Tag Archives: Chinook Salmon

Animals, Rivers & Oceans

Kakawin breaching at Harbour Quay in the Alberni Inlet

Editor’s note: Are we going to be hearing more stories of orcas coming closer to human communities as they search for food?

By Alexandra Mehl, Ha-Shilth-Sa, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Port Alberni, BC – As the sun was setting on Saturday, Aug. 26 three kakawin, the Nuu-chah-nulth word for orca, traveled into Port Alberni’s Harbour Quay for what some would say is the farthest up the Alberni Inlet they’ve been seen.

Only meters from Fisherman’s Wharf, orcas breached multiple times, putting on a show for the lucky crowd who cheered them on. Soon, videos and photos would be circulated on social media to share the incredible sight.

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Environment, Rivers & Oceans

Saving the Cowichan Estuary from drowning in a climate-fed ‘coastal squeeze’

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

High atop a dike hemming the Koksilah River as its fresh waters meet salt, red-winged blackbirds call out as they patrol their territory.

Noisy heralds of spring, the blackbirds return to the Cowichan Estuary each year to nest and protest human intrusion with sharp signature trills from the brush along the riverbank.

Today the interloper is Tom Reid, conservation land management program manager with the Nature Trust of British Columbia (NTBC), who stands atop the 15-foot-high rock embankment he is working to destroy.

The dike, built to fortify farmland stolen from the estuary, is stifling the tidal marsh vital to the survival of a host of endangered salmon and bird species that rely on it for breeding, feeding and migration, he said.

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Indigenous Nations, Rivers & Oceans

Yukon River’s salmon runs likely to stay small while Indigenous Peoples’ sacrifice grows

Canada’s National Observer, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

The collapse of wild salmon is causing a current of pain that spans the length of the Yukon River, from its mouth at Alaska’s Bering Sea to the headwaters in Canada’s Yukon territory 3,000 kilometres away.

Indigenous people on both sides of the border spoke about the devastation the loss of chinook salmon and the more recent collapse of chum stocks are having on communities while testifying at the Yukon River Panel, a bilateral commission that manages salmon stocks, during its meeting in Whitehorse this week. 

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Energy, Environment, Rivers & Oceans

B.C. will soon decide the fate of four projects with big climate and biodiversity impacts

By Matt Simmons, The Narwhal, Local Journalism Initiative reporter

B.C. Premier David Eby’s newly appointed cabinet is about to decide the fate of a handful of proposed projects,  each of which comes with a slew of implications to biodiversity and  climate. 

While provincial ministers wrestle with the decisions, delegates from across the country and around the world are gathered at COP15,  the United Nations biodiversity conference in Montreal. The aim of the  conference is to secure government commitments to slow the global  biodiversity crisis underway — the crisis is sometimes referred to as  the sixth mass extinction and is the first to be human-caused.

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Rivers & Oceans

70% of the fish farms sampled had PRV-1, study finds

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A new study published by the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences, states that 70% of the samples taken from 56 fish farms had PRV-1.

One of the co-authors is independent biologist Alexandra Morton, who explained, “The study was my concept and I funded a lot of the analysis and did a lot of the sampling myself. It was truly collaborative with Clayoquot Action sampling the Farms in Clayoquot Sound. An extraordinary man, Dr. Neil Fraser from Powell River got in his speed boat and went to the central coast. The Wild Fish Conservancy down in Washington State, sampled farms there. So it was  a sustained effort by a lot of people, and then Dr. Gideon Mordecai did the analysis of the relationship between the different strains that we picked up.”

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