October is the month of the Salmon Run, always impressive as the Shuswap Lake stock is one of the largest breeding populations in the basin of the Fraser River. It is an incredible sight to see the fish make their way up the rivers to their final nesting grounds, and to think of their amazing four year life cycle. Four years earlier the parents of these fish, mated, and laid their eggs and then died. In the spring the tiny fish made their way to the nursery lake, Shuswap, where they spend a year roaming it's kilometeres of deep waters. At the end of that year they headed off down the 480 kilometre trip down the Thompson and Fraser rivers to the Pacific Ocean. Of the estimated 100 million sockeye that leave Shuswap Lake in the spring of a peak year, approximately 10 per cent are expected to return the the B.C. coast four years later. The aging process of the salmon is as dramatic as it is for humans, but much faster. In the 17 day journey as they leave the Pacific to head to their spawning grounds, their bodies undergo a complete change. In his article "Salute to the Sockeye", Murphy Shewchuk, describes this transformation; "Their deep-sea blue-gray bodies gradually change to a brilliant crimson in their battle against such well-known obstacles as Hell's Gate Rapids on the Fraser and the many whitewater rapids on the Thompson. By the time the Adams River Sockeye reach the mouth of the stream in mid-October, the transformation from blue-gray to crimson is virtually complete. In addition, the male of the species now has become grotesquely distorted with a humped back and a sharped hooked nose on his gray-green head."
During my last visit to Switzerland I was discussing the health of the Salmon stocks with Gus Naef.
He remembered when the "Salmon were so numerous in the Salmon River that by Fall when the Salmon die the people close to the river would fish out the dead fish for fertilizer for the fields". This was a souvenir from the 1940s, when in fact the Salmon stocks had already suffered a decline due to the after- effects of the Hells Gate Slide. As early as the 1900s there had been habitat destruction in the Salmon River watershed due to land settlement and agricultural development. In the early 1930s there was documentation of obstruction of adult salmon at the outlet of the Salmon River into Shuswap Lake (credits to the Salmon River Watershed Roundtable). The truly remarkable Salmon runs were well before the area was settled as reported by the First Nations. In 1905, Salmond D Mitchelll, a Fisheries Officer, who was investigating salmon utilization of the Salmon River documented the following after being woken up in the morning where he had spent the night in his rowboat; "I was aroused by a commotion, and found the river full of sockeye running upstream...red from bank to bank...so jammed that they were crowded out...rushed up the sloping banks out of the water...struggling flapping fish were rolling down onto the backs of the fish in the river bed below...The boat was on fish, on a red, flapping, squirming mass...They rushed (by)....creating a great noise, like the roar of a storm, or the noise of a thousand wild ducks rising from a lake..."(excerpt from Hume, 1992-credits to the Salmon River Watershed Roundtable).
The Salmon do not come into Shuswap Lake in large number to spawn. We do see small numbers of them, but Gus told me a story that took place in the 1940s in front of the "Atwater Cabin", one of the residences on Canoe Point. The Salmon were not spawning, but they were fortunate enough to see the young Salmon migrating to the ocean. Gus recalls; "by nine o'clock we could see fish swimming head to tail about four feet deep! By seven at night I went there again. At that time the fish were about two feet wide and deep. The next morning the fish were still running but only one fish at a time".
The Salmon River Watershed Roundtable report that "fish are a useful bioindicator of watershed health. Present day rearing and spawning success of coho and chinook appear to be 1-10% of potential. This is largely due to habitat degradation." It is devastating to think that we may lose this incredible being and what that would mean for all of us. Gus commented on the health of the Shuswap; "The Shuswap has mainly been victim of the humans. I think it was in the sixties when the fishing department decided that Trout and Salmon were not breeding because other fish were too numerous...so they poisoned all of the small lakes which flow into the Shuswap". The widespread use of DDT to control mosquitoes also had a significant impact. However it is the continued practices of forest cover removal, pollution through grey water, loss of riparian vegetation, rise in water temperatures, active bank erosion, and significant water withdrawals that continue to pose a threat to the health of the Salmon and other fish. (credits to the Salmon River Watershed Roundtable).
The late Roderick Haig-Brown, a well known British Columbia conservationist, author and magistrate, gave a eloquent summary of our current situation in his book, The Salmon, written for Environment Canada in 1974; "The salmon run are a visible symbol of life, death and regeneration, plain for all to see and share...The salmon are a test of a healthy environment, a lesson in environmental needs. Their abundant presence on the spawning beds is a lesson of hope, of deep importance for the future of man. If there is ever a time when the salmon no longer return, man will know he has failed again and move one stage nearer to his own final disappearance."
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