‘Major milestone’ in salmon project
SYDNEY — Parks Canada is calling this year's Atlantic salmon run in Clyburn Brook one for the record books.
The wild Atlantic salmon population in Clyburn Brook has been dwindling for years, so the Cape Breton Highlands National Park has been working with four other national parks, First Nations and Dalhousie University's Aquatron Laboratory to study them and their habitat.
This year was the last scheduled salmon run as part of the five-year Clyburn Brook Salmon Restoration Project, which began in 2019 and runs until 2024.
POPULATION IN DECLINE
“We're just heading into our third year,” Parks Canada resource management officer II Sarah Penney said in an interview with the Cape Breton Post. “And the goal of the program is to bring back the Clyburn salmon population, which used to be very healthy back in the 1980s but has been in decline now for decades.”
The Atlantic salmon population hasn't met federal conservation targets for over two decades now, so the Clyburn Brook Salmon Restoration Project aims to bring it back to a self-sustaining state.
“We have a number of activities on the go to try to make that happen,” said Penney. “The main one is capturing smolt, which is like the teenage life stage of the salmon that is leaving the river and going to the ocean.
“So we capture them, raise them [in] captivity at the Dalhousie Aquatron Laboratory and then, when they're fully mature adults, we'll release them back into the river.”
This spring was their final year of catching smolt in the brook for the project and the park met its goal, counting 600 young salmon and capturing 150 of those for rearing at the Aquatron.
‘A MAJOR MILESTONE’
“We've met a major milestone in terms of the project activities and achieved our first major objective,” said Penney.
She said that it's exciting to finish this stage of the project “on a high note,” because they're had a lot of difficulty with catching smolt because of the river conditions.
“There was a lot of flooding and high water and inconsistencies in the flow, which made it really hard to catch smolt, so this year we actually managed to fish consistently and fish efficiently in sort of lower, more consistent water conditions,” said Penney. “So that's why we caught so many smolt this year compared to in previous years.”
The Post spoke to local fishing guide and custom flytier Evan Rice, who is based in Sydney Mines and owns fly fishing company Currents Fly
Fishing, on his thoughts about the project.
“I think that their project is pretty great, what they're doing up there,” said Rice. “The smolt rearing is a great way to do it. … As far as other rivers around, the areas such as the North, Middle Baddeck, we've actually been seeing a lot of success in rehabilitation on rivers.”
Rice said the Clyburn Brook hasn't had a salmon season in it in a few years so he can't speak to what populations on it look like currently, but he's encouraged by Parks Canada's numbers.
“The swim-through counts that [Fisheries and Oceans Canada] did last year, numbers recently came out and some rivers are actually double from the year before, … so it's very encouraging to see that a lot of these restoration projects and things are working.”
Some of the threats to Atlantic Salmon, based on data
Parks Canada receives from the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), are:
Changes in the ocean environment
Habitat degradation Poaching
“Our goal here really is to get the Clyburn Atlantic Salmon population back up to a healthy level … where it sustains itself going forward. But more than that, we also want to shed some light on what is the ideal timing of an intervention like this?" Penney said.
“That's why we have so many other parks involved — we want to know when, in the decline of an endangered species, do you start to try to help to get the best possible results?”
Penney said that they have their first release of adult salmon, from a group caught in 2019, coming up this October.
“We don't know exactly what that's going to look like yet, but that will be a very exciting moment and sort of the beginning of the real work, I guess, on this project. We're really looking forward to that.”