It is obvious to anyone who has put in any time on the issue of increasing salmon populations that saving and restoring spawning and rearing habitat in rivers is the single most important issue to be tackled today. This far and away outstrips the common sense view that stopping fishing is the way to go. The rejoinder is to note that if habitat is ruined a run becomes extinct in one year, whether there is or is not any fishing.
One clear example where habitat proved crucial is the Fraser River Hell's Gate Canyon slide of 1924. That slide wiped out a run of as many as 30,000,000 pinks in one year. And it is why, today, more than 80 years later that there are no pink salmon for the Fraser in an even numbered year, like this year, 2008.
Far and away the biggest contributor to ruined rivers is a century of logging damage -- a smother of small gravel and silt from bank to bank, wiping out habitat for spawning and rearing and leaving a hot algae-filled low-water stream nearly devoid of life. Rivers so destroyed here include the last few clicks of the Sooke, more than half of the San Juan, 16 kilometres of the Nitinat, the lower end of the Sarita, the Englishman, sections of the Cowichan, 10 clicks of the Salmon River below the Sayward Junction bridge, the middle and lower sections of the Nimpkish and the last five kms from the Adam and Eve confluence.
The most ruined river is the Klanawa, near Bamfield. It has 20 kilometres of water course so bad that, taking an average of two metres deep, 100 metres across, it represents 4,000,000 metric tonnes of salmon death. There should be a tax on logging, and other big abusers like suburbification to make up for this problem. Cabling in logs, and huge rocks, a very pricey endeavour, is the only way to speed up the process of putting the rivers back into use -- that after 100 years have not been able to choke out the load of logging damage materials
The Wild Salmon Alliance has just released a document comparing two systems, one in the Queen Charlotte Islands, Rennell Sound and Ford Arm, south of Sitka, in Alaska. There are sport and commercial fishing in both areas.
In Ford Arm smolt production trends upward and it has the highest steelhead production in S.E. Alaska. It remains a top 10 sockeye system, with 16,000 coho runs. One million pinks were seined last year and the same number made it back. One year, the pinks were so numerous, their carcasses depleted so much oxygen that in some outlet streams, waiting coho all died. Numbers are so high that local bears move 700 carcasses into the woods.
Now, what's happened in Rennell Sound, B.C.? Chum numbers have dropped 92 per cent in the last 40 years; coho and pink numbers have declined 68 per cent and 67 per cent respectively. Coho are now on the endangered list. But there have been no commercial chum harvests for more than 25 years.
The only difference is that Ford has undisturbed old growth trees as much as 31 feet in diameter, while in B.C. the area has been clear cut. And that's it. Research has shown that local plants have 15 per cent of nitrogen and carbon from fish carcasses, growth rings on trees are wider in large salmon years, and 40 per cent of salmon smolt carbon and nitrogen comes from the carcasses of their parents.
Undisturbed old growth forest is the key. Here are some solutions for Vancouver Island. Obviously, all old growth forest should be reserved forever, without any logging activity. The land 'given' to logging companies, should be returned to the Crown to be held in perpetuity. And, there should be a 500 metre riparian -- no logging -- zone around rivers.
