There are more Chum swimming up Basil Creek than we’ve seen for years. According to Matthew Clarke of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), Cortes Island isn’t the only place where the Chum run is good this year. 

“As a general rule this year things are looking much better for Chum than they have looked, albeit with a couple of places that are not quite as strong as we would have hoped to see,”  he explained.

“We are seeing strength like you mentioned on Cortes. We actually saw some Chum in Campbell River, which has been hard for us to really survey for a while. It was nice to see that because we have had that as a question mark. Oyster River has some good Chum numbers in it, and as we move down the island, things are generally good.” 

“There are definitely some returns that are better than we have seen in recent years, but we are also seeing some runs that may not come up quite as high as we would like to see. At Orford (which empties into Bute Inlet and has a summer Chum population) we saw a few thousand fish come back, but it wasn’t excellent returns relative to what we’ve seen elsewhere. In adjacent rivers, like the Qualicum, Little Qualicum, and Big Qualicum, one is not showing quite as strong, but the other one is showing reasonable strength.”

“As a rule, pretty much throughout the entire south coast area, we’ve seen poor Chum productivity since about 2017. Some years we did see some slight upticks in abundance. 2019 was  poorest year on record for all south coast Chum stocks and that has tumbling down effects. Chum returns are primarily  3, 4 and 5 year old fish with the 4 year old component typically being the strongest, but that can vary a little bit.” 

“Last year the dominant brood year return would have been from 2019, a low abundance year. We saw low abundance pretty much throughout, but with maybe a slight indication that things were improving for Chum. We typically see that four year old component as the most abundant component, but in the test fishery last year, we actually saw the three year olds showing up in really strong numbers. Typically,  four year olds are about 80% of what we would expect to see. Last year,  in the final days of the test fishery, 50% of the run consisted of 3 year old fish.” 

Cortes Island streamkeeper Cec Robinson recently told Cortes Currents, “Just a few weeks ago, Fisheries was anticipating a very poor return based on their test fishery. They couldn’t find them, and they thought that they weren’t there, but obviously they pulled a lovely surprise. They were somewhere, and here they come. There’s been lots of Chum being spotted. They are so full of energy when they first come in. They’re all excited.  They’re above average size this year, too. Beautiful, strong, the nicest we’ve ever seen.” 

Matthew Clarke: “Always that first day it’s like, ‘Ooh, what are we going to see?’ We were looking to see over 30 Chum per set in that first little stretch and I think by the second day we were seeing close to a hundred Chum per set. That’s pretty early indication that things were actually much better than we had anticipated.”

“Johnson Straits Test Fisheries measures something that we call the ISC Chum, or inside Southern Chum, and we manage that based on a critical threshold of a million. If we’re below a million, we’re below the critical abundance needed. We don’t have any fisheries commercially and other fisheries like rec are heavily constrained. This year we’re looking to be somewhere between two and three million if everything pans out the way it’s looking right now. We have to wait because Chum are late returns and takes time to get all that data together, but things are looking much better this year than they have for a while.” 

“We saw ocean conditions improve in about 2020-2021. That marine heat wave from 2014-16 is really what drove those poor abundances we saw from 2017 onwards, but things really started to pick up in that 2021 time frame. Fish entering the ocean in that time frame experienced much better conditions than the salmon entering before, so their survival was much better.  I think what we’re seeing is because some of the populations dropped so low, it’s going to take a little bit of time under those good conditions to see the big bounce back that we would like to see. We have a few more years of  expected good marine survival, so hopefully we see those numbers tick up a little bit further.”  

“An interesting Pink salmon anecdote, since about 2005 on the Campbell and  Quinsam Rivers we typically see about 3% of the smolts return.  This year with just Pinks, it’s looking to be like 6% or 7%. A Pink salmon goes out 30 millimetres long, when they hit the ocean.  To think that 6% of those little guys made it back is pretty mind blowing. They went into a very much better ocean than the previous years had been. With the Chum, it’s a similar story.”

Cortes Currents: Given the probability that there’ll be more droughts and extreme weather events in the future. What species do you think have the best chance of survival in our streams and why?

Matthew Clarke: “That one is tricky, it depends on how those events are timed, right?  In 2022, We had a really long drought in the fall but Chum weren’t even really supposed to be in the river when it finally ended. Coho, some Chinook populations and Sockeye, live in lakes, so it may not be such a big deal. Those Coho typically like to sit in backwater type habitats, which maybe are less impacted by drought conditions, as long as they’ve got the depth.”

“The late timing on that 2022 drought might have reduced spawning success in Coho, because our juvenile programs that we have at Black Creek (near Campbell River) and the Keogh River (near Port Hardy) both showed smaller smolt numbers than we would have expected this year based on recent trends.” 

“If you get a big flood early in the fall, before the eggs have eyed, that might be a big problem but if you see it later in the season, it might not be so important because those eggs are a bit more resilient. Droughts in the middle of summer might not be that bad of a thing either.  A system with a lake is probably different from a system without a lake, or a big water resource. It really depends on the specifics of each system.”

“In Coho we are seeing some age structure that we haven’t really seen before. We’re seeing juvenile migrations that include three and four year old smolts,  and usually we only see ones and twos. So you might see that those fish are finding themselves a little bit further into the backwater channels or  lakes and not able to get out, then residing for another year.  We’re also seeing higher smolt numbers in some systems might be a result of those changing environmental conditions being a bit more favourable for them.” 

Cortes Currents: Do you have any comment about reports of Chum showing up in Arctic waters?

Matthew Clarke: “There have been documented observations of Chum in the Arctic.  What you’re looking at there is probably multiple things. One is it’s a big area, you’re going to see those fish where people are, but straying is  a characteristic of salmon. Otherwise they wouldn’t have recolonized BC after the glaciers retreated.  I think that there is some amount of straying that occurs and those fish are probably from BC or Alaska or Russia.  They end up in that area,  smell the freshwater and they go take a look. What we would be looking for in the near future is this potential for  successful reproduction in the Arctic.”  

“I had a colleague who worked on the Mackenzie River. He mentioned that they  had documented conditions that were favourable  to survival under the ice. Now, that’s hearsay, I don’t have that as data on my computer, but one of the things that we expect to see as climate change sets in is that northward push of species as conditions become more favourable in those areas that are currently uninhabitable.”

Cortes Currents: Is there anything you wanted to add? 

Matthew Clarke: “Fisheries are cyclical. Conditions in the ocean are good and then that’s followed by conditions that are less favourable for salmon, but maybe more favourable for other species.” 

“This is definitely a positive time to be working with salmon specifically, because things are on the uptick. We’re seeing salmon return to places that have seen low abundance in recent years.”

“I got into fisheries because I love it. When you’re swimming or  flying over a river and you see a large number of salmon, it is very heartwarming.  Seeing the fish that we’re seeing this year is definitely why I got into this work. It provides a little bit of hope that even when things  are seeming  bad or  the abundance is poor, that things can still come back, we just have to give it the time and the space.”

Links of Interest:

• The Chum Return to Basil Creek (2024 interview with Cec Robinson) – Cortes Currents
• Exceptional salmon returns on Campbell, Quinsam Rivers this fall –
  MyCampbellRiverNow
• No Chum in Basil Creek yet, but the outlook for salmon may be improving (2022 interview with Matthew Clarke)
• Chum Returns
• Chum Salmon in Basil Creek
• Vagabond Salmon

Top image credit: Chum salmon after spawning – courtesy DFO; All undesignated photos by Roy L Hales

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