Last November, four years after the federal government closed its Atlantic salmon restoration program for the Connecticut River, along came a minor miracle: the discovery of three nests of wild salmon eggs on the lower Farmington River, a tributary of the mighty Connecticut.
In a Facebook post that as of Friday had been shared 491 times, Connecticut wildlife officials hailed a “milestone fisheries event.” In its hunt for silver linings, the independent “good news network” website posted a buoyant story about the return of “an ancestral line that researchers hope will thrive.” The website has the Connecticut flowing through New York State. That’s erroneous thinking, while “hope,” sadly, is magical thinking.
Granted, it is tempting to believe nature might succeed at something the federal government could not pull off in the 50 years it attempted, at significant expense, to engineer the return of this noble fish species.
But as with global warming, facts are facts.
All the conditions that foiled the federal restoration effort, despite an investment of more than $25 million over the years, remain in place for wild Atlantic salmon: dams, questionably efficient fish ladders and lifts and, most recently, changes in ocean conditions far from the river that are blamed for at least a tenfold decline in the number of returning salmon while the program was still in place.
Still, the excitement over the nests discovery was understandable. The three Farmington River streambed nests were the first documented instance of wild spawning observed since 1991. Before that, wildlife officials say, this hadn’t happened since the Revolutionary War era. Those wild salmon eggs will hatch this spring, the start of a strange and beautiful cycle that will take these wild salmon down the Connecticut and out into the Atlantic, where for centuries this species has migrated to areas off Greenland before returning to the tributaries where their lives began to spawn.
The restoration effort saw early success, starting with the return in 1974 of the first salmon that had been seeded into the waterway. By 1981, 529 salmon came back to fight their way back up a watershed that over time had been obstructed through the construction of 2,500 dams. Things held steady for another decade, fueled by the capture of returning salmon, breeding in New England hatcheries and the release of as many as four million young salmon a year. But then the numbers of returning salmon started to fall, to as low as 54 in 2012, when the restoration program threw in the towel. The end came because the point of the program all along was to create a self-sustaining Atlantic salmon population.
Human use of the river rendered this impossible. With so many dams still in place, it’s just not possible. That’s why the discovery late last year of wild salmon eggs in an undisclosed location on the Farmington River seemed like such a miracle.
It is, but while you might like to believe in miracles, you can’t bank on them. The return of wild Atlantic salmon to one Connecticut River tributary says something about the resilience of this species. These eggs are tiny footnotes to a trend that won’t be reversed.