Swiss officials are delighted by a 36-inch Atlantic salmon that
apparently migrated 600 miles up the Rhine River, well into the
landlocked country of Switzerland, where the fish was caught by an
amateur angler.
It was the first salmon seen that far up the Rhine in half a
century, according to the English version of
Spiegel International.
“In the 19th century, salmon were so plentiful in the Rhine that
they were used to feed the poor,” the story states. “In the 1930s,
salmon were still relatively plentiful in Basel, with around 120 of
them caught each year. But neither tail nor scale of the animal has
been seen since 1958.”
This incident reminds me of the ongoing, and somewhat desperate,
effort in the Northwest to return sockeye salmon to Redfish Lake in
Idaho. But that’s a Kitsap story for another day. (For a quick
review without the Kitsap angle, there’s an update in The
Idaho Statesman.)
As for the Rhine, a series of dams blocked the migration until
fish ladders were installed. In 1986, a chemical spill had
disastrous consequences for sea life in the river. Then in 1988, a
project called Salmon 2000 set out to improve the river and bring
salmon back to Switzerland.
On Sunday, 39-year-old Thomas Wanner was surprised at the fish
he caught while dangling his line in the Birs River near Basel, not
far from where its waters flows into the Rhine.
“It’s crazy, I can still hardly believe it,” Wanner told the
local Basler Zeitung (newspaper).
As luck would have it, Olivier Schmidt, a hobby fisher who is a
curator at Basel’s Natural History Museum, was nearby. Schmidt took
a photo with his cell phone and sent the picture to Switzerland’s
Environment Ministry to confirm the identify of the salmon.
Check out the
map of the salmon’s apparent migration route and the obstacles
it faced to reach Basel.
In December, Jochen Bolsche of Spiegel
International reported on the difficulties faced by the group
Salmon 2020 in getting salmon up the Rhine, particularly relating
to troubles with dams in France. His story includes this note:
Switzerland, Europe’s environmental poster child, spends
millions so that fish can pass through its own sections of the
river and in addition pays for 5 percent of the stocked salmon in
the entire 1,320 kilometer long Rhine watershed. Yet the Bern-based
Federal Office for the Environment complains that Switzerland is,
“along with Luxembourg, the only country that has not yet been able
to celebrate the successful return of the salmon.”
If you are as fascinated as I am by the struggles to restore
salmon in another country, check out this 2004 report called
“Rhine
Salmon 2020” (PDF 1 mb), which outlines the next phase of
recovery.
(Interestingly, Washington
Gov. Chris Gregoire has listed 2020 as the date to restore a
“healthy Puget Sound.”)
The Salmon 2020 report declares the following “visions,”
including the second one that we can hope is getting closer to
reality:
1st vision: Several thousands of salmon in the
Rhine
2nd vision: Undisrupted salmon migration as far as
Basel
3rd vision: Salmon stocking is self-sustaining
4th vision: Wild salmon in the Rhine in 2020
One last item is the press release from the
International Commission for the Protection of the Rhine.
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