The 2008 salmon catch: Equal to a herd of a million buffalo, moving over the plains

This is not the kind of story you’d expect to hear about Pacific salmon. It’s just not supposed to be happening, but it really did happen, last autumn, in the parched bunchgrass and mesquite country along a five-kilometre stretch of the Okanagan River, not an hour’s drive north of the Canada-U.S. border. This is the kind of country where you might encounter rare tiger salamanders or spadefoot toads in the sagebrush and prickly pear, but it’s the last place you’d expect to find sockeye salmon. And yet last year, close to 130,000 sockeye were there, churning up the gravel with their tails, frantically building nests for their eggs and their milt and, finally, writhing in their post-spawn death throes.

Most of the spawning occurred in the last wild stretch of the river, almost all of it within the Osoyoos Indian Reserve, just above the town of Oliver. It was the highest return of sockeye to the Okanagan River in at least six decades. But it wasn’t the only astonishing salmon story last year.

In the North Pacific, the all-species, all-nation commercial catch of salmon was the largest of any year on record. It was bigger than even the gluttonous excesses of the early-20th-century industrial fisheries. And most of the 2008 catch came from relatively healthy stocks. In all, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Canadian and American fishermen pulled just over a million metric tonnes of salmon from the coastal waters of North America and Asia. Imagine a herd of one million buffaloes thundering across the plains and you’ll have an idea of just how much biomass that is.

There are many reasons why these aren’t the sorts of things you’d expect to hear about salmon nowadays. After all, roughly half the world’s surveyed fish species are threatened, while one-third of the world’s fisheries have collapsed and most of the major ones that remain are operating well above their sustainable limits. Hundreds of Pacific salmon runs are extinct, and hundreds more are threatened. As a result, Pacific salmon are now gone from at least half their former North American range, and ever fewer spawners are carrying much of the genetic diversity that remains.

All over the world, species of all kinds are retreating into their shrinking ecological redoubts and vanishing at a rate without parallel since the great Cretaceous die-off 65 million years ago. The planet is warming, and even in B.C.’s cool, cedar-shrouded coastal rivers, water temperatures are now routinely so lethal entire salmon runs come home from the sea only to suffocate and die before spawning. . .

The truth is, B.C.’s vast and splendid diversity of wild salmon is withering, and has been for some decades now. The province’s sockeye are by far the most robust species, but even so, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature placed them on its “red list” of threatened species last October. And because sockeye have been the staple of the province’s commercial salmon fishery, the industry, as you might imagine, is now on death’s door.

Salmon anglers, meanwhile, are facing unprecedented closures, bag-limit reductions and no-catch rules. Last year on the Fraser River—long known as the greatest salmon river in the world—federal fisheries officials closed almost all the sockeye fisheries in the river’s approach areas, and left the Fraser Basin’s aboriginal communities, which make up half the Indian bands in B.C., to ration the remnants among themselves. Even with constitutionally protected fishing rights, these communities are increasingly going without the salmon that have sustained them from time immemorial.

The farther south you go, the worse it gets. Declines in salmon abundance have been most dramatic in the recreational fishermen’s preferred quarry of chinook and coho. Cross the border into Washington and Oregon, and you’d think it’s doomsday. The litany for all this sorrow and loss is well known: overfishing, habitat destruction, hydroelectric dams, dysfunctional government agencies and, lately, global climate change.

But as the story of the Okanagan salmon reveals, there is hope. . .

That's just the opening bits of a rather expansive interrogation of the state of salmon in the North Pacific - and changing currents and controversies in conservationist thinking and in science - that I've just written for Outdoor Canada magazine. You'll have to pick it up at the newsstands if you want to read it, or (better idea) subscribe. The beautiful photo up above is actually the work of my old colleague Nick Didlick, from the website A River Never Sleeps, which he produces with another old pal of mine, Mark Hume.

It's an especially good issue of Outdoor Canada, with several interesting articles, and I see that in Top Gear tips, Ken Bailey 's recommendation for best pump-action shotgun of the year is the Remington Model 87 Nitro-mag 12-gauge.

It was the very thing I had in mind today, being of humane disposition (if you take my meaning), when I was reading a certain addled columnist in the Tyee, just after having read the usual idiocies from the "ceasefire.ca" project of the Rideau Institute. As far as I can tell, the former is one of those ageing hippies in the early stages of dementia whose wealthier fellow out-patients the latter is solely designed to bilk of tax-deductible contributions.

I could be wrong, of course, in which case I'd dispense with the ritual of offering a last cigarette and blindfold and go with Bailey's "best bolt-action rifle" pick, Sako's 85 Bavarian. A handsome rifle, with walnut stock and a Schnaebel fore-end. The Bavarian offers a choice of six calibres.