THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Atlantic salmon has returned to the Connecticut River and its tributaries. This despite W's efforts to cut funding for a restoration program that saw very modest success.

In 2001, only 40 Atlantic salmon returned to the Connecticut River. The next year there were 44. The George W. Bush administration cut the budget of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and some Atlantic salmon restoration proponents began to question whether the anemic returns justified the annual cost of around $2 million — tens of thousands per fish. Meanwhile, the general public mostly ignored the program, because the salmon had not yet returned in large enough numbers to be seen or caught.

What happened next, Gephard said, was “a perfect storm.”

Hurricane Irene, its gale winds pulling extra energy from the warmed waters of the mid-Atlantic, wrecked the White River National Fish Hatchery in Vermont in August 2011. The damage to the facility, where 65 percent of all Connecticut River Atlantic salmon eggs were raised, was estimated at as much as $14 million.

As only 54 salmon returned to the Connecticut River in 2012, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pulled out of the restoration program. New Hampshire, Vermont and Massachusetts followed. Connecticut opted to continue stocking a small number of salmon, but it lacks the resources to continue the breeding program, which had made such progress.

While the restoration program failed for salmon, it boosted a suite of other species. American shad, gizzard shad, sea lamprey, striped bass, sea-run brown trout, white perch, alewives, yellow lamp mussels and endangered American eels in the Connecticut River all jumped in population.

Then in the fall of 2015, biologists found five adult Atlantic salmon swimming past the Rainbow Dam on the lower Farmington River. On a hunch, they searched likely upstream spawning habitat and there found the three nests full of eggs. In the spring of 2016 they will hatch the first wild salmon into that river in two centuries. (In 1991 a few salmon spawned for the first time in centuries in Connecticut’s nearby Salmon River.)

The phenomenon was so extraordinary that the nest’s location was kept a tight secret. Some local fishermen refuse to even speak about them for fear attention might do them harm, and some state officials even opted for plausible deniability.

“I don’t know where they are, and I really don’t want to know,” said Neal Hagstrom, inland fisheries biologist for the state of Connecticut. “Sometimes it’s better that way.”

A tight-cropped photo of one of the nests posted in December to a state Facebook page triggered a storm of its own. The photo went viral and became the most shared piece of news in the history of the wildlife department, Gephard said. Email listserves for scientists and message boards for fishermen lit up, said Kocik, who works in Maine. Soon Gephard was fielding questions about the salmon from local, regional and national media.

The attention suggests there might yet be another effort to restore wild Atlantic salmon to the Connecticut River, despite the odds.

We wish the best to all the young salmon fry, may they return safely and horny.