Helped by Biologists, Connecticut River Salmon May Stage a Comeback

It could be a sunken log or a shadow cast by a rock, but a momentary patch of smooth water or the occasional flick of a tail or a fin reveals an aquatic colossus common in Vermont streams 200 years ago.

From the right place, the 19-pound, 37-inch Atlantic salmon is easy to see: It rests in the current under a bridge in the brook where it spent the first two years of its life after it was stocked there as a three-quarter-inch fry, probably in 1993 or 1994.

Once it reached 7 to 10 inches, the fish swam down the Connecticut River and into the Atlantic Ocean, where it spent two or three years near Greenland before returning last summer to Vermont to spawn.

The presence of such a large fish in a tributary of the West River, where 12-inch trout are worthy of fish stories that will be told by anglers for years, is a small step toward reestablishing the Atlantic salmon in their traditional breeding grounds. Biologists hope the salmon are common enough again one day to warrant a fishing season.

There’s a long way to go. And much of the challenge lies in the North Atlantic ocean beyond the reach of biologists working to make the Connecticut River basin a salmon breeding area again.

Dams Wiped Out Fish Stocks

But the fish that summered in Jamaica is a good sign. The fish, a female, is expected to clear space in the gravel of the brook and lay up to 15,000 eggs that will be fertilized by a number of small male salmon stocked in the stream two years ago. They swarm around her awaiting their chance.

“It just shows the potential of the program in that a huge fish like that can live through the drought summer in a tiny stream,” said Vermont Fish Biologist Jay McMenemy, who found the fish in July. He was aided by a radio transmitter attached to the fish in May when it crossed the Holyoke dam in Massachusetts.

McMenemy showed off the salmon on condition its exact location not be identified. Given the fish’s ability to blend into its surroundings, McMenemy said it was doubtful that people living near it were aware of its presence.

Come spring, about a quarter of the eggs the fish is expected to lay will hatch. In two years the survivors will have grown into smolts that will then swim down the Connecticut River and head to Greenland. Two years later they will return as 10-pound adults and the cycle will be completed.

When Europeans first arrived in what is now New England 350 years ago, hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon swam up the Connecticut River every year almost to the Canadian border. But the stocks were wiped out around 1800 after the construction of dams kept the fish from swimming upstream.

In 1967, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Connecticut got together with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and started working to restore Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut River basin.

Other Species Also Returning

In some ways the Connecticut River is more of a challenge for salmon restoration than more northerly rivers. It is the southern limit of Atlantic salmon habitat. The water in Long Island Sound, into which the river empties, is warmer than that favored by the fish, and the river is by far the longest in which the salmon live.

The salmon program was formalized in 1983 when Congress created the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission. It is made up of the fish and wildlife agencies from the four states, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and National Marine Fisheries Service.

The commission has a budget this year of about $1.8 million. Half the money comes from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the rest from the states.

Using fish from Maine or Canada, scientists started stocking fry in the Connecticut River tributaries. At the same time they worked to improve water quality and find ways for the fish to get around the dams and other obstacles.

The stocking program began in earnest in the 1980s. Over the years, tens of millions of salmon fry have been released in small streams in the four states.

The goal is to stock 10 million fish a year and have 100,000 smolts make it to the ocean. Last year 9 million fish were stocked.

This year about 150 fish made it back up the Connecticut River to the Holyoke dam, where they can be taken from the fish ladder that lets them pass upstream. Most of the survivors are taken out of the water and used as brood stock to make sure the fry stocked next spring come from the hardiest genetic material. About 20 this year were released above the dam and allowed to return to their natural spawning grounds.

Last year about 300 salmon made it back to Holyoke. McMenemy said he believed the drought might have contributed to the lower number this year.

The salmon program has other benefits. Cleaner water and fish passages have brought back hundreds of thousands of American shad, eels, river herring and, on the lower reaches of the Connecticut, striped bass, according to Janice Rowan, coordinator of the Connecticut River Salmon Commission.

And once they have bred, some of the fish used as brood stock are released into lakes and rivers in Vermont, Massachusetts and Connecticut for anglers to enjoy.

But there’s only so much the scientists working on the Connecticut River can do. The fish spend a large part of their lives in the North Atlantic, and scientists are monitoring a precipitous decline in the numbers of Atlantic salmon on both sides of the ocean.

Historically there were 2.5 million to 5 million breeding salmon migrating between Greenland and spawning rivers in New England and Canada. By the mid-1970s the figure had shrunk to 800,000. By 1991 it was about 300,000; 1996, 125,000; and last year, 80,000.

Scientists have offered a variety of explanations for the decline, ranging from climate change to genetic weakening of the species to more salmon being killed by seals or other predators.

“We really don’t actually know what the factors are,” said Dan Kimball, an Atlantic salmon recovery specialist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The numbers are down so low, it will be quite a lag time before they respond.”