“Estuaries are extremely important for biodiversity and the significant driving factor is salmon,” says Jordon Labbe, Technical Field Lead with the Wei Wai Kum Guardians. First Nations Guardians are experts in traditional land management and stewardship, and work to restore and conserve natural spaces within First Nations territories through practices rooted in traditional and cultural knowledge.
The Campbell River estuary is part of the traditional lands of the Liǧʷiɫdax̌ʷ peoples—the Wei Wai Kum and We Wai Kai First Nations. It has long been an important site of Indigenous habitation, predating the settlement by European colonists and modern industrial activity by thousands of years. “Salmon is the thing that’s been most important to our Nation for who knows how long—there isn’t a time that salmon wasn’t significant,” says Labbe. Labbe’s grandfather often told stories of his youth spent in the estuary, before industrial activity in the 1980s and ’90s brought the habitat to its most degraded state. “It’s a multi-generational thing,” Labbe says. “He was a Guardian before they were called Guardians.”
The Mill Pond Project
Tucked away in the north of Campbell River, the Mill Pond is a brackish waterbody in the estuary adjacent to Baikie Island. Here, Greenways Land Trust and the Wei Wai Kum First Nation have embarked upon a restoration journey. The Mill Pond Project aims to restore over 22,000 square metres of habitat to as close to its natural state as possible, bringing immeasurable benefit to the native aquatic and terrestrial species who depend on it for sustenance. A critical part of the overall restoration is a vast swath of eelgrass transplant sites below tide. Eelgrass oxygenates the water; provides cool shelter for invertebrates, foraging salmon, amphibians, and waterfowl; and stabilizes sediments to mitigate coastal erosion. It is a keystone of a healthy fish-bearing habitat.
Until the 1960s, the Mill Pond was an extensive salt marsh habitat with intertidal channels surrounded by riparian forest. By the 1980s, industrial activity had ravaged it to make way for road access and log storage for the adjacent mill. According to the Museum at Campbell River, by 1993 the chinook salmon run had fallen to as few as 219 fish, down from 8,000 in 1965. No doubt this was the result of years of habitat degradation in critical spawning grounds.
By the mid-1990s, Campbell River Mills had ceased operations at the site, and in 2000 the Nature Conservancy of Canada acquired the former mill site. Baikie Island was replanted with native flora after the removal of truckloads of contaminated soil. It opened to the public as a reclaimed nature preserve in 2012.
Jim Van Tine, former manager of the Quinsam River Hatchery, spearheaded the initial restoration efforts. “People were saying, ‘You’re just ignoring the wild stuff. You build a hatchery and you expect that to cure all evils.’ And so it kind of challenged me,” Van Tine says. “It became obvious there were two critical things in fish production: one was the spawning upriver, the other was rearing down at the estuary.”
A three-year Mill Pond project began in 2023, predominantly funded by the British Columbia Salmon Restoration and Innovation Fund through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans Canada (DFO), with some support from the Pacific Salmon Foundation and the Campbell River Salmon Foundation.
Restoring Mill Pond it to its pre-industrial elevation
In 2023, the project began with major construction: re-grading the foreshore and filling in the Mill Pond with clean substrate to restore it to its pre-industrial elevation below water. In 2024, Greenways and the Guardians began transplanting eelgrass in the now-shallower Mill Pond. Native eelgrass (Zostera marina) is collected from a donor site elsewhere in the estuary by a dive team and brought topside to a shore crew, who work tirelessly tying the rhizomes around non-galvanized washers, which are then tied 10 each around a loop of wire. The loops of eelgrass go to replanting zones, each occupying a square metre. The eelgrass rhizome establishes a new eelgrass meadow, and the washers and wire will slowly oxidize and rust away, fertilizing the pond bottom.
Cynthia Durance is a consulting biologist on the project. She is an eelgrass habitat restoration specialist who successfully pioneered the method used at the Mill Pond in vigilante-style trials in the 1990s. She then approached the DFO’s regional Head of Habitat, asking permission for a larger-scale project.
“I’d say, ‘You know, just let me try one and [see] if it works,’” she says. “So, finally, he says, ‘Okay, I’m tired of listening to you. You can try one, and if it doesn’t work, don’t talk to me anymore.’” In 1996, an initial project was successful in Nanaimo, paving the way for Durance to complete 140 more eelgrass restoration sites.
Eco-cultural fencing
To prevent damage from invasive Canada geese on the new eelgrass beds, the Wei Wai Kum First Nation Guardians are installing eco-cultural fencing. Canada geese consume plants like eelgrass, drastically reducing the size of salt marsh habitat. Last winter, the Guardians harvested alder and willow poles, and wove them together in the style of a traditional fishing weir. The fencing is a psychological barrier that discourages geese from browsing specific areas, ensuring the newly planted eelgrass can flourish.
Chum, coho, chinook, pink, and sockeye salmon are all found in the Campbell River and begin their life cycle in the gravelly river bottom. Some species will migrate out to sea in their first year, while others, like coho, will spend their first year in the protection of the river, before heading out to sea to mature into adulthood.
Upon their return three years later, adult spawners fight their way up rivers swollen with the fall rains, prey for bears and eagles bulking up for another winter season. The nitrogen and phosphorus from salmon carcasses are spread into the surrounding terrestrial habitat by those who gorge on the returning fish, providing a pulse of nutrient uptake in the forest. But the flow travels in the opposite direction, too, supporting invertebrates and juvenile salmon in the slower, protected waters of estuaries and wetlands. Wild salmon are keystone species and declines have far-reaching effects that cascade throughout marine and terrestrial habitats.
“I think the significance of this estuary has not been emphasized enough to realize that it’s not just how many fish you can get to spawn. It’s a matter of how many of those that spawned you can actually get out to open ocean,” Labbe says.
The importance of wild salmon
The importance of wild salmon in Campbell River’s culture, the self-proclaimed Salmon Capital of the World, runs deep. According to the Pacific Salmon Foundation, recreational anglers alone spend over $550 million annually on fresh and saltwater sport fishing in BC.
The Mill Pond project will restore an ecosystem to balance—a flourishing salt marsh habitat, abundant fish populations, and terrestrial inhabitants who depend on both. The estuary weaves together the communities of Campbell River’s First Nations and settler communities, conservationists, hikers, kayakers, tourists, and tourism operators. In restoring the estuary, we foster a collaborative spirit that underscores our shared responsibility as stewards of these lands and waters and the relationships between us.
“The amount of salmon that we can habituate and continue to habituate on the estuary is going to do nothing but good for the Nation and everyone else,” Labbe says. “It’s not just the Nation—it’s about finding a balance with various groups.”
