A5

by Daniel Martins

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Two Miramichi-area conservation groups received grants from the Fredericton-based Atlantic Salmon Conservation Foundation last week.

The funds were awarded to the Miramichi Salmon Association (MSA) and the North Shore Micmac District Council, whose head office is in Eel Ground.

MSA president Mark Hambrook said the money will go toward hiring temporary staff — mostly from local First Nations — to seine salmon pools in the river.

"It's a great way way of getting our volunteers out and providing useful information, but we need a core of staff as well," he said.

"You get volunteers to do the easy stuff. The hard work you get the staff to do, right?"

Currently, Hambrook said, margins of error when estimating the number of salmon actually in the river can be as high as 50 per cent. With more people seining the river and catching more fish, accuracy would be increased.

Some of the funds will also go towards recovering salmon who have had tracking devices surgically implanted. When they return to the river to spawn, a series of receivers will track them as they progress upriver. Hambrook said the tracking project is essential to understanding salmon behaviour in the open ocean, as well as their mortality rates and areas when they return to the river.

"We don't know where they go, we don't know how long they go out before they can recondition themselves and come back in again," he said.

"The grant from the ... endowment fund will permit us to ... go out and physically track some of these."

Hambrook said the grant was valuable because of its timing. Applications were made in late 2007, with funding coming through last month.

The non-profit Atlantic Salmon Conservation Foundation was founded last year as a fund for conservation projects across all the Atlantic provinces as well as Quebec. Its executive director, Stephen Chase, said this year's grants came later in the year as the organization was still starting up after its launch. Funds will be distributed in March in subsequent years.

$275,150 in grants were awarded to 21 organizations across the five provinces, including four in New Brunswick.

Chase said the MSA's plan was in line with the charitable organization's salmon conservation priorities.

"We felt it was good value," he said. "Our program has heavy emphasis on partnership, and the MSA met that quite well."

Chase said the organization was also intrigued by the efforts North Shore Micmac District Council, whose grant will go toward monitoring and identifying issues in the Miramichi and other regional rivers to plan for long-term watershed management.

"We're really excited about that one because it was a consortium of First Nations," he said.

"We think, from a policy point of view, that First Nations take an active role in salmon conservation. The best way to get effective use of this money is to use it in a planned way, assessment, identify what the issues are, and target those issues."

Attempts to reach a representative of the council in Eel Ground were unsuccessful by press time.