He Never Stopped

Bill Taylor was not a goon. Let’s just get that straight. Yes, he was a tenacious agitator and a rabble-rouser during his hockey career, which spanned from age six, through university and a tryout with the American Hockey League’s Nova Scotia Oilers (the farm team of the Edmonton Oilers), to stints with the third-division Dartmouth Moosehead Mounties and Pictou Highlanders. And, yes, his injuries—a broken nose, cheekbone and collarbone, dislocated shoulders and a separated sternum—tell the tale of a physical player. Bill was forced to retire from the game he loved in his late 20s, after a season in which on-ice bouts caused seven dislocations in his right shoulder, and six in his left.

Bill was not a goon, and he could have chosen a path of less resistance. He could have let someone else on the team—perhaps the actual goon—fight for him when the opposing player had finally had enough. Doing either of those things would have lengthened his career, but also would have rendered him a less effective player. That’s not how Bill operates though.
“You always have to fight your own battles,” he says.

For wild Atlantic salmon, Eden was lost long ago. The fish—found on paleolithic cave paintings and named salar (“leaper”) by the Romans for its prowess at ascending steep falls—has not suffered the fate of the extinct carrier pigeon or even the nearly extinct bison. But it isn’t far behind.

On the Penobscot River in Maine, only 0.01 per cent of that river’s historical run of 100,000 fish returns each year. The news is no better in the southernmost part of Atlantic Canada. Salmon are extinct in 40 rivers that empty into the Bay of Fundy. Among those is the Saint John, which once held the second-largest run of Atlantics in Canada and now no longer has a run at all. Even the Miramichi, the queen of salmon rivers, which once boasted the largest Atlantic salmon run in the world, has seen its numbers decline from more than half a million fish to 25,000.

That Old Testament fall from grace took just a half-century or so. Dams, acid rain, deforestation, open-net pen aquaculture, commercial and recreational overharvest and climate change all played roles.

What we’ve been left with is an attempt at the New Testament promise of redemption. And that’s where a former minor league hockey player stepped in.

Bill Taylor grew up in Moncton, New Brunswick fishing for trout with his father. But salmon were the glamour fish of the Maritimes, so as soon as he was old enough—15 or so—Bill and his friend Hank would either drive or take a train an hour to the Kennebecasis River in the evenings during the week, or head to the air-clear pools of the Big Salmon, two-and-a-half hours away, on weekends to try to catch an Atlantic.

It took years for Bill to even get a bite. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” he says. Sometimes distractions got in the way. One morning, Bill read in the newspaper that Hugh Hefner was going to fish at the Hearst family camp on the Kennebecasis. He and Hank spent that day tramping through the woods to try to spy on the camp. “We didn’t see a Bunny,” he says.

And then one evening during his third salmon season, at Secords Pool on the Kennebecasis, Bill hooked a grilse. “It was the first time I ever had anything bigger than a 12-inch trout on my line,” he says. The old timers shouted instructions and advice, much of it conflicting. Drop the rod! No, lift the rod! “It was complete chaos, and I barely remember anything except for a jump or two,” says Bill.

He began to fish public water all over the place. The Miramichi in New Brunswick. The Stewiacke, St. Mary’s, LaHave, Medway and Margaree in Nova Scotia. The Penobscot in Maine, which at that time had a robust salmon culture, with clubs, like the Veazie and the Eddington, and a hundred or so anglers on the water daily. Bill’s wife, Suzanne, caught her first salmon on that river in the mid-1980s.

But that decade turned out to be a nearly apocalyptic moment for Atlantic salmon. The clients of Bill’s favourite guide on the Miramichi, Ernest Long, caught just nine salmon total in the four-month season in 1983. The run of 2,000 salmon on the Kennebecasis dwindled to 100 or so. The Big Salmon, with its run of 3,000, followed suit. And, one by one, all of the rivers Bill fished, save for the Miramichi and Margaree, were closed to salmon angling. They remain so today.

By that time in his life, Bill was too deeply invested in the welfare of Atlantic salmon to just sit around and watch the species wither away. “I saw what was happening around me; I read the stories,” he says. “I knew that Atlantic salmon were an indicator species, and that reduced runs of them meant something was really wrong.” He decided to fight battles no longer just for himself. He became a member of ASF. As the years went on, he gradually got more involved and started attending conclaves, where he met people like Wilf Carter, then the ASF president, and Joan and Lee Wulff. Something had to be done, and Bill wanted in on it.

He was hired by ASF in 1988, at the age of 27, and put in charge of communications and the regional councils in Canada and the U.S. A few years later, he added public policy to his duties, working with national, provincial and state governments.

Then came 1995. Carter’s successor as president, David Clarke, stepped down, and Bill was asked by the board to take the role of placeholder while a search committee sought out a new president.

At the ASF board meetings that year, the search committee officially announced its recommendation. It was a simple one: Don’t look any further. So at age 34, Bill dropped the “acting” part of his title. He would helm ASF for the next 29 years, a run that made giant steps toward that redemption.

