Phased-out stream walkers cast a vital eye on salmon
MARK HUME
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There was a time on the British Columbia coast when every little salmon stream was walked at some point in the late summer or fall by a fisheries guardian.
You could run into these guys sometimes, way out there in the middle of nowhere, sloshing through the water like black bears, turning over the bodies of dead salmon with their boots and stopping to enter figures in weather-beaten notebooks.
They understood the timing of each species in each river. They knew which water the pinks liked and where to find chinook.
One day, a guardian took me up a stream so confined by brush that we had to bend over to pass through the bower of green, our noses down by the surface of the stream, the salmon swimming by our feet.
Over the years, most of those guardians, who were usually hired on short-term contracts to assess the health of salmon stocks, were phased out by the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
DFO cut back on stream walkers for two reasons. First, the department was crippled by budget cuts. And second, a new breed of managers had little use for the unscientific method of gathering fisheries data by actually looking into a stream and counting what you saw.
That was an unfortunate move because the stream walkers knew intuitively when things were going right, or wrong, and provided early warning signals about stock problems on thousands of small streams.
Those small streams, many of which have runs of only a few hundred salmon, collectively play a vital role in the health of B.C.'s salmon stocks.
Today, fisheries managers know more and more about fewer and fewer stocks. They look at a limited number of rivers, gathering detailed information through tagging programs, test fisheries and hydroacoustic counting stations. Then they apply mathematical models to estimate the overall status of stocks.
But they may not know when a tiny stream that usually had a run of 500 salmon now has none.
It is true that an army of volunteer citizens has stepped forward over the years to care for the salmon. They watch over spawners, fight polluters and run hatchery programs. But that work is mostly done in small streams close to towns.
Those little creeks that burrow through the distant forest, in the middle of nowhere, are often never visited.
DFO continues to be crippled by tight budgets. And there is increasing talk about "indicator streams." The plan is to focus intensely on a few key watersheds, in the hopes that that will tell what is happening over a huge geographic area.
Some of the big, important watersheds -- like the Fraser River -- remain under intense scrutiny by fisheries managers.
But even on the all-important Fraser the budget cuts have made the data less complete.
In the past, DFO used to put counting fences or do mark-recapture studies on all the Fraser tributaries where there were runs of 25,000 fish or more. Now that work is only done on streams with runs of 75,000 or more. That's a huge change because it means the DFO doesn't have a firm grasp on what's happening on a large number of small, but very important salmon rivers.
Over the past 12 years, there have been three inquiries to find out why so many fish that swam past a hydroacoustic counting station on the lower Fraser River never made it to the spawning grounds.
In some years, millions of fish were unaccounted for. The loss has been attributed to a number of factors, including environmental conditions, poaching and miscounting. But nobody really knows for sure.
Last year, a parliamentary committee looked into the situation on the West Coast and came up with a number of important recommendations. One was that DFO re-establish the threshold of 25,000 fish for the mark-recapture method of estimating spawning escapement. That was never done.
Recent reports suggest at least 300,000 sockeye vanished in the Fraser River watershed last year. But DFO doesn't really know -- because nobody knows how many fish were actually on the spawning beds. They don't know because they didn't look. And they didn't look in thousands of streams all along the B.C. because they didn't have the budget for it.
The federal government should give DFO a substantial funding increase so that it can do a proper job of counting fish.
It just might be that before we can bring back the salmon, we will have to bring back the stream walkers.
mhume@globeandmail.com 
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