THE FIRST steps in an ambitious 50-year programme to restore the natural run of salmon to the Upper Lee and its tributaries have been taken near the Cork-Kerry border.
Yesterday 3,000 year-old smolts were hauled by fisheries officers on to a giant fish tank from a specially-built pool.
They were transported to Cork city, past the reservoir and electricity dams on the Lee on their way to the sea.
The expectation is they will return in Christmas 2010 as spawning adults to the quiet pools of the Sullane which have not seen a salmon in over 50 years – since the building of the giant hydro electric dams at Inniscarra and Carrigadrohid and the flooding of the valleys in 1957.
Until then, some 15,000 salmon a year made their way up the Lee, one of the largest catchments in Ireland.
Within three years the numbers dropped to 1,000. The problem was not making their way upstream: the smolts could not negotiate their way down. They became confused, got lost in the reservoirs and the generations never came back.
It is not so much to where the salmon is hatched that he returns – it is where he leaves from, Aidan Barry of the South Western Fisheries Board explained.
All those released yesterday were hatched downstream in the ESB hatchery in Carrigadrohid and what has been going on in Coolea is a process called imprinting.
“It’s the last six weeks before they go to sea that matters. They get the smell of the water and maybe there may be a magnetic pinpoint too that kicks in and it is to there they return,” said Mr Barry.
A number of bodies are involved in the plan including the ESB, the Central Fisheries Board, the Marine Institute, the Department of Natural Resources and UCC.