Negligence, poaching, weather harming salmon population: DFO

By Christopher Vaughan

FOR THE SOU’WESTER

With the summer sun beating down on the West Coast of Newfoundland, many people are heading to their favourite swimming hole to have some fun while cooling off.

However, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans is concerned people swimming in blocked off areas of local rivers and streams may be having a negative effect on the province's salmon population.

"The danger is that the fish will usually not be able to get past the blockage when they are heading up stream [to spawn] because it acts as a dam," says Brent Watkins, department conservation and protection supervisor.

"Also, fish that get trapped in these pools will stay there in times of low water and when the swimmers return they are stressing these fish, sometimes unintentionally and sometimes intentionally. These fish are usually resting in these pools and due to high water temperatures they cannot stand great amounts of exertion because the water contains very little oxygen."

Watkins says the recent dry weather makes the situation even worse.

"We have a really bad scenario happening here now with a large amount of returning salmon, probably the best return in numerous years, but the water levels have dropped and now these salmon are stranded in the rivers until we receive enough rain to get them moving," he says.

Watkins says the department has found that some people have been poaching salmon in the blocked off areas, and notes there are reports of people erecting river blockages in order to sweep the area clean of the fish.

While all scheduled rivers in the province have some monitoring, Watkins says department officials have found that the rivers close to large human populations are a main concern at this time.

"In particular Blanche Brook and Warm Brook," says Watkins of rivers in the Stephenville area. "These two rivers have been closed to angling for some time in hopes that the salmon population would return to a sustainable harvest level."

While the weather cannot be regulated, Watkins says the Department of Fisheries and Oceans are doing their best to control negligent or illegal activities.

"It is our job to protect these fish and this is done through education, but also can be done through enforcement," says Watkins. "People that intentionally try to harm these fish will be dealt with by the enforcement approach, but hopefully we can educate enough people about these fish and the need to protect them that they will become true stewards of the resource and do what is necessary to help them survive."

Watkins notes those apprehended trying to capture, destroy, or harass the salmon could be charged with a variety of offences, fined somewhere in the range of $1,000 and sometimes be prohibited from being at or near rivers or inland waters.

(Christopher Vaughan is a journalist with Transcontinental Media’s Georgian newspaper, which is a contributor to the Sou’Wester.)