The Bowen Island Conservancy set up a tour of the Terminal Creek Hatchery, guided by members of the Bowen Island Fish and Wildlife Club, that offered islanders a chance to get to know what goes on there and understand the history and purpose of the place.
It all goes back to the mid-1970s when the federal government saw that salmon stocks were declining on the West Coast and decided to take action.
The Minister of Fisheries and Oceans at the time, Romeo LeBlanc, launched the Salmon Enhancement Program to that end in 1977. The program funded the building of salmon hatcheries and the rehabilitation of creeks and streams. Salmon enhancement volunteers on Bowen with the assistance of DFO made plans for a hatchery that they completed in 1987.
The other important component to the Salmon Enhancement Program was education. Salmon volunteers on Bowen, members of of what we now know as the Bowen Island Fish and Wildlife Club, have taken this on by working at BICS, IDLC, IPS and the Youth Centre, as well as inviting young people into the hatchery for events like Coho Bon Voyage in June, when kids get to release fry in to Terminal Creek.
“The reason we have hatcheries is that in the wild probably less than five per cent of the eggs laid and fertilized in the gravel of creeks and rivers actually hatch into fry,” says Tim Pardee, president of the Bowen Island Fish and Wildlife Club. “In the hatchery, between 95 and 97 per cent of the eggs we get from DFO become fry and are released into the ocean. Last fall, we saw many of them come back to spawn. We estimate that more than 1,000 chum spawners made it back to the Lagoon and Davis Creek this year. You do the math. It might be thinking that not many came back, but even those fry that got eaten by predators made a positive impact on the ecosystem. There were some years we saw no returns at all, so we are hoping last fall’s returns mark the beginning of a positive trend.”
For more information on the Fish and Wildlife Club’s mission, our waterways and how to get involved visit bowenhatchery.org or contact either Tim Pardee at [email protected] or Mike von Zuben at [email protected].
