spend their entire lives and spawn in the hatcheries themselves; others that are brought in as smolt and then are allowed to spawn in the rivers.

A smolt is a salmon, aged about three-years-old, that is ready to head out to sea for the first time. By this point in its life, the salmon – its back and sides now turned to silver – has “imprinted” on its natal river; that is, it knows the river’s smells and tastes enough to be able to navigate its way back to it after being in the ocean.

In the spring of 2003, members of the National Recovery Team, under the direction of Renee Wissink and including six wardens, began a program to catch smolt in Fundy National Park’s Upper Salmon River as the fish headed toward the ocean – and probable extinction. These iBoF salmon are taken to the Mactaquac hatchery, where they live until they are ready to spawn. At that point, they are returned to the river to lay their eggs.

The hope is that, once these eggs hatch successfully, they will increase not only the iBoF salmon population, but also their genetic diversity and, ultimately, their chances of survival as a species. The staff at Fundy National Park and their partners are doing their best to buy some time for this endangered salmon while research continues on what’s preventing the fish from returning from the ocean to regenerate itself.

The Endangered Piping Plover of the Maritimes
There are more piping plovers, a starling-sized shorebird, than iBoF salmon. In the nineteenth-century, in fact, these birds were abundant, but they were almost hunted to extinction for sport and for their feathers (which were used to decorate Victorian women’s hats). Today, only an estimated 5,550 adults still exist, just under half of which breed in Canada, mainly in the Maritimes. Their population .

has become so small that they were declared an endangered species in 1985. Many factors have contributed to this decline. Human use of beaches has seriously disrupted and degraded their nesting sites, which also attract predatory gulls, crows, foxes, raccoons, and even pets such as dogs and cats. Then there are the seasonal storms and spring tides that can cause the flooding and destruction of their nests on exposed Atlantic beaches.

Since 1988, protecting the piping plover has been a priority at three Maritime National Parks: Prince Edward Island, Kouchibougnac (in New Brunswick), and Kejimkujik (in Nova Scotia), which together attract a breeding population of between 50 and 100 of the birds. They come here in mid- to late-April after wintering in the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, and they remain until their chicks fledge, or take wing, from the nest in mid-August – that is, if the adults and chicks manage to survive. Since the nesting sites are on flat stretches