Salmon count on upswing 6/9/05

GOOD NEWS! 133 Salmon returned vs 77 for previous years.
BAD NEWS! Lowest number of Shad in 30 years.

After five years of disappointing returns of migrating Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut River, the upstream run this year is proving to be the best since 1999. With the season about two-thirds completed, some 133 salmon had been counted yesterday at all the dams on the river and its tributaries, including the Westfield and Farmington rivers. In the previous five years, no more than 77 salmon had returned in an entire season. However, the returns still fall far short of original expectations when the salmon restoration program began in the 1960s. It was hoped that 10,000 or more salmon, often called "the king of the game fish," would make the spring run to their spawning grounds, but the most in any one year to date was 529 in 1981. To date, more than $100 million has been spent in opening up the Connecticut River to spawning fish and the stocking program. "We've been struggling to get these fish restored. It's been a major challenge, to say the least. We're trying to do something that's never been accomplished, and that is to try to restore extirpated salmon where we had no original stock to work from," said Wayne MacCallum, director of the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife.

Atlantic salmon disappeared from the river in the 1800s when dams constructed along the Connecticut and its tributaries prevented the fish from reaching their spawning grounds, the shallows of freshwater streams that feed the river. Fish ladders were constructed at dams to allow passage, and young salmon, raised from the eggs of Atlantic salmon captured in other East Coast rivers where they had not disappeared, were released into the Connecticut. It is a three- or four-year process for young salmon to travel downriver to the ocean where they grow to adulthood before returning upriver to spawn. While salmon have not returned to spawn in the numbers hoped, American shad have. This year, nearly 106,000 have been counted at the Holyoke Dam. In many years, the total number of shad counted has been in excess of 500,000. In 1992, the shad total peaked at 720,000. Caleb Slater, the anadromous fish project leader for the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, said whatever problem has kept the number of returning salmon low in recent years is not occurring in the Connecticut River. "It's got to be something out in the ocean. We do surveys of fish we stock in Massachusetts and elsewhere, and we know that the (young salmon) we stock do very well. They grow well and we see them migrating to the ocean," he said. Whether it is disease or predation or some other cause, "these things run in cycles in the ocean and hopefully it will turn around," Slater said.