Salmon

Johnston Creek is a major Pink and Coho salmon bearing river. It is also prime Dolly Varden and Steelhead trout habitat. Orcas, grizzly and black bear, seals, eagles and even the forest depend on healthy salmon runs.

From 1953 to 1989, Johnston Creek Coho runs averaged between 400 and 800 with a 1961 high of 7500 to an all time low of 10 in 1989. This year, Coho will still return to Johnston Creek, but in 4 or 5 years the creek may be virtually barren. The Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) identified Johnston Creek as “excellent rearing habitat” and “one of the best Coho producers in the [Rivers] Inlet.” Nonetheless, poor ocean survival and poor federal fisheries management are already contributing to the decline of Johnston Creek Coho. Logging could push the stocks into extinction (DFO/MDEP Fish Inventory and Information Program. Stream Information Summary, 91-1168, Johnston Creek). Interfor is currently blasting a logging road to within around 100 feet of salmon bearing waterways at the valley bottom. Thomas Pendry, Habitat Biologist, DFO, writes “...three of the [bridge] crossings will have fish habitat, including possible salmon spawning areas, a short distance downstream.”

Despite the BC governments claims that the Forest Practices Code - even the rewritten, watered down code - gives strong protection to all fish streams, this has simply never been the case. The Code does not require “no logging” buffer zones on creeks less than 1.5 metres in width. Coho, the most immediately endangered of BC’s salmon stocks, frequently spawn and rear in creeks smaller than 1.5 metres.

Throughout the coast, 142 stocks of salmon are now extinct and another 624 are considered at high risk of extinction because runs have fallen to less than 200 fish. A DFO conference in February 1998 reported a “Coho Crisis” as historical runs numbering thousands of fish have collapsed and ocean survival rates have plummeted to just 2%.

One is left wondering what the future holds for the Coho and all the species that depend on them !!!