Whoppers fight their way up creek

Spawning salmon return to Stoney Creek for the first time in 50 years
By Dan Hilborn
Published Nov. 10, 2004


Local Streamkeepers are ecstatic this week after discovering mature spawning salmon have made their way to the upper reaches of Stoney Creek for the first time in more than 50 years.

Spawning pairs of coho and chum salmon are now splashing their way past the culvert under the Lougheed Highway and are laying their eggs just metres away from nearby homes, schools and roads.

"This is incredible," said Jennifer Atchison, the head steward for the waterway and founder of the Stoney Creek environment committee. "Children from Stoney Creek school have been releasing coho into that creek for the past 14 years, and now we're finally seeing them come back."

However, Atchison is cautioning her neighbours to respect the fish and make sure that children, pets or others do not wander into the water, where they could disturb the fish and interfere with the salmon's ability to procreate.

"The fish down there are huge - 10 pounds or more - so I know people will be absolutely shocked when they see them," she said. "I want to make sure that people and their dogs don't go into the water. People have to learn to live with the fish."

Atchison said the revitalization of the creek is a long-term success story that started in the early 1960s when members of the Sapperton Fish and Game Club began their work to bring salmon back to the Brunette River.

By the 1980s, after fish began returning to the Brunette, local environmental groups turned their focus to the river's tributaries, such as Stoney Creek and the other streams that flow off Burnaby Mountain.

She credited the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), Burnaby city hall and the GVRD for working together to make a series of improvements to the waterway over the past 10 years that allowed the salmon to make the trip back up Burnaby Mountain.

The final obstacle in the fish's path was cleared last summer when a baffle was installed on the culvert under the highway, allowing the fish to make their way past the new secondary school and up Burnaby Mountain.

The fish have been spotted as far north as the Broadway connector, near the intersection with North Road.

Atchison said the return of the salmon is a phenomenal success story, especially considering all the new development in the neighbourhood over the past few years.

"When the high school went up and the SkyTrain was built we went looking for community partners and that effort paid off," she said. "In fact, the stream was actually maintained at its previous level or made better. We really worked hard to ensure that would happen, and it worked."

Maurice Coulter-Boisvert, the DFO community advisor on the north side of the Fraser River, said the return of the fish took years to accomplish, and pointed to the 1996 installation of a stone weir on the Brunette River as one of the major achievements.

Coulter-Boisvert also urged neighbours to use caution when viewing the fish.

"What we have here is a treasure worth preserving," he said. "For those who are not aware of the significance of this, it's a very important thing to a lot of people. Put it this way - if we don't have healthy salmon, it speaks to what we can expect as humans living in the same environments."

Local Streamkeeper Vladimir Soukhatchev, a fisheries biologist who conducts an average of 19 water quality tests on Stoney Creek each week, said the Stoney Creek environment committee is still concerned about high conductivity readings coming from two small tributaries flowing from the top of the hill.

While the main stem of Stoney Creek has an average conductivity level of 130 - which is more than adequate to maintain healthy fish - one of the small tributaries often has readings as high as 3,000. Soukhatchev believes the problem comes from the storage of road salt at an SFU maintenance yard.

Another small tributary coming from the centre of the SFU Discovery Park site has conductivity readings that are twice as high as the main stream, but that problem could probably be resolved with very little effort, he said.

"But most of the tributaries are good, and the main stem of Stoney Creek is unbelievably good, but we can still improve this," said Soukhatchev, who worked at the Novo Sibirks scientific centre on the Ob River in Siberia before moving to Burnaby five years ago.