BANGOR – Dan Roy used to wait here beside the churning Penobscot River for a turn to fish for salmon. Two-foot-long monsters would fling themselves skyward, snagged in tugs-of-war that could last a half-hour.

With the coming of each warm season, thick streams of both salmon and fishermen would migrate to this spot, known as the Bangor Salmon Pool. Each sometimes traveled thousands of miles, the fish from waters off Greenland and their pursuers from around the country and beyond.

The year’s first salmon always went to the U.S. president as a token of Maine’s bounty. As recently as 1982, fishermen took 944 salmon on the river, with help from aggressive stocking.

These days, hardly anyone comes to read the annual catch numbers, still etched in a commemorative boulder beside a fisherman’s cabin. Roy uses the rocky bank as his personal beach, a tranquil, largely forgotten place to stretch out bare-chested and bask in what limited warmth the Maine summer bestows.

With salmon fishing banned, the fishermen are gone. The salmon are almost gone too. Even stocking seems futile.

New England’s entire seasonal run – salmon returning from the sea to spawn upriver – has averaged barely over 1,000 for the last four years, according to official counts. This majestic runner of rivers, a silvery, speckled emblem of the region’s wild past, is flirting with oblivion throughout New England.

To those who ask why something can’t be done, there’s a frustrating answer: Much has been done – maybe too much. At what point should failing recovery efforts stop?

Since the late 1960s, state and federal wildlife managers have toiled stubbornly, even with great ingenuity, to revive New England’s population of wild Atlantic salmon. They have worked with electric utilities to upgrade fish passages at dams, tracked fish with transponders, listed some Maine salmon as endangered, banned virtually all fishing of migratory salmon, and stocked an astounding number – about 200 million – into the rivers. They have even recruited school classes to hatch eggs.

Yet managers say it will probably take decades to end reliance on hatchery fish. On the Connecticut River, New England’s longest, they say hatcheries may well be needed forever – hardly anyone’s idea of restoring a genuinely wild population.

Federal fishery biologist Joe McKeon, who chairs a regional monitoring body known as the U.S. Atlantic Salmon Assessment Committee, says New England’s Atlantic salmon have been reduced to “a species that we are perhaps watching, unfortunately, go extinct.”

Openly frustrated managers can’t figure out why. They blame dams and other obstacles, pollution, harmed habitat, climate warming, new predators, diseases, interference from fish farming, even some mysterious X factor in the oceans.

Every year, a small body of critics asks whether the program should be radically reshaped or scrapped. So far, they have been largely ignored. But the program’s never-say-die promoters find their efforts harder to justify with each thin seasonal run.

“They have been trying so long, maybe they ought to leave it alone,” says Roy. “They’re looking for blame, but maybe it’s just nature. Things do go extinct.”

‘Leaper’ history

Five years ago, in Springfield, Mass., then-U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt planted himself beside the sun-washed Connecticut River and radiated optimism. He pledged that the salmon effort “will pay off.”

“Part of the reason it goes so slowly is trial and error,” he told reporters and locals.

For almost 150 years, New Englanders have heard such declarations.

By some estimates, up to 400,000 salmon used to return to spawn in New England’s rivers between the spring and fall.

The English settlers who straggled from their boats in the 17th century, hungry and homesick, sent word back that salmon, prized in Europe as kingly fare, were plentiful here, too. It was eventually claimed that salmon were so thick you could practically cross a river on their backs.

Exaggeration and embellishment surround the salmon to this day. It’s easy to understand why. Weighing up to 50 pounds and capable of vaulting more than 10 feet into the air, it is dubbed “The Leaper,” in keeping with the meaning of its scientific name, Salmo salar.

Beginning in the mid-19th century, alarmed New England states began to notice a sharp drop in the salmon population. They mandated dam passageways for migrating fish and laid the beginnings of today’s hatchery program. Still, at the end of the century, salmon were practically gone from New England. Successive efforts over the decades have boosted their numbers only modestly – and temporarily.

In the 1960s, as the environmental movement gained momentum, state and federal governments began to fashion today’s interstate, interagency collaboration of bureaucrats and biologists, utilities and conservationists, public and private players. On the Penobscot, which accounts for about three-quarters of New England’s run, catch numbers climbed into the early 1980s.

“We as U.S. citizens have a commitment to our environment,” says Joan Trial, who runs Maine’s salmon program. “Salmon has always been the glamour child.”

