RECORD RETURNS

The West Vancouver Streamkeeper Society was established in 2001 to restore and sustain local aquatic wildlife populations in 22 different creeks and tributaries across the region. To that end the team, now with more than 250 members, has spent decades restoring waterways to give coho, chum, and chinook salmon the best possible chance for survival. 

In the Fall of 2024, streamkeepers conducted their annual count of returning salmon. And things looked really good. Despite flash floods from an atmospheric river, recent record low counts and record high marine mammal populations (including the salmon-eating transient killer whales), 2024 saw an all-time high chum salmon return and a near-record number for total salmon spotted.

This comes after the Mokelumne River saw a record run of Chinook salmon in 2024, the largest run since records began in 1940, which broke the previous record set in 2023. At the same time the Okanagan River the largest sockeye salmon run on record while the Coquitlam River had its largest return of sockeye in more than a century. (In fact, the 2024 Coquitlam salmon return matched the combined total for the previous eight years.)

Nice work, folks. Keep it up.