On a sunny morning last month, Ben Teskey stood on lush green grass near a thick forest east of Toronto, surrounded by several dozen students and a handful of teachers, all of them radiating with excitement.
“Here we are for the big day, the big release,” he told the crowd assembled at the Greenwood Conservation Area in Ajax, Ont.
“What is it that we’re releasing?” he asked. “Atlantic salmon!” the students shouted.
Back in January, more than 100 salmon eggs were placed in an incubating tray inside a water tank that sat on a table in Pam Freitag’s Grade 6 class at Sunderland Public School in Brock, Ont.
For five months, the class took care of the eggs, checking the water temperature and oxygen level daily, then fed the fish after they hatched. Students kept a log, checking off whether bubblers, chillers and filters were all working properly, and alerting school officials when they found a problem with the filter on a day their teacher was away.
All that hard work paid off.
In late May, the group gathered on the shores of Duffins Creek, a waterway that drains into Lake Ontario, to celebrate the project’s successful conclusion — and a new beginning for 93 tiny fish headed to their permanent habitat.
“I’m really grateful for and respect you guys … for having that level of care,” Teskey told the students.
Each year, salmon eggs are placed in the care of more than 80 classrooms across the province as part of the Ontario Federation of Anglers and Hunters Foundation’s Lake Ontario Atlantic Salmon Restoration Program, which Teskey coordinates. The hatchery program is funded by Ontario Power Generation, a Crown corporation, and is one of several initiatives by the foundation to restore the Atlantic salmon population.
Freitag, the teacher who has led the project at Sunderland Public School for several years, said students look forward to being in her class in part because of the fish.
“There’s already a huge amount of enthusiasm coming into the project, and then it just builds … from the day they get the eggs to the day we release,” she said.
While the main objective is to teach children how to be “good stewards” of the environment, Freitag said there is another valuable lesson.
“I definitely think that this hatchery program contributes to developing a sense of empathy and understanding the value of life and how we can all help to support other living things,” she said in an interview in her classroom in March.
All students played a part this year, but two — Emma Mitchell and Eric Batpie, whose older siblings participated in the past — were particularly keen, Freitag said.
Emma said her interest stems from her love of animals and nature.
Salmon are “in danger, so I want to help bring them back,” she said, standing next to the tank a few months into the project.
The thought of releasing them makes her “a little sad,” but also “happy that they get to be in a river and a creek … and they can eat actual food and stuff and swim around more,” she said.
Eric said he also wanted to be part of a project that helps nature.
“They’re living things … so we need to keep them alive and bring more of them back,” he said. “They’re pretty cool, they’re fun to take care of and feed every day.”
Part of the program involved learning the history of the local salmon population, and Teskey gave a final recap before the main event.
Lake Ontario was once home to the largest freshwater population of Atlantic salmon in the world, he told the group. The lake’s depth, its clean and cold water, its abundance of food and, more importantly, its flowing river systems where salmon could spawn made it an ideal habitat for the species, he said.
Indigenous people fished in the lake for thousands of years in a sustainable way, leaving enough fish to spawn and reproduce, Teskey said.
Then European settlers came to the shores of the Great Lakes. What followed was an era of overfishing, deforestation, pollution and damming, culminating in the local extinction of Atlantic salmon in Lake Ontario by the late 1800s, he said.
“So now we’re bringing them back,” Teskey said.
He put on a chest wader before leading the group along a trail in a thickly forested area and down toward the bank.
Kneeling in the shallow water, Teskey took the lid off a plastic box filled with baby salmon, scooping out one at a time with a plastic cup. The cup was passed between students and teachers, with everyone getting a chance to release a fish into the creek.
Each student held the cup for less than 30 seconds, peering at the creatures the size of a baby’s finger.
“Make a little connection with that fish, make eye contact with it, give it a name,” Teskey urged the students, who had formed a long line to wait for their turn.
Some named their fish after cartoon characters, while others chose the names of luxury brands such as Chanel and Gucci. One named his after the American rapper and actor 50 Cent.
Eric named his fish Elmo after the popular character on the children’s show Sesame Street. Eric said he would miss the fish “a little bit” after releasing it.
“But not too bad because they’re going to a better place and they’re going to have a better life there,” he said.