Bill is modest when discussing ASF’s accomplishments during his tenure and, to be sure, he didn’t do it all alone. The excellent staff he hired, the ASF donors and members and people like Chad Pike and the late Orri Vigfusson—both from the North Atlantic Salmon Fund—and various other partners were all integral parts of ASF’s success. Conservation is a team game. But presidents are ultimately judged by their wins and losses. As football coach Bill Parcells once famously noted, you are what your record says you are. And Bill’s record is remarkable. “I can’t think of a single person who has done more for Atlantic salmon than Bill,” says Yvon Chouinard, who, as an individual and the head of Patagonia Inc., supported much of ASF’s work.

Among the many achievements of ASF during the nearly three decades of Bill’s presidency, four stand out.

Shortly after Bill became president, through an intense advocacy campaign, ASF convinced the Canadian government to shut down the commercial salmon fisheries in Quebec and Newfoundland and Labrador, which, in total, were harvesting 150,000 adult salmon per year.

Around that time, too, ASF and its then-head of U.S. programs, Andy Goode, spearheaded what would become a $63-million restoration project on the Penobscot, the most important Atlantic salmon river in the U.S. ASF built a coalition, which included the Penobscot Indian Nation, Trout Unlimited and American Rivers, and tore down two dams and built a state-of-the-art fish bypass on another, in what amounted to the largest river restoration project ever done on the east coast of the U.S.

And last year, ASF started what’s known as the Wild Salmon Watersheds program, an attempt at tackling the problems posed to Atlantic salmon by climate change. Again, the organization has put together a coalition—of governments and Indigenous and community groups—this time to double down on protecting the watersheds, rivers and salmon runs that remain in good health by increasing the forest buffer along rivers and headwaters, identifying cold-water refuges and protecting them, and mapping marine migratory routes of salmon and critical feeding zones. The idea is to help make these places more resilient to the effects of climate change and, in doing so, give Atlantic salmon time to adapt to the faster-than-ever changes in their environments.

But by far the most significant measures taken under Bill were the three agreements made with the Greenland commercial fishing industry. The agreements were done in partnership with Vigfusson and the North Atlantic Salmon Fund. Each agreement took years of negotiating, international diplomacy and private funding. They were all very much worth it. In fact, the Greenland agreements, in saving several hundred thousand adult fish a year, have been the single most beneficial step ever made in Atlantic salmon conservation, boosting salmon runs in both North America and Europe.

Other projects that were started under Bill will, hopefully, bear fruit in the future. ASF helped create an Indigenous commercial fishing season on the exploding population of striped bass in the mouth of the Miramichi (see “The Milty Way,” p. 20). Perhaps the most important initiative is the raised awareness of the dangers—to the environment, to salmon rivers and even to human health—of open-net pen salmon aquaculture.

One other thing worth mentioning is that the sport of Atlantic salmon fishing, long thought of as a patrician pastime, has become more inclusive in the last few years, with more young people and more women getting involved.

And while the southernmost range of the species continues to suffer, the health of rivers in many parts of Canada are far better now than they were 40 years ago—which brings up perhaps the most impressive statistic and accomplishment of Bill’s run as president of ASF: during the 29 years of his presidency, Atlantic salmon runs in North America have increased by 30 per cent.

I have fished for Atlantic salmon with Bill all over the place—Newfoundland and Labrador, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. Once, on a river on the North Shore of Quebec, I watched from the bank as Bill cast a big, orange-hackled dry fly over a promising seam in the river. Suddenly, a snout broke the surface of the water and inhaled his fly. It was a nice salmon, bright and nearing 20 pounds (nine kilograms). Bill put the wood to the fish, as he always does, but bowed the rod when the salmon leapt, head over tail, and then landed back in the water with a thwap. “C’mon fish,” Bill murmured. “I’m going to let you go.”

He tailed the fish himself, no net, no glove, keeping the fish in the water. He removed the hook and held the fish nose-to-the-current. “I can feel its heartbeat,” he said, just before the fish kicked off, splashing water all over his arm. And I thought to myself: If that fish only knew …

Bill, 63, officially retired from the presidency of ASF at the end of August. Both he and Suzanne have had bouts with cancer, and though they beat it, their experiences gave them some perspective. They will spend more time together now, skiing, travelling and being with their kids and grandkids. But Bill will always be there to lend support for Salmo salar. “Bill will never really stop fighting for Atlantic salmon,” says Chouinard. “He cares too much.”

Bill’s legacy is uncomplicated—that 30 per cent increase in salmon runs speaks for itself. In the end, he has done something remarkable. Through his tenacity, he has turned what was once a doom-and-gloom story into something else, something that has put Atlantic salmon on the path to redemption. And he has provided us with perhaps the single most important thing in the world of conservation: hope.

ASJ’s columnist-at-large, Monte Burke, is a staff writer at Forbes magazine. Along with Charles Gaines, he was editor of the recently published Atlantic Salmon Treasury.