The rivers of Roderick Haig-Brown spill out of great, snowy mountains that once were cloaked in ancient rain forests, filter through lakes where the water is of shocking clarity, and make their way to the rich, blue waters of the Strait of Georgia on Canada’s West Coast.

Those mountains have been heavily logged in the past century, the waters have in some cases become tainted with mining pollution, and some of the lakes have been replaced by dam impoundments. The sea is still as beautiful as ever, but because of pollution and over fishing - and climate change - it is no longer the highly productive nursery it once was for young salmon and steelhead.

The survival rate for steelhead smolts leaving the rivers, for their epic one to three year journeys across the North Pacific and home, has dropped from 15% to 4%. At that low level, the fish are no longer able to replace themselves - and river populations begin a rapid fall towards extinction. In many of the rivers Haig-Brown once fished, on the eastern slope of Vancouver Island, steelhead are now down to remnant stocks.

“We really question whether there’s any steelhead left in some of those smaller streams,” says Craig Wightman, one of the government of British Columbia’s senior biologists.

In Goldstream, a beautiful little river near Victoria, that twists around mossy boulders, and splashes under the bows of great cedar trees, fisheries technicians have watched a once productive watershed become vacant of steelhead. In the past three years, teams swimming the Goldstream have counted only one adult steelhead.

Goldstream never produced great numbers of fish, but as a kid I used to clamber over the rocks there, peering down into the clear pools, sometimes sweeping my arm under the boulders to try and scare out a steelhead with a cedar-green back. I could always find one or two - and up until relatively recently, anglers could expect to catch 40 or 50 steelhead a year in the stream.

Now there is one. Or less.

Mr. Wightman says there are many rivers like that along Vancouver Island’s East Coast, between Victoria and Campbell River, where Haig-Brown lived and wrote his famous books.

“They just seem to have disappeared,” says Mr. Wightman of the steelhead in the small rivers which historically used to have runs of only a few hundred fish.

And they are vanishing from the big rivers too - the rivers where Haig-Brown perfected his dry fly techniques, catching stunningly beautiful steelhead in rivers that seemed to flow through paradise.

The effects of a dam, combined with zinc and copper leaching from a mine, have eradicated the Campbell River run, which used to pass right through Haig-Brown’s backyard. From the desk in his book-lined study he could look out and see the glinting waters of the Campbell and in any season he could take his fly rod and find a steelhead.

If he wasn’t already gone, his heart would break to see the Campbell today - devoid of steelhead.

The Oyster, Quinsam, Englishman, Nanaimo and other runs are all in trouble too. So far 17 rivers have been totally closed to steelhead fishing, and four more have been put under restrictions, because stocks are so low there are conservation concerns.

All the rivers are on the populated East Coast of Vancouver Island. West Coast rivers, which are more remote and drain into the open Pacific, seem to have remained relatively stable.

In a recent creel survey along the East Coast, fisheries technicians interviewed 150 steelhead anglers on streams that were still open - they found just 20 fish had been caught.

“Obviously, there’s a problem,” says Mr. Wightman, who has dedicated most of his professional life to fighting for Vancouver Island steelhead.

He said a convergence of impacts is to blame for the crisis: habitat degradation caused by logging, mining, dam building and urban growth, coupled with oceanic changes, caused by global climate shifts and the El Nino event, has severley reduced steelhead survival rates.

The B.C. fisheries branch has embarked on a special project that’s designed to preserve wild steelhead stocks along the East Coast of Vancouver Island. The hope is that they can retain the genetic diversity of the various stocks, while rebuilding damaged habitat - and waiting for the ocean conditions to turn around.

There are signs that oceanic conditions are improving this year - and if that is the start of a trend, the return to a productive cycle could be just starting. If so, then stocks could rebound dramatically in the next three or four years.

	* The "mating game" in action. In artificial spawning, milt from a male steelhead is taken (left) and later mixed with the eggs of a female steelhead. The eggs are raised to the fry stage and returned to their native rivers. *

In the meantime, a “living gene bank” program has been started - the first of its kind in the world for steelhead.

Mr. Wightman said the project evolved after B.C. steelhead biologists met with their counterparts in Washington State, who were battling to preserve endangered stocks of salmon.

In the past biologists have augmented wild steelhead production by catching brood stock, stripping them of eggs and milt, hatching the progeny, then returning the fry to rivers.

But with returning runs of steelhead so small, Mr. Wightman explained, biologists were reluctant to start taking adults for brood stock. Instead, they caught smolts that were migrating out to sea, placed them in hatchery ponds, and raised them to maturity.

“What we’re doing is cutting out the ocean phase of their lives,” said Mr. Wightman.

The technique is less genetically intrusive than artificial spawning, because the smolts have been created by wild steelhead that paired naturally in their home steams. Also, the smolts represent the survivors - the fish that had lived through the first year of life and were ready to migrate to the ocean.

Because survival rates at sea are now so low, the technique allows steelhead to bypass a stage of life that had become increasingly fatal.

Ray Billings, manager of the Vancouver Island Trout Hatchery, where the steelhead are being raised, said the program is costly, because the fish are almost hand reared.

“I’ve worked (in fisheries) for 22 years - and this is the most intensive of any program I’ve ever seen,” he said.

And it is nerve wracking, too, because biologists realize the fish they are working with may be the last hope for keeping unique genetic traits alive.

“When you’re looking at them you realize they are endangered stock, so you don’t want to muck up. You do things at all costs and make sure there are no failures. You know you could lose them all to disease outbreaks or water problems.”

Mr. Billings said one thing that’s surprised him has been the exceptional growth rate of the young steelhead. In June 1999 the fish weighed 50 grams - 10 months later they were one kilo on average.

“Trout grow quickly, but nothing like these fish. It’s phenomenal growth,” he said.

This year the hatchery had a 70% survival rate among the smolts, and this spring were able to spawn the adults. The target is to produce 25,000 smolts this year, and up to 40,000 in the near future. The young fish will be returned to the wilds as healthy, vigorous smolts, to repopulate the vacant steelhead habitat that has become so common on Island streams.

At the moment, because of budget restrictions, just three rivers are the target of the living gene bank program: the Keogh, on northern Vancouver Island, and the Little Qualicum and Quinsam, near Haig-Brown’s old home on the Campbell River.

“This is considered a novel and exciting program, and it has great promise,” said Mr. Wightman.

It would have even more promise if it was properly funded.

Last year the fisheries branch produced a report, the Vancouver Island Steelhead Recovery Plan, which set out a strategy for rebuilding stocks in Haig-Brown’s rivers.

The report identified 10 key problems - the first of which was “inadequate funding for all steelhead management functions/activities”.

Mr. Wightman said not much has changed since then. The program is still struggling to find the money it needs.

In a recent news alert, Trout Unlimited Canada urged the public to start writing to the Canadian and British Columbia governments, to ask that more money be put into the program.

(If you would like to express your opinion on this issue to the government, write to B.C. Fisheries Minister Corky Evans at: corky.evans.office@leg.bc.ca. Or Premier Ujjal Dosanjh at: ujjal.dosanjh.office@leg.bc.ca