A Fishway in Thornbury, Ontario - Helping Chinook Salmon & Rainbow Trout to Spawn

We were vacationing in Blue Mountains.

we invited a few friends to come along with us.

One of the places we took our friends to visit was Thornbury, a small town about a 20 minute drive from our resort.

One of our favourite seafood food in Canada is salmon which is found in abundance along the Canadian coast and many lakes in Ontario. There is an unique phenomenon about salmon which choose to return to their birthplaces to lay their eggs.

After the eggs are hatched and grow to a certain size, the salmon will leave their spawning site and swim to bigger rivers and evenutally end up along the coasts.

Strangely enough, no matter how far the salmon have left their orignal birth places, they have been geneticlly imprinted and will try their ulmost to return there to spawn. The fall season is the time when the salmon's mass migration and spawning occur. Along certain rivers, we can often see schools of mature salmon swimming upstream or even flying to incredible height in order to get to their birthplaces.

However, in some towns or cities, dams have been built which have made swimming upstream quite difficult for fish or even impossible for them to reach their intended locations.

Here comes the resuce of a fishway. Managed by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry, a fishway is designed to assist local fish swiming upstream to spawn. A fishway differs from a fish ladder as a fishway is designed to mimic the natural landscape and environment. Thornbury is one of these towns where we can watch the salmon swimming upstream to the fishway ( known as a fish ladder to the locals) this time of the year. On the day of our visit, we did see many salmon doing just that that.

For our friends who have never seen this natural awesome phenonmenon, it was quite an eye opening event for them! Rev. Sue just loved the experience!

R.T. Thornbury, Ontario