I was e-mail queried the other day by an unknown reader who, it turned out, was a blogger interested in my opinion about continuing the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, which began in 1967 with the now impossible goal of establishing a viable sport fishery.

The question read: “Gary, is it fair to say you’re against the restocking effort because it’s ineffective, or because it’d be good to use those funds in another way?”

I first spotted the query at work going through my Web mail during a brief dead spot, made a note of it and revisited it upon retuning home after midnight. That’s when my cranial wheels got to spinning like bald tires in a shiny black mudhole. Yes, I have often called the program a failure and cited numbers, ones the experts implore us to ignore, to support my position. No, we never will enjoy that pie-in-the-sky sport-fishery we set out to establish way back when. And now, with the herring runs bordering on extinction and shad runs greatly diminished due to global warming and other factors, all Connecticut River anadromous fish migrations could be endangered. Still, I can make a case for continuing the cooperative, interactive, 41-year-old restoration effort, which, despite the salmon failure, has been a positive conservational influence on streams big and small throughout the Connecticut River basin.

I guess it comes down to politics and philosophy, and anyone who has read this space for any length of time knows I’m no conservative. The question I ask myself is: Where would we be now if there had never been a salmon-restoration program? What would our Millers and Deerfield rivers look or smell like today? How about the Chicopee and the Westfield; what would their status be? So it really shouldn’t come down to one issue, salmon, when assessing the restoration program, because it runs much deeper than that.

I remember the Connecticut and Millers rivers when you wouldn’t want to stick your little toe into them for more than an instant, that filthy. Today people are water skiing and bird watching and swimming, all byproducts of salmon restoration and river clean-up.

And how can our evaluation of the failed program come down to dollars and cents given the trillions we’re wasting elsewhere on far more damaging, potentially world-altering adventures for the benefit of greedy billionaires?

So, yeah, the salmon program has been a failure. There’s no other way to evaluate it. And had the shepherds of the program done their homework before embarking on the project, they would have learned that the Connecticut River never was an important Atlantic salmon river, except for a perhaps a 300-year window during the Little Ice Age, which happened to coincide with New England settlement.

But pull the plug? Why?

Like I told the blogger who queried me: To me, the vocal critic, 200 annual salmon returns is better than none. But that’s just one man’s opinion, one who is light-years removed from mainstream political thought.

We could and often do spend far more on less worthy projects.

Published: Thursday, June 18, 2009

What you see is what you get. That’s about the status of anadromous-fish passage here in the Happy Valley.

If you’re content with maybe 200 Atlantic salmon and less than 200,000 American shad annually, rejoice, you’ve got it. Want more? Too bad. Ain’t happening anytime soon. Not now or ever. Case closed. Rhetoric be damned.

Yeah, I know, the recent gray, unsettled weather has stabilized the Connecticut River temperature in the mid-60s, prolonging the annual run. More shad and salmon may yet appear before it climbs to 70 and they stop migrating. Uh-hu, could happen. And maybe you’ll discover the money tree if you walk through the woods on enough hot, steamy days. Then again, perhaps if you suffer here on earth, there’ll be a better day in mythical paradise. Get the point? It’s all about that pot of gold. Some chase it. Some don’t. Count me among the latter. In my finite world, reality ain’t that hard to swallow.

I’ve seen the white, extended-cab, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service trucks out along our dirt roads in recent weeks, crews depositing immature Connecticut River-strain salmon progeny into our bubbly streams. I’ve seen them in my back yard, in Whately, in Conway, in Ashfield. You name it, for decades they’ve been there. True-believers, these altruistic souls doing the stocking. Totally committed. Ignore the numbers, they say. Numbers are irrelevant.

Imagine that: numbers meaningless, at least so long as they’re depressing. Tell me, do you suppose they’d still be meaningless if the salmon-count miraculously jumped to 1,000, 1,500, 15,000? Yeah, sure. Give me a break. Let that happen and you’ll hear about salmon numbers on your radio, your TV, in the newspapers (if any survive), and from the red-clad town crier with the long brass bugle. You couldn’t escape it if you tried. Sort of like Chandra Levy or Terri Shiavo. They’d slap you upside the head with their numbers then, the same ones they now call insignificant. And trust me, the media would swallow it hook, line and sinker, hawk it like a Fenway frank. ”Hear ye, hear ye!” they’d bark. ”Read all about it! The salmon are back!” They’d flash it on the tube, tease to it in the crawl along the bottom of the screen. Breaking news: long-lost salmon are back in New England.

