By Ron Karten
Smoke Signals staff writer

Claude Peters remembers fishing for pike at the edge of the Sauer River.
Peters, 28, has loved fishing since he was 10. He started in the small town of Mersch, Luxembourg, and it was this love of outdoor life that led him to a career in the natural resources.
“You had the place all to yourself,” he remembered about the Sauer River in January at the end of his six-month internship with the Grand Ronde Tribe.
In describing a fishing trip to Pacific City with Natural Resources biotech staffer Lawrence Schwabe, one of the cultural experiences he enjoyed here, Peters said he was amazed that fishermen line up along the dock, so close together that everyone casts their lines straight out.
In the end, though, things didn’t turn out too badly. Even with all those fishermen out there, Peters was the second one to catch a Coho.
“We catch bigger fishes in Luxembourg,” he said. “We have pikes that you could compare to Chinook salmon.”
So, it was no trouble for him to pull the two-foot Coho from the water. It was a wild fish, however, (a fin was not clipped as they are on farm-raised salmon), and he had to throw it back.
An outdoorsy, athletic guy from the time he was a child, Peters studies forestry in Rottenburg, Germany, at the University of Applied Science. This, not coincidentally, is the same school that Tribal Geographic Information System coordinator Volker Mell attended almost 10 years earlier.
Students at the school use their fifth of six semesters to do an internship, and Peters selected the Grand Ronde Tribe as much because Mell works here as because of Oregon’s reputation for forests and forest management.
At the end, Peters looked back on his time in Grand Ronde with much appreciation.
“The things I learned here are really going to help me. I’m way ahead of anybody else,” he said.
“Every year, I have people contacting me from that school,” said Mell, who not only mentored Peters in the art of GIS, but also hosted him during his six months here. “He liked to make maps.”
Mell had a similar internship in the U.S. Northwest when he was a student, but Mell worked with the U.S. Forest Service. Mell took an additional internship on a eucalyptus plantation in Australia, he said.
For two months, Peters made maps for Tribal purposes.
“He worked on ceded lands maps that will be hanging in locations all over western Oregon,” Mell said. “He was pretty good at capturing stuff just by reading. He wants to learn.”
“We don’t use GIS much,” Peters said of his studies in Germany. And the forests are more varied and slower growing than the predominantly fir forests are here in the Northwest. “The main difference is here, you do a lot of clear cuts. We do everything we can to avoid that.”
Peters started working at the Natural Resources Department when he arrived in mid-August. At the end of November, he moved over to Mell’s GIS Department.
At Natural Resources, Peters worked with Schwabe cleaning out the fish weir and building things.
“Claude was a good worker,” said Schwabe. He was “beneficial to the program,” helping with the boat tracking of lamprey, and downloading some of the fixed sites that also track lamprey.
“He was really interested in the biology part of lamprey that nobody really knows about, and we’re finding new information on them all the time,” Schwabe said.
They also worked together on a deer tracking project.
On the lighter side, Peters relaxed at a Blazers game (the Blazers won), watching the new movie “Avatar,” and, says Mell, in the summer he had the not so relaxing experience of running into a swarm of angry bees three or four days in a row.
He helped around the house, Mell added, working on the roof at one point, and playing with the dog at many others. When Peters left, Mell said, “We lost the best ball thrower (for our dog) ever.”

Photo by Michelle Alaimo