Volunteers harvest thousands of eggs as salmon return to South Surrey river

Volunteers at a hatchery in South Surrey are hard at work, aiming to help bolster local salmon populations with spawning season well underway.

On Wednesday, volunteers were conducting their annual egg take, collecting Chinook salmon eggs from the Little Campbell River for their breed stock.

Semiahmoo Fish and Game Club volunteer hatchery manager Roger McRurie said the goal was to collect between 60,000 and 70,000 eggs.

“This is a very important program, not only for fisheries, for sports fishermen, for Chinook, the orcas and all the other animals that live here in the habitat of the Little Campbell River,” he said.

McRurie said volunteers were happy with the effort so far, and had counted more than 700 returning to the hatchery.

That’s good news, given concerns about low river levels brought on by a drought heavy summer — concerns eased in part by heavy rains over the last several weeks.

“I was doing a little jig, I was pretty happy about it,” McRurie said of the recent precipitation.

The hatchery will take the extracted eggs, fertilize them and raise the salmon as juveniles until they are ready to be released and make their way back out to sea.

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The work at the hatchery has been underway since 1985, and McRurie said volunteers have been able to increase the number of salmon returning to the waterway by roughly five per cent every year.

While McRurie said the environmental health of the Little Campbell watershed has seen vast improvements from the days when gravel mining occurred in the area, conservationists remain concerned about the area.

Continued development in the area continues to cause concerns, ranging from potential pollution to fluctuating water levels and flooding.

“The river rises and falls a lot faster than it used to, there’s more chances of an environmental disaster for contaminants into the river,” he said.

For now, volunteers are celebrating what they’ve manage to achieve on the river, and marking what may be one of the better returns in years.

“It’s what all the volunteers were hoping for,” McRurie said. “It’s very satisfying.”