But when the numbers are embarrassing, as they are today, it’s all about damage control, propaganda, classroom deception and field trips; chasing yellow swallowtails through goldenrod meadows. Patience, jackass, patience: that’s the message. Don’t you understand? Numbers are meaningless in scientific experiments. Yeah, right! Sounds good. And while you’re at it, stop by, I’ve found the Holy Grail in my attic. Honest. There it was, buried in a stack of old plates; cups and saucers; goblets, too. I’ll let it go cheap to a worthy man, if there is such a thing.

As much as I hate to admit it, I have been looking at the numbers for three decades; studying them, comparing them, trying to digest them, make sense of it all. Guess what? They’re trending in the wrong direction. Has anyone else noticed? Shhhhhhhhh. There I go again, mentioning numbers. I should realize by now that they don’t matter. How could I forget? Shame, shame, shame on me, the gadfly, buzzing in their faces, stinging the back of their necks, the small of their legs, burrowing into their eye sockets, their ears; no relief, an unmerciful pest. Oh, how the truth stings.

So, just in case you were wondering, 69 salmon and 157,000 shad had been counted in the river basin through Tuesday. That’s fresh off the federal Web site, updated daily; then confirmaton by direct e-mail straight from the Connecticut River Coordinator’s office. By the way, if numbers aren’t important, then why do they record them daily, annually, historically? Why don’t they hide them in the same vault with their expense sheets? You tell me. Sometimes it’s hard to figure.

All I can say is that I’m giving it my best shot. Not good enough, I guess, because I refuse to play the fool.

Truth is, it takes only a simple mind to see that something just doesn’t add up.

Octogenarian Edward M. Wells, a former Braintree educator enjoying blissful retirement nestled in Leyden’s gentle hills, has issues with our Connecticut River Atlantic salmon-restoration effort. First, he’s tired of stocked salmon progeny interfering with his native brook-trout angling along shaded, backwoods, Franklin County streams; second, he’s tired of the propaganda.

Wells was so stirred up last summer that he fired off a complaint to MassWildlife. He was reacting to “Brook Trout in Massachusetts,” a Kathleen Campbell article about conservation efforts aimed at rebuilding declining Eastern Brook Trout populations in the Northeast. The story was published in “Massachusetts Wildlife,” MassWildlife’s popular quarterly magazine. It was one of many stories, including more than one in this space, published in the Northeast last year during a media blitz by Trout Unlimited and the Eastern Brook Trout Joint Venture — a watchdog organization uniting private conservation and academic groups with 17 state fish and wildlife agencies and federal partners under one altruistic tent. The goal was to protect and build dwindling wild-brook-trout habitat, some of the best of which exists right here in our Franklin/Hampshire and southern Vermont hills.

Wells’ opinion, formed after three-quarters-of-a-century-worth of fishing experience on local streams, is that one quick way to protect our indigenous brookies is to quit polluting their native streams with foreign, hatchery-raised invaders called Connecticut River Atlantic salmon progeny. Mr. Wells stated his contentions succinctly in an erudite, July 10, 2006 letter to the editors of Massachusetts Wildlife. He’s still waiting for a response. Let’s excerpt the letter here:

“If the global attention now given to environmental issues is valid, it stresses that we humans must learn to control our waste products in a responsible manner. This does not include the delusional and irresponsible dumping of Atlantic salmon fry in our mixed-forest, glacially spawned, beautiful New England brooks, so unique and delightful.

“As a dedicated, non-purist, worm-fisherman who uses a modest, no-frills fly rod, I am distressed to spend an outing catching these huge-eyed, little nibblers who have usurped my favorite spots and greatly diminished the number of native trout by their consumption of the available stream nutrients.”

After praising state, federal and private organizations for a job well done improving the water quality of our Connecticut River and its tributaries as a byproduct of anadromous-fish restoration over the past 30 or 40 years, Wells gets back to his diatribe against salmon stocking:

“The unreasoned release of millions (literally) of raised fry and smolts is deceptive and counter-productive in light of the clear impossibility of these fish reaching Long Island Sound and returning to their spawning sites. The existence of multiple dams on almost all of our stream drainage precludes this. The Volstead Act (Prohibition) of the 1920s was a noble experiment also, but it was doomed (or damned) by its idealist frailty.

“To enlist school kids in these failed ecology projects is both deceptive and poor science. Give it up, please.”

Before we proceed, be it known that Mr. Wells does read this column but was not aware that I became an outspoken critic of our salmon program during the 90s, following exhaustive research on the status of salmon migration in colonial New England. It’s not that I’m against the program. Quite the contrary, I initially viewed the initiative favorably, and still accept it as worthwhile, albeit barely. My salient oppositional point has always been that we’re trying to restore a Connecticut River salmon run that was never great, even during the golden era of the Little Ice Age, which ended during the first quarter of the 19^th century. Even then the mouth of the Connecticut River was at the southern extreme of a North American salmon range defined by water temperature. So what hope exists with the earth warming at an alarming rate, and with it the water temperatures of historic New England salmon rivers like the Penobscot, Merrimack and Connecticut?

