 Just like people need to move from one place to another like going from your house to the grocery store or to school or the office salmon need to move too. In Maine, that means going up and down streams and rivers and all the way out to the ocean and back again. The native people understood this and for thousands of years they made sure salmon and other fish had healthy places to live and could move whenever they needed to. In fact, the Wabanaki Nations are often described as riverine peoples because the interconnected waterways have always been such an important part of their culture, how they travel and what they eat. When Europeans came, they changed the rivers to make them work for them. They dammed the rivers for energy, straightened rivers and streams and took out all the nicks and crannies that fish like in order to move logs downstream more easily. Roads were built across streams with culverts that only let the water through, not everything else in the stream. And factories polluted the rivers by dumping their waste right into the water. All of these things made it difficult for salmon and other fish to stay healthy and keep living in Maine. Fortunately, now many people are working hard to fix these problems. In the 1970s, the pollution on the Androskegon River in Maine inspired Maine Senator Ed Muskie to spearhead the passage of the Clean Water Act for the whole country. Since its passage, rivers around the country have been restored and now run with healthy clean water once again. Dams that blocked fish from moving up and downstream are getting special fish passage added to them and in some cases the dams themselves are being removed. One great example of this is on the Penobscot River. The Penobscot was once one of the most important rivers in Maine for Atlantic salmon with tens of thousands of salmon moving up it every year to spawn until several large dams were built on the river and the salmon could no longer get to their spawning grounds. All that changed in 2016 when the Penobscot River Restoration Project was completed which included the removal of two dams and the creation of fish passage around a third dam. This let Atlantic salmon and other fish get back up into parts of the river they hadn't been able to get to for over a hundred years. In other parts of Maine where dams still exist but salmon need to get past them the state actually catches the salmon that come up to the dam and drives them around the dams in trunks. In other places the state just brings the eggs up for them and plants them in the gravel bed just like the salmon would have done. Where roads have been built over streams with culverts that only let the water through not the fish and other critters in the stream our partners are working to replace those culverts with bigger crossings that let the stream act like a stream. Rivers and streams that got straightened and cleaned out are now having structures of wood and rocks put back into them to recreate the nooks and crannies like deep pools, gentle flowing sections and fast eddies where salmon and other fish like to live. By working together we can restore Atlantic salmon to its native waters throughout Maine once again. Cool, clean, fresh water, free flowing streams and rivers and lots of nooks and crannies all across the state. That's what Atlantic salmon need and that's what we're working to provide.