DOWN EAST magazine • November 6, 2020
Wild sea-run Atlantic salmon used to abound in at least 34 rivers throughout New England. Populations started dropping at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and Maine is now the only U.S. state where the species clings to existence, after year upon year of population decline caused by dam construction, pollution, overfishing, warming rivers, and poor survival rates at sea (possibly the result of increasingly cold ocean waters created by melting polar ice). To try to keep the fish from disappearing entirely, the federal government prohibits angling for them, even catch-and-release. And the work of trying to reverse the species’s fortunes falls largely on fish hatcheries, such as the Downeast Salmon Federation’s Peter Gray Hatchery in East Machias, where salmon are raised and then released to repopulate the wild.