Salmon Tales: Life is But a Stream

The five species of Pacific salmon have been the cornerstone of life for man and animals on the West Coast for centuries. Their life cycle is a captivating tale that has rippled through the years, inspiring a greater understanding of our rich natural history and the economy that has arisen from their abundance.

The story of salmon has all the hallmarks of a classic drama – birth and death, familial bonds and intrigue, struggle and beauty.

It begins in the gravel beds. Young salmon hatch in rivers and streams and spend the first part of their lives in fresh water. After anywhere from a few weeks to a couple of years, they migrate to the saltwater of the Pacific Ocean. There they spend several years maturing into adulthood before returning to their natal streams to spawn and expire. The details of their time spent in the ocean and exactly how they find their way back to their home pools remains a mystery.

Chinook, also known as King Salmon, Tyee and Smiley, are the kingpins of the species, growing anywhere form 13 to 50 kilograms. Coho, or Silver Salmon, are smaller but more aggressive than their Chinook cousins, often leaping as far as 2 metres to reach headwater streams that other salmon cannot navigate. Chum spread themselves throughout more than eight hundred streams across the province. Less fatty, and thus less tasty, Chum earned the name Dog Salmon because First Nations peoples fed them to their dogs. Pink, the smallest and youngest, with a fixed, two-year life span and averaging only 1 to 2.5 kilgrams, are mainly night crawlers – a strategy to protect them from predators. Sockeye, with its startling red flesh and scarlet and green mating colours, is the prize catch, its name translating from its indigenous origins to “fish of fishes.”

Every autumn, thousands of British Columbia waterways fill with the radiant, distorted bodies of returning salmon ¬making the epic journey to find the waters of their birth. Guided by smell, they traverse small coastal brooks to the headwaters of large rivers like the Fraser, Skeena, Yukon, and Thompson, travelling as far as 1500 kilometres from the ocean. These family-oriented creatures swim in the company of brothers, sisters and other spawners, and possess such amazing homing instincts that they often mate within 100 yards of where they were born. Here they spawn– the males battle for the right to fertilize the females, and the females batter their bodies as they dig holes (or redds), in the river bottom in which to lay their eggs – then die.

Pinks may be the smallest of the salmon but they return in the greatest numbers. The Fraser River run, for example, sometimes exceeds 30,000,000 fish in one season. top: At work at the Canfisco processing plant;
bottom: Fishers of yore (Canfisco)Coho salmon are easiest to catch as they spawn in the tiniest rivulets that flow into rivers. From September to November, this incredible annual pageant draws people from around the world to the Pacific Northwest. Campbell River, on the northern central coast of Vancouver Island, is internationally recognized as the Salmon Capital of the World.

The First Nations peoples who dwelled on salmon-rich streams depended on these fish for sustenance. According to Northwest Native legend, the salmon were actually people who lived in great houses under the sea. Each year the Salmon People become fish for the land-based tribes to catch, whereupon they returned home to be reborn.

Salmon plays an undeniable role in the local ecology. Otters scoop them from rivers. Bears feast on salmon before hibernating for the winter. The scores of fish bears haul into the forest become food for any number of scavengers, and nourishment for trees. Thousands of Bald Eagles, hailing from all over North America, and hundreds of thousands of seagulls, patrol the shores for decaying carcasses. Salmon remains left in rivers fertilize algae and other aquatic life, boosting the river’s food chain.

The Canadian Fishing Company

Salmon are not only delicious, but with as many as 50 million of them returning to B.C. each fall, represent a huge, quality protein source. West Coast Aboriginals caught them for thousands of years with circular cedar hooks embedded in flesh, in weirs built on rivers and with harpoons in the racing Fraser River canyons. Only 50 years after the first European, Captain James Cook, set foot on the West Coast, the first commercial cannery was opened circa 1830. By century’s end the number had burgeoned to 47.

Enter the Canadian Fishing Company (Canfisco). First opened in 1906, Canfisco rose in prominence early and is now, with five plants in Alaska and B.C., the largest salmon canning processor in Canada, moving through the astronomical number of 45 million pounds of salmon every year. Two thousand employees work in this integrated company. From out on the fishing grounds to marketing salmon products to 24 countries around the world, Canfisco is a world leader in quality Pacific salmon.

The Canfisco docks today (Canfisco)

And that’s not all they do. The huge resource of Pacific foodstuffs that they transfer into their signature brands Gold Seal®, Tea Rose and others, includes halibut, black cod, herring, crabmeat, smoked tuna, clams, oysters and mussels.

Wild salmon – and Canfisco packs only wild, natural salmon with a healthy genetic mix – are a great source of Omega-3 fatty acids. Wild salmon need the acids to survive low ocean temperatures: at 6- to 8-degrees Celsius just off the Canfisco docks – and everywhere else in B.C. – the North Pacific Ocean is only two degrees above the freezing mark. Among other things, these fats are essential for healthy human brains.

The tale of salmon is beautiful and bountiful. Considering the unequivocal role salmon have played in the British Columbia diet and economy, we should consider ourselves blessed to have this vital source of food, and provider of thousands of local jobs, swimming at our doorstep.

Gulf of Georgia Cannery

Salmon are an important part of a bear’s diet.

An interesting visit for the family is the National Historic Site, the Gulf of Georgia Cannery. Stand on the Steveston docks where for 85 years fishermen of boats large and small jockeyed for dock position to unload their prodigious catches.

In the beginning, tugboats towed small skiffs to the fishing grounds. The fishermen rowed their little boats around while lowering gillnets over their transoms. At day’s end, and with fish loaded to their gunwales, the small craft were ‘parked’ on the water within the factory itself. The fishermen were strong indeed – they unloaded their fish one by one, throwing them up to workers on the docks. Over the decades large cherry pickers, hoppers and added canning lines gave the growing operation the nickname “Monster Cannery”.

As business grew, large, ocean-going, square-rigger boats tied to the wharfs and loaded with tons of Canadian salmon, bound for the wild journey around Cape Horn and on to Great Britain and Europe. When Canfisco purchased the cannery in 1926 it made the site even larger, branching out into new lines such as canned herring, large manila bags of fish meal, and 45-gallon drums of herring oil supplement for animal feed. During the Second World War, herring was packed in one-pound oval tins for shipment to the fronts.

In 1979 the Gulf plant finally closed its doors and an era had ended. Visit the historic cannery site for the story of Canfisco, which celebrates 100 years, June 24 to October 9, 2006.