The tradition began in 1912, after a Bangor angler named Karl Andersen caught a salmon in the Penobscot River on April 1, and sent
it to President William Howard Taft. Maine’s
salmon were already in trouble by then, with a multitude of dams blocking their
access to spawning grounds and too many of the remaining fish being removed by
both commercial and recreational fishermen; as time passed, sewage and other
pollution added to the salmon’s woes.
Conditions in the Penobscot worsened, and the tradition of
the Presidential salmon was suspended during the Eisenhower administration, in
the late 1950s. It began again in 1984,
when President Lyndon Baines Johnson was gifted with a salmon from another
Maine stream, the Narraguagus River, but the tradition came to another, and so
far final, end in 1992, after angler Claude Z. Westfall delivered a Penobscot
River fish to President George H. W. Bush at his summer home in Kennebunkport.
After that, the health of Maine’s Atlantic salmon runs
continued to decline, to the point when, in 2000, they were included on the
federal endangered species list. The
salmon, which used to run up all of New England’s major rivers, had died out along
much of their former spawning range, despite significant, costly, and
ultimately futile efforts to restore them to waterways in most states between
Connecticut and New Hampshire.
Only in Maine did the runs survive, and they remained at
serious risk, with seemingly fewer fish returning each year. The salmon faced a world of adversity, from
dams that blocked their access to spawning grounds, to polluted waters in their
natal streams, to walls
of nets that intercepted adult salmon as they fed and grew in the Atlantic Ocean
west of Greenland.
But there are a few encouraging signs that suggest that those
Atlantic salmon that spawn in Maine’s rivers might just be in the earliest stages
of a recovery.
But perhaps because the nets have been removed from the
water, perhaps because of more favorable environmental conditions, or perhaps because
of a lot of hard work being done up in Maine—or, most likely, some combination
of all three—a few more salmon seem to be returning to Maine’s rivers today.
There are still very few fish by historical standards.
Scientists
believe that, when its run was still healthy, between 75,000 and 100,000
Atlantic salmon returned to the Penobscot River each year. As the run collapsed, those
numbers dropped to just a few hundred, and there was real fear that the
fish might be extirpated from the state.
But there are signs of things, perhaps, getting better.
More than 1,500 salmon returned to the Penobscot this year, following on the heels of a 2022 season when 1,320 were counted. Those were the second and third highest returns in the past decade, although little more than half of the 2,900 or so salmon tallied in 2011.
It’s hard to call a run that, at best, is about 2% of a healthy
population a positive sign, yet when you can move from hundreds of returning
fish to over a thousand, and see such returns in consecutive years, it can
still be a positive trend. Counts
of salmon returning to the Penobscot have exceeded 1,000 fish in four out of
the last five years, a contrast to the immediately preceding period, when returns
topped out at 840.
Still, if Maine’s Atlantic salmon can recover, it’s going to
take a lot of work, money, and time.
Some of those eggs are planted directly into the rivers. Others are grown out at the Green Lake hatchery for releasr into the Penobscot, which receives about 850,000 juvenile salmon each year. Salmon are released at every stage of their lives, from eggs to adults, to maximize the chances of some surviving.
Releasing juveniles forces the fish to survive two or three years in the
wild before returning to the river; while that may help produce fish most
likely to survive the marine environment, it also results in many young salmon
falling victim to predators in the rivers, along the coast, and in the open
ocean. Releasing adults enhances
survival rates, but could also produce salmon that, at least as juveniles, are
better suited to survival in a hatchery than in a natural environment.
Unlike many hatchery operations in freshwater and on the
Pacific Coast, which have created genetic issues by mixing different strains of fish and developing strains more able to thrive
in hatcheries than in the wild, the federal hatcheries working to restore Maine’s
salmon are making every effort to get the genetics right. The genome of each brood fish is recorded,
and computers used to determine which fish should be paired to maintain the
highest possible level of genetic diversity.
Released salmon may be tagged in various ways, ranging from
a fin clip to an acoustic tag, so that biologists may recognize them when they
return to the rivers. At this point, it
appears that about 92 percent of the returning fish have hatchery origins,
which suggests that at least a few of the returning fish were hatched in the
river.
The percentage of salmon hatched in the river, rather in hatchery
tanks, will hopefully increase with time, but no one reading this is likely to
fish for Maine’s Atlantic salmon in their lifetimes. Assuming
that everything goes according to plan, federal fisheries scientists hope that
the salmon might be taken off the Endangered Species List in about 75 years.
And there are plenty of reasons to worry that things won’t
go according to plan. A warming ocean
could impact the survival of salmon before they return to the rivers, either by
limiting their food supply or by creating conditions more favorable to
predators that feed on the fish. A
changing climate and land development may further degrade coastal rivers. And people might just lose interest in the
salmon’s survival.
Still, the recent increase in salmon returns provide reason
to hope that Atlantic salmon may yet be restored to the rivers of Maine.
And that sort of hope is more than the salmon had just a few
years ago.
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