Photo: Will Husby
Terminal Creek
Terminal Creek Fish Hatchery
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Tucked away in the forests of Crippen Regional Park, about a 15-minute walk from the Causeway towards Killarney Lake, is the salmon hatchery run by the Bowen Island Fish and Wildlife Club.
In partnership with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), club members raise juvenile salmon from eggs and release them in creeks on Bowen, including Terminal Creek and the Lagoon. Volunteers also monitor the health of Bowen’s salmon-bearing creeks and riparian areas.
Each fall, DFO provides the hatchery with eggs taken from spawning adult salmon caught on the tributaries of the nearby Squamish River at the northern end of Atl’7katsem/Howe Sound. The type and number of eggs received each year can vary, but typically they include chum, coho, and sometimes pink salmon eggs.
The eggs arrive at the hatchery during the salmon spawning season and are incubated in dark, cool, slowly flowing oxygenated water within trays that mimic the conditions of wild eggs laid by salmon in stream gravels. When the eggs hatch, young salmon with an attached egg sac wriggle out. These juveniles, called alevin or sac fry, feed on the nourishment contained in the egg sac until it is used up. At that point, the young salmon are called fry and are moved to large tanks of water where volunteers feed them until release time.
Chum salmon fry are ready for release in April. They are let go into the Lagoon, where they have only a short swim to the ocean. This matches the experience of wild chum fry as upon hatching they quickly swim downstream to the estuary and sea. Wild coho salmon fry, on the other hand, spend a year in their stream after rising out of the gravel. During this period, coho are preparing for life in saltwater. Hatchery volunteers release their coho fry into various creeks on Bowen well upstream from the ocean.
This release is in May (coho spawn later in the winter and so eggs mature later in the spring) and the Club invites the public to participate in the release during the Coho Bon Voyage celebration.
Earth Day Chum Release
On Earth Day 2021, Terminal Creek Hatchery volunteers escorted Bowen’s graduating class of young chum salmon from the hatchery where they were born down to the Lagoon to prepare for life at sea.
The team netted the young salmon from the hatchery’s giant tanks. At the shore, they tipped their pails to release approximately 70,000 fish into the shaded, shallow, and cool water of the Lagoon.
A further 30,000 were released into Davies Creek in Snug Cove. Each fish weighed roughly two-thirds of a gram (the weight of three toothpicks) and was about the length of your baby finger. The fry spent from a few hours to a couple of days in the sheltered water of the Lagoon or Davies Creek. Then they ventured out to begin their life in the ocean.
Here, as young fry, they spend several weeks near shore, hunting for food in the eelgrass beds of Kwilákm, then further months in local waters before heading to the north Pacific. Chum salmon spend about four years fattening up at sea before returning to the stream where they were born to mate and die. Chum is the largest salmon species that spawns on Bowen Island. Individual fish typically from four to six kg as returning adults.