‘Our river is almost dead’: What’s killing an iconic Miramichi fishery?

Every veteran salmon angler, guide and outfitter in the Miramichi watershed remembers their first encounter with a striped bass.

For Rip Cunningham, a member of the storied Black Brook Salmon Club, it happened at the junction of the Main Southwest Miramichi River and the Cains River.

“I caught what I thought was a salmon, and I was going, ‘This fish isn’t jumping. This is odd,’” he said. He reeled it in.

“The guides who live on the river, who’d been fishing on the river for years, said ‘What’s that?’ They had no idea whatsoever.”

It was a striped bass, a fish Cunningham believes now represents an existential threat to the Miramichi’s most iconic species: his beloved wild Atlantic salmon.

Byron Coughlan, who runs the County Haven fishing lodge near Blackville, was guiding two salmon anglers from New England about 15 years ago when they caught two bass.

“They said, ‘Your river’s done,’” he recalled. “‘The bass is going to eat everything.’ They said, ‘Eventually you won’t have any salmon.’”

The community of anglers, guides and outfitters in the Miramichi watershed fear that prediction is now on the verge of coming true.

Juvenile salmon, they say, are being gobbled up on their migratory trek to the ocean by a growing striped bass population.

“We have a crisis facing Atlantic salmon and other species on the Miramichi,” Alex Mills, an angler who is part of lawsuit against the federal government, told the House of Commons standing committee on fisheribes and oceans this month.

In 1996, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans closed the commercial striped bass fishery to halt a collapse in stocks caused by overfishing.

The salmon anglers say the closure allowed the bass population to grow to an unsustainable level, moving upriver from its traditional home in tidal waters and throwing off the Miramichi’s delicate balance.

DFO blamed for ‘a big mess’

The anglers say the growth of the striped bass is killing the fabled recreational salmon fishery, once an economic lifeline for small communities along the river.

DFO officials “have done essentially nothing” to curb the bass boom “and created this big mess,” said Bradford Burns, a Maine business owner with a salmon camp on the Southwest Miramichi. 

The bass population is now north of 500,000 — some estimates are much higher — while salmon returns were below 5,000 in 2025, DFO numbers indicate.

Burns, Cunningham, Mills and two other anglers have filed a lawsuit in federal court hoping to force DFO to resume a commercial bass fishery to reduce the population and give more smolts a chance to reach the ocean.

“This extraordinary level of predation is completely unsustainable and is on the verge of extirpating Atlantic salmon from what has long been considered the greatest salmon river in North America,” the group wrote in a letter to the federal fisheries minister in 2024.

On its website, DFO says bass eat “variable numbers” of smolts every year, and “it is not clear whether this natural predator-prey dynamic is limiting the number of returning adult salmon to the Miramichi river.”

‘A direct correlation,’ outfitter says

Brock Curtis, who operates an outfitter store in Blackville that is an essential destination for anglers and guides, says the cause and effect are clear.

“Our numbers are dropping as the bass numbers are increasing, and there’s a direct correlation there,” he said.

The Atlantic salmon is so tied to the river’s identity that its image is used on provincial road signs identifying the Miramichi river route. Curtis says what’s at risk is a unique fishery that puts a premium on patience, practice and a calm state of mind.

“We live in a world where a lot of people are used to immediate gratification,” he said.

“This sport isn’t like that. It’s a skill, and you put your time in and you will be rewarded in the end.”

Striper success

By contrast, the abundant striped bass has spawned a two-day frenzy of immediate gratification that unfolds downriver every May.

Hundreds of anglers crowd into the city of Miramichi for the Striper Cup, a bass tournament with a seemingly bottomless list of prizes and giveaways.

“We’ve always had fish,” participant Barry Hay said in an interview over the side of his boat during this year’s tournament. “We’ve never won, but we’ve always had fish, two a day.”

Dwayne Ogilvie of Salisbury said he loves the “aggressiveness” of the bass. 

The Striper Cup launched in Miramichi in 2015 and has turned into one of the city’s biggest tourism draws. Paul McGraw, the city’s economic development officer, said the success of the event is “one hundred per cent” attributable to the booming bass population.

“We never, ever imagined that it would grow and develop the brand that we have with the Miramichi Striper Cup as quickly as we have done it,” he said.

McGraw would not comment on the debate involving salmon.

“We’d be naive to think there wasn’t a controversy,” he said, “but that’s not what we’re into.”

At the cup’s opening ceremony in May, pro angler Jeff Wilson, a co-founder of the tournament, urged participants to lobby politicians against a reopened commercial striped bass fishery. 

“It’s really important that you folks talk to your politicians and protect this resource for our kids,” he said.

“It’s been here for millennia. They’re not bad. They’re good. Bass are good.”

A detour for juvenile salmon

The anglers taking DFO to court estimate a commercial fishery of 300,000 to 400,000 bass would reduce the population to about 100,000 — enough, they say, to give the salmon a chance.

Ottawa approved a First Nations striped bass fishery of 50,000 in 2018 and increased the allowable catch to 175,000 six years later.

That maximum has not been reached, and anglers say letting non-Indigenous anglers catch that quota would be a good start. 

In the meantime, the Atlantic Salmon Federation, the Miramichi Salmon Association and Anqotum Resource Management, a Mi’kmaw conservation agency, are doing what they can.

In the spring, their teams descended on the northwest branch of the Miramichi at Wayerton to collect and tag salmon smolts and truck large numbers of them downriver, around and past the hungry bass population, so they could make it to the ocean.