The cost of the regional commitment? An Associated Press survey shows that the partnership of 13-plus agencies is marshaling more than 80 staffers and $11.2 million in annual public funds. Over the past 35 years, it may have cost more than $200 million.

Some other attempts to restore animals redolent of the Northern wilderness, such as the caribou and lynx, have faltered. Few have drained as much money and manpower for so long – with so little payback – as the Atlantic salmon.

“If we throw more fish in, it seems we’re just feeding the cormorants,” says Richard Dill, a Maine state biologist. “I think everybody’s a little discouraged. They put a lot of time and effort into it for little returns.”

Yet no one at the helm shows any sign of giving up, not even those who speak of salmon in the past tense. “By extirpating the species, we have robbed society of its birthright … and one of the things that makes New England New England,” says Steve Gephard, who helps run the salmon program at the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection.

Government biologists and administrators claim modest successes.

For one thing, they say the salmon provides a helpful barometer of a river basin’s general health. The program has funneled resources to clear pollution and improve dam passages that help other fish too, they say. Shad, stripers and others have rebounded.

As for its chief raison d’Fetre – bringing back a flourishing population of salmon – they don’t even try to make an argument.

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Detractors tend to sympathize with the program’s intentions. Often biologists or conservationists themselves, they dissent with a heavy heart.

Most advance one of these arguments:

– The program depends too much on hatcheries.

– The 20-river effort should narrow its thrust to a handful of river basins.

– It is wasteful and disorganized.

– It is bound to fail, no matter what, because salmon are beyond help in New England.

The emphasis on hatcheries has prevented successive generations of wild salmon from making genetic adaptations to the changed rivers, says Boyd Kynard, who has challenged the program from the inside as a fish biologist at the Conte federal research center in Montague, Mass.

Coddled, weaker hatchery fish have overwhelmed the population’s gene pool, he says.

“To delude yourself that you’re going to produce anything that’s natural by artificial means, is just wrong,” he argues.

Jeff Reardon, New England conservation director for the fishermen’s group Trout Unlimited, makes the points against hatcheries more simply: “No. 1, it’s expensive. No. 2, it isn’t restoration.”

Some critics want the program to drop certain rivers, improve fish passages elsewhere, and more forcefully promote other fish that would provide alternate food for salmon predators.

Others, like Autumn Hanna, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, want a closer watch on spending. “Money can’t just continue being put into this program without results,” she says.

Hardly any critic has made a visible impact, though, except for an unassuming Canadian archaeologist named Catherine Carlson.

She studied fish remains at more than 70 New England sites where native people lived before the year 1500. She knew of today’s much larger – though also shrinking – salmon runs in the Pacific Northwest and both coasts of Canada. Still, she expected to find at least some salmon bones in New England. She found almost none.

She concluded that cold-loving salmon stretched their range southward during what is known as the Little Ice Age, from about 1450 to 1800. When New Englanders began to notice the dwindling numbers, they assumed dams were keeping salmon from their upriver spawning grounds. Carlson thinks populations were mostly shifting back north, into colder water.

Sure enough, in recent seasons, the runs along New England’s southernmost river, the Connecticut, have virtually vanished, at fewer than 50 salmon. Also dammed but farther north, the Merrimack and Penobscot have done better, though still poorly.

“Privately, fisheries biologists would tell me they agree with me, but publicly they would never say that, because they’re part of this whole industry and bureaucracy that has grown up around this salmon restoration effort,” says Carlson. She would have them focus on reviving stronger species or fisheries with more economic value, like cod.

“They seem to think it’s something that we humans aren’t doing right. They don’t accept that it’s the environment that has changed,” she says.

Many program administrators have tried to fault Carlson’s science. They say salmon bones simply disintegrate over time. Yet Northwest digs turned up plenty of them, Carlson says.

“What you’re dealing with is true believers,” says Gary Sanderson, a nature columnist for The Recorder newspaper, in Greenfield, Mass. “They’ve savaged this woman.”

Yet, at the hub of the salmon effort, McKeon doesn’t completely disagree with Carlson. “I think perhaps the range of salmon is moving north,” he says. “For the restoration, it’s been a struggle from the beginning.”

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EDITOR’S NOTE – Jeff Donn is AP’s Boston-based Northeast regional writer.

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