Mark McNeil takes a historical look at angling on Hamilton’s bayfront

Bringing back the bay to its angler glory days has been frustratingly slow

When anglers post photos online of fish from Hamilton Harbour, they tend to be one of two species.

There are big, hearty walleye that look like something from a sport fishing magazine.

And there are bloated, monstrous goldfish that look like the last thing you should find at the end of a hook.

The mature walleyes are from Ministry of Natural Resources stocking in previous years and anglers are delighted — even if the fish don’t appear to be reproducing. The long-term hope is that the predator fish species will gain hold and help restore balance to the bay. Stocking is being done every two years with the next one planned this summer. The goldfish can be traced to people dumping them in tributaries leading to the harbour or flushing them through the sewer system. They’re causing a great deal of habitat damage and are crowding out native species. And unlike walleye, the goldfish are creating offspring like crazy.

So goes the story of Hamilton’s much abused bay and the 40-year effort to improve its ecology. Good news tends to be accompanied by setbacks.

“With fish, it is always going to be two steps forward, and one step back at best. And some years it is going to be worse than that,” says Chris McLaughlin, the executive director of the Bay Area Restoration Council.

“The general trends are not particularly encouraging. For every walleye story, there is a goldfish story.”

This is in stark contrast to the 1800s when the bay flourished with whitefish, trout and pike, among other native species. They say fish would almost jump in your boat.

“It was a spectacular place to go fishing, for the range of species you could catch and how big they were,” says Tys Theijsmeijer, head of natural areas for the Royal Botanical Gardens.

After that golden age, urbanization, industrialization and infilling of the shoreline led to the bay falling into steady decline. By the 1930s, there were virtually no fish to be caught. A once vibrant fishery was obliterated.

The bay was then taken over by invasive carp because they could survive the polluted waters, low oxygen levels and compromised habitat. And then in more recent years, an influx of goldfish — and other non-native species — complicated the ecosystem further.

Since the 1980s — after the harbour was identified as an “area of concern” by the International Joint Commission — governments and other stakeholders have been trying to bring back some of the harbour’s former natural glory.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on sewage treatment and sewer system improvements, habitat restoration, among other things. But the results have been generally disappointing, especially when it comes to fish recovery.

“The fish populations are actually worse in terms of numbers and species compared to when we started,” says Theijsmeijer.

Water quality is still a serious problem and scientists have not been able to restore fish and wildlife habitat to the extent that they hoped.

As someone who has written extensively about the harbour since the 1980s, I’ve been amazed at how ecological improvement turned out to be far more difficult and complicated than anyone imagined.

At several points, rehabilitation efforts have been blindsided by unforeseen circumstances. New problems arose while trying to solve old ones.

For example, it was known that some people would foolishly empty aquariums into streams and sewers. But no one expected that discarded pet fish could flourish so

well in the bleak waters of Hamilton Harbour.

A $2.3-million carp barrier was built between the harbour and Cootes Paradise in 1997 to keep destructive carp out of Cootes in hopes of fostering the growth of native species of fish. It has had some success, but no one dreamed that bay waters would rise so high in 2017 and 2019 to flood out the barrier, letting carp through. The designers never imagined water levels that were seen during those years. The barrier has since been modified. But who knows what to expect in the future?

And who would have thought that prescription drugs taken by humans would wash through the sewer system and into the bay, affecting the health of native fish? One study found that antidepressants were chilling out fish to a point that they were not aggressive enough to defend themselves.

For that matter, who would have dreamed that gates would have inexplicably been left open in the city’s sewer system, leading to an estimated 24 billion litres of sanitary and storm sewage deluging Chedoke Creek and flowing into Cootes Paradise for four years, beginning in 2014?

“And the big one now is we have no idea what climate change might do in the coming years,” says McLaughlin.

An interesting reference point is the work of John W. Kerr (18121888), who was “fisheries overseer” of the harbour between the 1860s and 1880s. He left more than 10,000 pages of diaries and letters that give a vivid understanding of the bay at the time. He was the subject of the 2021 book “Caught!” by his great, great grandson Joel Kerr, which was featured in a Flashbacks column last April.

The Kerr papers were also used by McMaster University historians Nancy Bouchier and Ken Cruikshank in their excellent book “The People and the Bay.”

Cruikshank says at the beginning of Kerr’s career he was focused on overfishing and spear fishing as being the greatest threat to the fishery in the bay. But he soon realized that pollution from sewage and industrialization was a far bigger concern. He was blindsided as well.

“Kerr was among those who initially thought the problem could be defined as bad fishing practices and figured that if you got rid of the bad fishing practices, the fish would last. But, by the 1880s, it was clear there were other problems with what people were dumping into the bay,” Cruikshank says.

And that legacy continues to this day amid a Herculean effort to turn back the ecological clock.

But as McLaughlin notes: “When people get discouraged, I remind them that it took a long time and a lot of effort to wreck the place … So improvements will take time as well.”