A small, insignificant number appearing in a thin vertical column it was. Yet, it immediately captured my attention.

I spotted it while skimming through the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS)’s last 2026 Connecticut River Basin Fishway Passage Counts that arrived in my inbox on July 10. There, in column six, labeled “Atlantic Salmon,” 10 of our river’s doomed migratory royalty were documented passing the Holyoke dam on upriver spring spawning runs aimed at cobble-bedded, nursery tributaries, many of which exist right here in Franklin County. Included among them are large rivers like the Deerfield and Green, smaller ones like the Sawmill and Fall, and too many cold, clear, mountain feeder streams to name.

By that date, only one of those salmon had been spotted migrating past Turners Falls, and none had made it past Vernon, Vermont. That doesn’t appear to have changed since.

So, do the simple math. That leaves nine salmon holed up in a stream near you. Which doesn’t mean anglers should get out there, rod in hand, in pursuit of the king of North American freshwater gamefish. Salmon are still off limits to anglers wetting their lines in the Connecticut River Basin.

My immediate internal question was this: Where did those 10 salmon come from, and why did they choose the Connecticut River?

Could it possibly have been pure, laudatory, last-breath survival instinct in a pathetic struggle against what appears to be inevitable extinction on a warming, burning, melting, blistering planet? Or maybe just a simple case of wayward migrants “settling” on a new destination unfamiliar to their DNA after encountering polluted or obstructed paths to their imprinted natal streams.

All of the above were potentialities considered before I reached out for an expert answer.

Enter Corey Eddy, Ph.D., a fish biologist and field dive officer for FWS’s Connecticut River Fish and Wildlife Conservation Office in Sunderland. He has been my contact this year for everything anadromous in our Connecticut Valley, following the spring retirement of longtime Connecticut River Coordinator Ken Sprankle, who was succeeded by Cathy Bozek.

What I learned from our new man was news to me. I had known that the formal, coordinated, federal and state initiative to restore a self-sustaining Atlantic salmon run to the Connecticut River ended on all fronts in 2012. What I didn’t know, or had forgotten (more doubtful), was that one honorable holdout, the Connecticut Department of Energy & Environmental Protection (CT DEEP), still oversees a “scaled-down legacy program committed to genetic preservation of the Connecticut River salmon strain and limited tributary stocking.”

When queried about the 10 salmon through Holyoke this year, Eddy said his best guess was that they were CT DEEP fish which “missed their turn into the Farmington River” and ventured farther upstream.

Eddy went on to say that CT DEEP annually stocks 200,000 to 300,000 immature salmon into the mainstem and west branch of the Farmington. These smolts and fry come from the Kensington State Fish Hatchery, which produces them to preserve the genetic integrity of the endangered Connecticut River strain created during the decades-long, defunct, federal Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program.

“With the low river flows we witnessed throughout the watershed this year,” Eddy wrote in response to my email query, “it’s possible there wasn’t enough water moving down the Farmington to entice these salmon back home. So, instead, they continued upstream. At least, that’s my guess.”

An educated guess for sure, and one that makes the most sense. Had I known CT DEEP was still in the salmon-stocking game, it would have been my obvious knee-jerk assessment as well.

The reason the 10 salmon listed on this year’s anadromous migration report got a reaction out of me was that it seemed like it had been many years since I’d seen salmon listed on the weekly reports I have received for nearly 50 years. A quick review revealed it was a slight overreaction. Last year one lonely salmon showed up on the count, following two consecutive dry years in 2023 and 2024. Excluding 2020, the rest of the annual counts – dating back to 2013, the year the federal and Massachusetts state plugs were pulled – show at least three returns, with a high of 92 in 2013 and single digits in all but one year since 2017 (20).

So, no, salmon-restoration true believers, it’s not time to rekindle hopes for a Connecticut River salmon renaissance. A self-sustaining population is far out of reach, never to return to New England’s largest river. Just the facts, ma’am.

Though I salute Connecticut’s altruistic campaign as an honorable and unselfish undertaking – a last-gasp effort to save a doomed species – I don’t expect it to last long. All the elements that matter, and especially the environment, are stacked against an Atlantic salmon comeback, not only in the Connecticut River, but everywhere on the warming North Atlantic.

I probably won’t live to see this noblest of all freshwater gamefish go the way of the passenger pigeon, but I’m confident my grandsons, God willing, may.