Photo: Mill Bay and District Conservation Society | The Canadian Press
Pacific salmon stocks, once so plentiful that they would shake the dugout canoes of Tim Kulchyski's Cowichan ancestors, are now fragile, in part because of human-made barriers in streams leading to their spawning grounds. A group of volunteers near Victoria, B.C., has built a human-propelled salmon run, carrying thousands of spawning salmon from a fish trap in the Salish Sea to Shawnigan Creek. "Millions of eggs will be hatched from these fish,'' said volunteer Alexander Hyndman. Those eggs translate into hundreds of thousands of young salmon. But climate change has brought challenges to this work. The June 2021 heat dome slowed Shawnigan Creek's flow to a trickle, and many young salmon from the 2020 spawning season perished. Despite such setbacks, Kulchyski is optimistic that his grandchildren may one day see salmon in the numbers remembered by his ancestors.
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