UVic student Khota Hamazoe was the first to arrive at Bowker Creek on Friday morning to help restore the chum salmon habitat in the freshwater creek. He was met by Austin Nolan, a biologist from Peninsula Streams Society who spearheaded the repair session on Sept. 20.
"I love fishing and I want to help protect nature," he said while grabbing a pair of rubber boots and waders provided by the society.
As the volunteers arrived and geared up, Nolan outlined the morning's game plan – building a riffle crest with cobble gravel stones to support chum salmon spawning and covering up an eroded portion of the stream bank with coconut fibre mat to keep sediment and silt off the creek.
The 8-kilometre-long Bowker Creek starts at the University of Victoria campus and flows down to Oak Bay, Victoria and Saanich.
"This creek repair activity is the first year where there is potential for the chum that we incubated in the stream here as eggs to come back as adults so it's a pretty exciting season for us," Kyle Armstrong, executive director of Peninsula Streams Society, said. "We're still a couple months away from that happening; we can prep the habitat in anticipation of those adults returning, but we're not sure if they will."
Armstrong's concern is not unfounded.
In its State of Salmon report released on Sept. 19, the Pacific Salmon Foundation (PSF) says Pacific salmon are in decline across British Columbia and the Yukon. The report found that of the 41 region-species combinations that they could assess, more than 70 per cent are below their long-term average spawner abundance.
Spawner abundance refers to the total number of female fish at spawning time. Understanding the state and trends in spawner abundance is important for salmon conservation because these salmon are available to meet ecological needs within watersheds and can reproduce and contribute to future generations.
According to the report, chum salmon and steelhead have shown concerning declines in recent years in all regions. For chum, this mirrors a broader pattern of decline that is occurring across the North Pacific Rim.
PSF cites 150 years of industrial development, compounded by climate change, that has impacted vital salmon habitat from freshwater streams to the open ocean, so much so that salmon that spend a longer amount of time in freshwater are struggling.
"There is that opportunity within this watershed where it still has some of those problems of pollution, extreme flashiness from storms – the urban creek syndrome," Armstrong added.
Volunteers present during the habitat restoration understood the work they're doing is important in addressing this situation, even if it's just moving some rocks and gravel to create an area where the chum salmon can spawn.
A few years ago, we installed essentially a spawning platform; we built some surrogate habitat by inserting incubation trays similar to how eggs are incubated in the hatchery," Armstrong added. "We incubated them in the creek, giving those individual eggs more chance to imprint here so they can find their way home."
Gerald Harris, one of the directors of Friends of Bowker Creek Society, says what they did on Sept. 20 was part of a multi-year effort to return salmon back to the creek.
"This is the fall that we're hoping some chum salmon will be coming back," he said.
Barring other ecological and unexpected habitat destruction, the chum salmon are expected to return sometime in mid-October or November.
Peninsula Streams Society says they will continue to keep an eye on the stream, educate folks about how storm drains make their way into the creeks and monitor water conditions for any kind of spill or sediment events.
