Wearing rubber boots and a waterproof jacket, salmon enthusiast Gerald Harris – the director of a local non-profit called the Friends of Bowker Creek Society – wades through slow-moving, ankle-deep water in Bowker Creek to find a salmon carcass discovered near the creek's estuary on Nov. 5.
Once home to salmon and trout, the creek, which meanders through Saanich, Victoria and Oak Bay, where it empties into the ocean near the Glenlyon Norfolk School, hasn’t boasted fish of any kind for years.
“It has been several decades since there were any fish,” said Harris. “I would say in the neighbourhood of 70 years.”
Then, earlier this week, astoundingly a dead coho salmon was found. And now for the second time again, another.
Development in Oak Bay's early years stunted the creek's fish populations, according to Harris, who added that, as of 1914, there are no records of fish upstream of Firefighter's Park, which sits just a short walk from the estuary.
"That was really the first huge blow to salmon and trout populations," said Harris. “Before that, there are records of chum spawning behind what is now Royal Jubilee Hospital and of people catching cutthroat trout from a bridge over the creek somewhere near Hillside Mall."
To welcome fish back, Harris has been volunteering with the Friends of Bowker Creek Society, which works to enhance, restore and protect the creek. This includes efforts to repopulate it with salmon.
In the fall of 2020, the group incubated chum salmon eggs from the Goldstream Fish Hatchery in the creek, hoping that full-grown fish would return to spawn four years later. That means the non-profit is expecting chum to start swimming up the creek this month.
“The Goldstream chum run is pretty much a November run,” he said, adding that the non-profit chose to incubate chum instead of coho because the former is better suited to the creek's current conditions. “Since these are eggs that came from Goldstream in the first place, they're going to behave pretty much according to the Goldstream timing.”
As Harris passes through a dark, graffiti-marked culvert, he explains that he believes the carcass found earlier that day is that of a coho salmon, not a chum. But he’s holding out hope until he can get confirmation from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Out of the culvert, Harris spots the salmon carcass floating upside down. He plucks it out of the murky water with a gloved hand and places it delicately ashore. Using his iPhone, he snaps a few pictures of the scaled creature, which he fires to a Department of Fisheries and Oceans representative, who almost immediately confirms it is indeed a coho salmon.
This news means the chum salmon Harris and the Friends of Bowker Creek Society have been waiting for haven't returned – for now.
After a short trek out of the creek, Harris explains that this is still an exciting discovery.
“With Pacific salmon and certainly cutthroat trout, if you create conditions that are right for them, they'll find the stream,” said Harris. “It's a bit of a promise that, if, in the next couple of decades, we can get water quality and habitat that would be welcoming to the coho or cutthroat trout, they'll find it.”
But why might a lone coho have ventured up the creek?
“Salmon have a wonderful instinct for homing to their native stream, but there's always a small percentage that get lost and that find themselves in other streams,” said Harris. “Evolutionarily, that's really important because it's how new streams get populated by salmon or how populations recover if they're wiped out.”
Harris added that he still has high hopes chum will return to the creek in November. So for now, It’s a waiting game – an especially exciting one for those who understand the importance of salmon here.
“Salmon is really a symbol for this whole coast, from northern California, right up to Alaska,” said Harris. “It’s really part of who we are."
