It's been a good year for the people trying to restore the Atlantic Salmon populations in their native spawning ground in the tributaries of the Connecticut River. The Vermont Standard's Kevin Forrest reports the fish that once filled New Englands rivers and streams are starting to come back.
David Deen at streamside - Oh�.big fish just jumped over there (laughs) �there he is! That�s probably a rainbow (laughs) isn�t that something? He�s having a good ol� time!
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David Deen stands on the bank of the Cold River in Walpole, NH. just a few miles upstream from where the Cold joins the Connecticut.
A few years ago Deen�s organization, the Connecticut River Watershed Council, helped make this spot in the river more fish-friendly.
A coalition of public and private interests replaced a dam with rock structure.
This allows fish like Atlantic Salmon to reach their spawning waters upstream at the end of a 4,000-mile odyssey to the ocean and back.
Even though the fish that just jumped wasn�t a salmon, Deen�s joy upon seeing it is testimony to the success of the salmon restoration efforts.
Anyone involved is quick to tell you that work on behalf of the salmon benefits all fish and all river users.
Deen - Our take is that it�s not the fish, it�s the river.
Deen and others involved in the multi-state Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission are clearly feeling pretty good this summer.
The spring salmon run brought a higher-than usual number of returning adults.
Gabe Gries is a fisheries biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.
Gries - Currently as of today we have 183 adult Atlantic salmon that have returned to the Connecticut river watershed. The past 4 or 5 years has been averaging about 45 or 46 fish per year.
Experts can�t seem to pin this year�s success on any one factor.
Jan Rowan is the coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service based in Sunderland, Massachusetts.
Rowan - The biological ups and downs of fish sometimes happen on their own and this may be one of those.
Construction of dams along the Connecticut and its tributaries over the past two centuries shut salmon off from their spawning grounds and they vanished from the region.
When biologists set out in the 1960s to bring the migrating fish back to the upper reaches of the Connecticut, they had their work cut out.
They built fish ladders and cleared tributaries.
But that was perhaps the easiest challenge.
After several years in the ocean, Salmon instinctually come back to the place they hatched in order to spawn.
Trouble was there were no salmon spawning in the Connecticut.
And the early salmon gathered in Maine and deposited in the Connecticut had genetic inclinations to return to Maine.
So biologists had to genetically retraining the fish.
And Jan Rowan says that doesn't happen overnight.
Rowan - We started a reintroduction of salmon in the late 60s that really didn�t get rolling until maybe the mid 80s.
But retraining the fish to return to the Connecticut was just one part of the solution.
The fish have to survive their years in the ocean, a migration that takes them up to Greenland.
New Hampshire Fish and Game's Gabe Gries says that of the Millions of baby fish introduced each year, only a few dozen survive.
Gries - For example in 2001, which are the adult fish returning this year, about 9.5 million fry were stocked. In the year 2000 9.3 million fry were stocked and we only got 69 adults back.
The apparent low return rate has made the salmon restoration program a target of critics.
They say the two and a half million spent annually to bring salmon back to the Connecticut�s watershed isn�t worth the results.
Jan Rowan says they miss the point.
While the salmon restoration gets the most attention, it�s the habitat improvement that yields the biggest benefit.
Rowan - A lot of what we do is sort of invisible. Working to restore the river to make the habitat better for fish is something that makes a cleaner, healthier river for everybody but it�s not something that you see.
The salmon restoration project is federally funded with additional proceeds from state fishing licenses and a tax on fishing equipment.
Jan Rowan with US fish and Wildlife hopes this year�s higher-than-usual salmon return will help the program vie for dwindling government monies.
Rowan - Folks that look to see accomplishments or some sort of benchmark that they can associated with success and that�s what they want to to fund And so in a year like this when we get a lot of fish back we hope that stands up on its own legs.
Biologists and others aren�t resting on the laurels of this year�s successful return. Rowan says they keep busy checking on the babies stocked in the spring.
Rowan - And then in August and September we actually go out and and survey the streams. We checked for the fish to see how well they�ve grown and how many are there and get kind of a handle on who survived and who didn�t and how well they�re doing.
The hope is that after years of work, the hundreds of volunteers joining the state and federal biologists have finally reached a point at which increasing numbers of salmon regularly return to their spawning grounds
While only 183 adult salmon returned this year, that's nearly 3 times the numbers of the past several years.
And that's 183 adults that will spawn and fix a genetic code into hundreds of thousands of eggs. Out of these, only a handful will return.
For NHPR News, this is Kevin Forrest..
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