Once again, Fulford Harbour, WENNANEC, had no sizeable herring spawn—for close on the 40th year in a row. It is always a disappointment because no herring in Fulford was probably unimaginable for millennia before that. Fulford Harbour is one of the many spawning areas that have flickered out with the advent of industrial seiners fishing winter and spring.  

Every year we witness herring schools passing by, starting at the end of January when I get the usual calls: There are California sea lions keeping me up at night! This year they were hanging out at Beaver Point with short-billed gulls waiting for their return. On February 19th, I rowed to ȾEMAȻES (Russell Island) where a small school of herring were swirling around the west side, a place that was a key herring rake area according to Dave Elliott Sr. and published in his classic Saltwater People.  Old timers from the harbour and marine scientist Anne Parkinson, now the Fulford Harbour Steward, remember it as a good place to find herring. Anne and I laid down some cedar boughs to welcome them back. 

The herring did spawn in Ganges and Long Harbour this year in small spot spawns (less than 800 metres over three locations). I spent a rainy two days with volunteers trying to track any evidence, but we weren’t successful with the high low tides, so we’ll await the result of the DFO dive surveys. Next year we will be able to mobilize more volunteers! 

The good news is that this year there is a real upsurge in public interest in learning about and restoring these bay spawning populations. We also call them resident or homesteader populations. Nature Saltspring, a natural history organization, dedicated to education about and preservation/restoration of natural ecosystems and biodiversity, is “developing a project focused on monitoring and protecting our threatened Salish Sea Pacific herring populations that will engage community members in science-based observations and conservation action in the spring of 2025.”

Anne Parkinson at Fulford (who runs a Facebook page for local volunteers) is part of the Coastal Forage Fish Network that Jacqueline Huard, from Project Watershed, is coordinating. Jacqueline writes “Coastal Forage Fish Network (CFFN) has kicked off an iNaturalist Project to gather observations of herring spawn https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/pacific-herring-spawn-and-nurseries. Everyone and anyone can contribute to the project. Participants can snap a photo and upload with the date and location to an iNaturalist account. Accounts on iNaturalist are free but do require registration. Observations of \’egg stage\’ are automatically added to our project. The purpose is to create a formal home for herring spawn observations harnessing the power of community/citizen scientists that are are spread out across the coast. By providing a publicly available source of Pacific herring spawn observations this data set could supplement pre-existing call-in networks, and the formal government fly-overs that sometimes miss spawn due to fog, cloud cover, or miss early or late spawns, or really small spawns.”

Dr. Tony Pitcher who did the genetics research with a team of scientists on Pacific Herring stocks up and down the coast wrote: “the results are unequivocal – our herring go home to spawn and spawning is driven by timing.” This Herring spawn observation campaign is intended to be simple and spreading the word is vital to its success. We hope to support these efforts by getting the word out to all our contacts and helping these fish get home.

“10 Things To Do With a Herring” by Briony Penn