Tag Archives: salmon
Year of the Salmon
On October 30, NOAA Fisheries Greater Atlantic Region launched the International Year of the Salmon on the East Coast at the New England Aquarium. This initiative aspires to bring attention to the conditions necessary to ensure the resilience of salmon and people throughout the Northern Hemisphere. The Honorable Madonna Soctomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and […]
Ice Age survivors: a tale of two land-locked fish
Maine lakes are home to two evolutionary wonders of the animal kingdom, Arctic char and landlocked salmon, related species of fish that exist in very few places. They descend from a common ancestor that lived millions of years ago. Evolution took them on diverging pathways during repeated ice ages. The char stayed farther north, swimming […]
Fish return to a restored Penobscot
Between the head of tide above Bangor to where it widens into the bay at Searsport, the Penobscot River shifts from a flowing freshwater waterway banked by cedar and pine to a brackish, wave-lapped marsh with a rocky shoreline. In this estuary, salt concentrations fluctuate as wind and tide push water and sediments back and […]
How did U.S. presidents eat their salmon?
For eighty years, recreational salmon anglers on the Penobscot River in Maine upheld the annual tradition of giving the first Atlantic salmon each spring to the President of the United States. A closer examination of how each president’s salmon would have been prepared and eaten reveals that the celebratory eating of salmon happened at the […]
Review: Running Silver by John Waldman
Salmon, eels and nine other sea-run fish make great migrations across the Atlantic Ocean and along the Gulf Stream and Labrador Current, migrating inland, along the East Coast of North America, some as far as hundreds of miles to spawn in shallow riffles at the feet of the Appalachian mountains. They are the subject of […]
Penobscot River Restoration Continues with Removal of Veazie Dam
Restoration of the mighty Penobscot River became one step closer to reality on July 22, when hundreds of people gathered on the river banks to watch as demolition crews began dismantling the Veazie Dam. I was there, too, and I wrote about it for Fishermen’s Voice newspaper and made a short video:
The Can Do Crew
In December 2011 Atlantic Salmon Journal asked me to report on activities of the Downeast Salmon Federation in eastern Maine, a grassroots organization that has overseen the restoration hopes for salmon and other sea-run fish since 1982, when local anglers banded together in order to pool resources and regain some political clout, which had been […]
Spring Tradition: Anglers Vied to Catch Penobscot’s Presidental Salmon
This article appeared in the Bangor Daily News on March 30, 2012.One hundred years ago, a local fly-fisherman decided to send an Atlantic salmon, the first one caught in the Penobscot River, to the president of the United States. This is the story of that fisherman, and the tradition he began, compiled from newspaper archives […]
