[dropcap]S[/dropcap]tate wildlife experts have now documented wild Atlantic salmon laying eggs in nests in their traditional Farmington River valley spawning grounds, possibly for the first time in centuries.
“It’s the first time since probably the Revolutionary War,” said Peter Aarrestad, director of inland fisheries for the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
The three wild salmon nests, or “redds,” were discovered in November upstream of the Rainbow Dam fishway in Windsor, somewhere “within the Farmington River watershed,” Aarrestad said.
State officials won’t reveal the exact location because they worry that curious people might trample the nests and the eggs, which need to remain undisturbed through the winter in order to have a chance to hatch. The salmon nests were not in the Windsor portion of the Farmington River, officials said.
![By Timothy Knepp, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](https://flylifemagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/AS.png)
By Timothy Knepp, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
One other documented Atlantic salmon nest site was found in the Salmon River in East Haddam in 1991, but DEEP officials believe those eggs were deposited by late-arriving salmon, in a non-traditional spawning area where the eggs had almost no chance of surviving. They say the new Farmington River watershed nests are in an area where salmon spawning was once common hundreds of years ago.
In 2013, the federal government ended its 45-year effort to restore wild Atlantic salmon populations in the Connecticut River watershed. The program involved raising young salmon in hatcheries and releasing hundreds of thousands of them each year into streams and rivers in Connecticut, Vermont and New Hampshire, and cost more than $40 million over the decades.
