Draft:Downeast Salmon Federation

Downeast Salmon Federation is an environmental organization founded in 1982 and headquartered in Washington County, Maine dedicated to "conserv[ing] wild Atlantic salmon, other sea-run fish and their habitats, restor[ing] a viable recreational salmon fishery, and protect[ing] other important river, scenic, recreational, and ecological resources in eastern Maine."

Peter Gray Parr Project

The Peter Gray Parr Project is a conservation project aimed at bringing back ocean-run wild Atlantic Salmon from the brink of extinction in the Downeast region of Maine, particularly in the 7 historic salmon rivers of the region (including the Narraguagus River, East Machias River, the Pleasant River, and more). Named after the late Peter Gray, a British fisheries biologist who orchestrated the reestablishment of the wild Atlantic Salmon on the River Tyne from near extinction, the project operates out of a hatchery in East Machias, Maine where almost one million juvenile salmon are hatched from eggs each season and trained to become 'little athletes' with a far greater chance of adulthood survival than those raised in state-run hatcheries. Gray was instrumental in helping set up the project in Maine and had the East Machias hatchery utilize many of the same practices that he had developed decades earlier in Britain at the Kielder Hatchery. The salmon are hatched into tanks painted black, rather than blue, to more closely mirror their natural river environments, and also face a constant water flow within the tank that increases in velocity as they age to prepare them for swimming against the strong current of a Downeast river after their eventual release. Most notably, the tanks use water that is constantly pumped in from the East Machias river adjacent to the hatchery to condition them to the precise environment they will be inhabiting.