spot and digs another nest and lays another group of eggs. She repeats this about five times, each time digging a nest and laying her eggs.

The female is very protective of her eggs and will protect them until the very last moment when she dies.