“Concept-wise, it works,” said David Roth, an Atlantic Salmon Federation biologist who called the operation an emergency measure. “It’s really just about the numbers that you can catch in total.

“It’s not like we want to transport fish for decades to come. Where the population currently is, everything helps.”

Salmon angler Rip Cunningham calls it “a good experiment” but unlikely to make a dent in the problem.

“You cannot get enough of them in tanks and move them around to make any reasonable difference to this river,” he said.

DFO biologist looks for ‘larger mechanisms’

Roth and Joe Augustine, a biologist from Metepenagiag First Nation, said there’s no doubt the bass boom is the biggest cause of the salmon’s decline.

Roth said fewer than 10 per cent of migrating smolts in the Miramichi reach the ocean, compared to 80 per cent in other nearby rivers.

The difference? “It’s definitely the massive population of striped bass that we do have in the Miramichi,” Augustine said.

Federal scientists say other factors can’t be discounted, because the decline is also happening in other rivers with fewer or no bass, including in Europe.

“We don’t say that striped bass do not eat juvenile salmon,” said Cindy Breau, a DFO biologist based in Moncton.

“What we are saying is that if we want to answer the question about why salmon are not returning to our rivers, we need to look at larger mechanisms and try to unravel the mechanisms involved with that.”

Breau suggested one reason Miramichi returns are lower may be the little tracking tags the conservationists insert in the smolts — weighing them down as they try to outrun hungry bass.

Climate change is also warming rivers beyond what cold-water salmon can tolerate and may be disrupting the food chains they rely on when they migrate to the ocean, Breau said.

But Mills said DFO’s science “flies in the face” of research done by conservation groups, providing the department a “half-baked justification for doing nothing.”

“It’s not climate-related. It’s not habitat-related. It’s striped bass-related, and if DFO does not see that, they are blind,” he told the House of Commons fisheries committee.

MP says larger bass fishery an easy fix

Some anglers also point to industrial logging practices that may increase runoff into the rivers and reduce shade that blocked the sun’s heat.

Acadie-Bathurst MP Serge Cormier says some illegal net fishing may also play a role. But Cormier, an avid angler, said the striped bass clearly have “a big impact.”

Cormier is a member of the House of Commons fisheries committee, and he persuaded his colleagues to hold hearings this year on the Atlantic salmon. 

“We need solutions. Enough talk,” he said.

While other factors DFO has identified are complicated to address, the MP said reducing the striped bass population with a revived commercial fishery “is the easiest piece to do right now.” 

Ottawa is spending $81.7 million on a 12-year Atlantic salmon strategy that includes climate-resilience measures, Indigenous partnerships and more transparent monitoring of stocks.

Federal Fisheries Minister Joanne Thompson visited New Brunswick in August and met with the the Atlantic Salmon Federation and Miramichi Salmon Association.

“Let’s understand that science is the backbone of what we do, but we also pay attention to the people who are closest to the resource,” Thompson said in an interview.

“And then if there’s a disconnect, as there is in this instance, what is it that we need to do to find and strike that balance?”

‘Is it our job to intervene?’

The Striper Cup has its own science championing the striped bass.

Dockside at the Striper Cup in May, a team of biologists from Acadia University ran the weigh station for the tournament.

Competitors returning to Ritchie’s Wharf watched the team rush their fish up to a table and submerge them in a tank before weighing them.

This year’s winning bass was 9.4 kilograms, or almost 21 pounds, the largest of almost 700 bass caught and released.

Salmon anglers say that abundance shows the species could withstand a regulated commercial bass fishery. 

“We are not saying that we want to eradicate an entire striper population,” Augustine said.

“They’re a native species, and it’s important that they stay at decent levels as well, because they’re meant to be here as well.”

But the Acadia team said it’s too soon after the bass’s near-collapse to take a chance.

“We should be able to long-term monitor before making big decisions,” said Leah Creaser, a Mi’kmaw biologist and Acadia researcher.

“Like, ‘that species is doing great, that one is not doing great,’ so there’s a game of picking and choosing because of a lot of social pressures.”

Trevor Avery, the Acadia professor and biostatistician who leads the team, said it’s “really hard to pit one species against another” when the ecosystem is more dynamic than a simple “smoking gun” scenario.

Creaser said the rebound and growth of the striped bass on the Miramichi may be an example of evolutionary history unfolding in real time.

“Is it our job to intervene? I’m not sure.” 

A changing camp on a changing river

As the debate continues, some salmon outfitters have resigned themselves to a different Miramichi.

Wilson’s Sporting Camps, a lodge that dates back to 1855, has branched out into canoeing, tubing, corporate retreats, weddings, and, yes, even striped bass fishing. 

“It’s to the point now where our river is almost dead,” co-owner Karl Wilson said.

“There’s very few fish out there … and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s really doing anything about it.”

Everyone is “pointing the finger at one another” while waiting for Ottawa to act, Wilson said.

“In my opinion, it’s almost too far gone.”

Joe Augustine, though, remains optimistic.

His community’s long history with the Atlantic salmon runs through his great-grandfather, who could catch enough salmon in a day to feed his entire family for a summer.

Augustine said his father, as a child, “could hear the salmon run coming up the river to spawn. It would keep him up at night.”

There’s no choice but to be optimistic, he said.

“You have to believe that the salmon numbers are going to come back,” he said. “Or then what are we doing this work for?”

“They’ve hit critical levels, but we’ve seen striped bass hit critical levels 20 to 25 years ago, and now look at them back in our river. It’s crazy, the amount — maybe, definitely, a little too much.

“But if it can be done with striped bass, why can’t it be done with Atlantic salmon?”