During the first 150 years of New England settlement, the sight of a 45-pound Atlantic salmon in the nets of shad fishermen below Peskeumskut Falls was a celebratory event, akin to a contemporary Colrain hunter bagging an 11-point, 205-pound racker. Salmon-restoration officials will dispute that informed opinion unless they do the research. But according to more than one critic within the professional anadromous-fish fraternity, the “true-believers” are not interested in history, and they’re not interested in numbers, either.

Imagine that! Doctors and masters of science who ignore numbers, the very basis of scientific experimentation. It’s true. Defenders of the salmon-restoration program must ignore numbers because they’re clear as a starlit February sky, screaming that the program has been a dismal failure. How else to describe an initiative that has deposited hundreds of millions of immature salmon into Connecticut River basin streams for an annual return of about 200? And let’s be honest: Two hundred salmon swimming up the Connecticut River basin is like a microscopic speck of dust floating in a 5000-gallon tank of water. You do the math. It ain’t encouraging.

The original goal of our salmon-restoration program was to create a recreational fishery on the Connecticut and its major tributaries, such as the Westfield, Deerfield, Millers, West and White rivers. Now, whispering officials will admit that initial goal will neven be realized, period. It’s out of the question. But they can’t admit it because there would be public outcry and potential program termination. So instead, the loyal employees shepherd a massive public-relations campaign aimed at what Wells calls “schoolkids,” who raise tiny salmon in their classroom aquariums and release them into local streams hoping they’ll return as spawning adults. Perhaps they should instead learn to pray, because the probability that one of their fish will return is about equal to winning the lottery. That’s what they don’t tell the kids, who will forever nourish a romantic myth planted by dishonest “education.”

“What really got to me was the way they manipulate the kids,” said Wells, 41 years a teacher. “I see the pictures and stories in the paper, smiling teachers and kids releasing salmon into our streams with the hope they’ll be back to spawn. It’s pure deception. They’re trying to put a happy face on an impossible dream.”

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It gets worse. You see, Wells attended a student field trip to a local facility that sent his blood pressure skyrocketing. During a presentation, one of the workers told the idealistic students that it was comforting to know that someday his grandchildren would be able to stand on the banks of the Connecticut River and catch Atlantic salmon.

“He wasn’t telling the truth,” said Wells, emphatic that he’s not angry, just disappointed with the dishonesty. “He was a nice man, very knowledgeable, but what he told those kids was wrong, in my opinion. He knows a recreational salmon fishery is unattainable.”

At this point it’s not about truth and integrity; it’s about planting the seed of hope in future generations, political spin created to shape policy and keep the money flowing into a failed program. These committed, well-meaning scientists are not evil people worthy of scorn. They’re bright, articulate scientists attempting to perpetuate a myth and preserve a wonderful job located in a slice of paradise known as the Connecticut Valley.

I guess you can’t blame them for that.

June 27, 2007

A recent development relating to Connecticut River anadromous fish must have officials worried, and this issue has nothing to do with Atlantic salmon.

Yes, the salmon numbers are still pathetic. That’s a constant. But now there are storm clouds hovering over other marine species that migrate upriver annually to spawn, namely river herrings. The fact is that blueback herring and alewife have virtually disappeared from the river while American shad are greatly diminished. That could spell trouble on the horizon.

When criticized about disappointing salmon runs that have averaged around 200 over the past 40 years, restoration officials have tried in recent years to justify their program’s existence by pointing to the bountiful herring and shad runs brought about by major improvements in water quality and aquatic habitat. The small herrings have little or no value other than bait in the sportfishing community, but the recreational shad fishery is popular, drawing thousands of anglers annually. The current problem is that shad numbers have dropped from around a million annually to about 200,000, which is troubling. Do the math. Anglers with memories of fishing the Holyoke tailrace when 750,000 shad were lifted over that dam must notice a significant difference when a mere 170,000 are lifted there, and that’s been the case the past couple of years.

As an observer who’s followed the anadromous runs for nearly 30 consecutive years and fished often for shad during the 1980s, I noticed the plummeting numbers in the 90s and queried officials for answers. The most common explanation was that a striped-bass moratorium had greatly increased stocks of large, predatory stripers, a factor that could be directly related to diminishing river-herring numbers, including shad. But, frankly, that never made a lot of sense to a man who studies history, particularly New England and Connecticut Valley history. I think in the historical context, which pokes a gaping hole in the striped-bass-predation theory.

