March 30, 2026 — On a bright March morning, Paul Christman hiked through deep snowdrifts on the bank of Avon Valley Brook in the western Maine mountains, leading a crew wearing waders and shouldering unwieldy backpacks.
One crew member carried a pack basket loaded with battered funnels crafted from stovepipes, duct tape and plumbing pipes. Another lugged a water pump. The last brought a cooler full of thousands of fertilized Atlantic salmon eggs.
The stream was mostly iced over, but Mr. Christman, a marine scientist with the Maine Department of Marine Resources, found some open water on the brook, a tributary to the Sandy River.
“This is a really good spot,” Mr. Christman said. “The river is picking up velocity and shoving that water into the gravel, so we’re going to set up right here and do it.”
For 20 years, Mr. Christman has been working to restore salmon to this Sandy River watershed, where they were eradicated after dams built in the 1800s blocked their passage.
The strategy is producing thousands of juvenile salmon that migrate to the North Atlantic, but just a handful that return to Maine to spawn as adults.
Now, a $300 million project to remove or modify four dams downstream on the Kennebec River is infusing the work with new hope, possibly clearing the way for salmon to swim freely up to the Sandy River within a decade.
Hundreds of thousands of Atlantic salmon once flooded rivers in New England. For millenniums, the fish have been valued by Native Americans in the region as sustenance and cultural touchstones.
But marine survival rates for Atlantic salmon have plummeted over the last 35 years, for reasons that are complex and interwoven, including changing prey, shifting currents and warming waters.
More recently, they’ve been regarded by anglers as the “king of fish.” But by 2000, their numbers had fallen so low that federal regulators listed them for protection under the Endangered Species Act.
Early recovery efforts focused on the last remaining populations of Atlantic salmon in the United States, all in Maine, in the Penobscot River, and the Mid-coast and Down East regions.