Fry abound in Byrne Creek

By Dan Hilborn
Published April 24, 2004


The Byrne Creek Streamkeepers are celebrating the sighting of both coho and chum salmon fry in the once-heavily polluted waterway.

"We've been seeing fry in the hundreds," said an ecstatic Paul Cipwynyk, who joined the South Burnaby conservation group soon after moving into the neighbourhood just two years ago.

"They're extended throughout a good portion of the creek - from as high as halfway up the ravine and down to where it passes under Marine Way.

"They're in the water and moving about, and just judging by what we see, it looks like a pretty good year."

The presence of coho fry is a special surprise because of the unusually low number of adult coho salmon - only six fish - who were spotted returning home to spawn in the creek last fall, Cipwynyk said.

Coho numbers were down throughout the province last year, and many salmon enhancement groups are worried that there could be substantially lower numbers of young coho salmon born this year.

More abundant are the chum salmon, which saw 56 adult spawners return to Byrne Creek last fall, he added.

Cipwynyk said the streamkeeper group now has about 20 volunteers, including Maho Hayashi and Yumo Kosaka, who helped net, photograph and release many of the baby fish in the waterway earlier this month.

But the group recognizes that young fish living in Byrne Creek still have an uphill battle to survive the ravages of urban run-off and other pressures.

One of the telltale signs of that ongoing water quality trouble was the relatively low number of hardy insects found in the waterway during an insect count this spring.

"We just finished a bug count in March and all of the sites came out poor, which is a little lower than in the previous series," Cipwynyk said.

The bug count uses a specially designed net to catch the insects, which are then divided into species and counted. Because certain bugs are more resistant to the effects of pollution, the results of the bug count can indicate the quality of the water.

"What you get is a spreadsheet rating from poor to fair to good and excellent. We hit fair a couple of times, but our last series was pretty much poor," he said.

The streamkeepers are also keeping a close watch on new developments taking place in the Edmonds town centre area, and Cipwynyk notes that large projects, such as the Highgate project being built on the former Middlegate Mall property, are often less of a concern than smaller buildings.

"The Highgate development is huge, so it's supposed to have water retention built into its plans. But smaller sites aren't required to have that," he said. "They do respond, but we have to keep an eye on them."

Cipwynyk noted that last fall's heavy rains were particularly tough on the creek, and several "severe releases" of sediment changed the watercourse through a spawning area in the stream bed.

Another recurring problem is a trickle of some kind of oil which comes and goes without any warning. "Sometimes, these things come down the road during rainstorms, but this you can see even when it hasn't rained for a week. Maybe it's an old storage tank that people have forgotten about," he said.

And for the future, Cipwynyk said the streamkeepers will likely focus on educating people who live in the area that they have a salmon-bearing stream in their midst, and even simple activities such as washing their car on the street can have a deleterious effect on the fish.