Haven’t river herrings and stripers always co-existed in the Connecticut River system? Weren’t there more large stripers and also more herring in the Connecticut River between the Contact Period and the Revolution than there are today? How, then, can we blame the disappearance of herrings on striped-bass predation? It defies logic.

Connecticut River Coordinator Janice Rowan says, “We have evidence that stripers are playing a role but questions remain about the size of that role.” So, in an attempt to answer that question, a study that began in 2005 is being conducted by University of Connecticut doctoral candidate Justin Davis and supervised by Associate Professor Eric Schultz, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Science and co-director of the Environmental Science Program.

“We agree that (the declining-herring issue) is not likely to be a single-factor story,” wrote Schultz in an e-mail. “The ocean fishery for herring may be playing a role, but quantifying that impact will be difficult. Other predators may be important. Other threats that should be considered include warming trends in coastal waters, rainfall patterns, and increasing water withdrawals in coastal regions.”

Davis and a research team have been electrofishing for striped bass and using a stomach pump to examine their diet, while another crew has been tagging a releasing stripers that will be tracked and studied.

According the Schultz: “We will be putting together several sources of data in this way: gut contents of striped bass combined with data and assumptions about digestion rates, yield estimates of how many river herring a striped bass in the Connecticut eats in a season. Our tag-recapture experiment will yield estimates of abundance of bass in the Connecticut, so that we can estimate how many herring are consumed by stripers in the river in a season. Our final intent is to put this in a historical context so that we can estimate what portion of the herring decline is attributable to striped bass.”

Schultz called the predation issue “size-dependent,” explaining that the stripers most likely to eat river herring are at about the 28-inch legal minimum for a keeper. However, smaller “schoolies” are more than capable of devouring many shad progeny, which are now readily available to them and other predators, such as marine bluefish and indigenous freshwater species. But, again, the fact is that those predators have always been present in the Connecticut, so how much of an impact could they really be having on the current decline.

The answer, based on historical precedent, is probably not much. Seems more like a porous excuse for what sadly may be a doomed program.

Published June 16, 2006

About the only thing you can confidently predict about the spring anadromous fish runs in the Connecticut River and elsewhere in New England is that they’re unpredictable. Other than that, it’s a crapshoot.

Many factors must be considered when analyzing the status of American shad, Atlantic salmon and other migratory fish that live in saltwater and spawn in freshwater; but once the run is under way, it all depends on the weather, which dictates river flows and temperature, the two variables that impact daily and weekly runs.

In a perfect world aimed at promoting optimal returns, I suppose the man at the controls would bring heavy March/April rains to initiate early-spring snowmelt and high river flows, followed by a gradually receding river that slowly and steadily warms from the 40s to 60s Fahrenheit, stimulates migration. Once the river temperature climbs to 60, all hell breaks loose until 68, when the fish stake out their territory and settle in for a few weeks of spawning that concludes before July. The problem is that it’s seldom that programmed and the runs vary greatly from year to year.

This year’s run is strikingly similar to least year’s. Both started early, triggered by warm, dry Aprils, then got bogged down by cool, gray, wet months of May that wreaked havoc on anadromous runs, riled the river, yo-yoed the water temperature and caused several shutdowns of the major upstream fish-passage facility in Holyoke. Last year we kept waiting for the river to settle down and clear the way for one last pulse of fish to pour through Holyoke and other lower Connecticut River stations, but that surge never materialized and probably won’t this year, either.

Yep, that’s right, I’m going out on a limb and predict that, despite the fact that river flare-ups appear to have delayed the runs big-time during the last month, it’s too late to expect that one last surge we were expecting last year at this time. It didn’t come last year and it ain’t coming this year, either.

How do I arrive at that assessment? Easy. You just get a feel for fish migration after sitting at the keyboard for a quarter century examining the same fish running up the same river year after year after year. Call it intuition or whatever you want to, but it’s proven reliable in the past and will, in most cases, remain that way in the future.

So, what we’re looking at today, is a run akin to last year’s, when 186 salmon were counted in the river and 116,511 shad passed Holyoke. Right now, the same two numbers stand at 138,323 shad, an insignificant increase, and 127 salmon, an insignificant decrease.

Yes, the Barrett Fishway has been closed about as much as it’s been open over the past 30 days, and the river temperature is still below 60. But even when the lift was open over the weekend only 2,000 and 15 salmon showed up, so why should we expect a major run later this week or next, when the sun again shines and quickly raises the water to optimal migration temps?

Chalk it up as another shad run of less than 200,000 and another salmon run of less than 200 and move on.

It is what it is.