New Haven Independent

Third- and fourth- graders at Barnard had been watching these salmon grow since January, when the fish arrived as tiny eggs in a tank. Friday, the fish had grown just big enough to release. So 80 students took the trip to a quiet stream in Devil’s Hopyard State Park.

The buses wound through country roads, past riverside cottages, farms and rustic stone walls. “A lot of them have never seen a place like this before,” said Marjorie Drucker, the school’s science coordinator and field trip director. She’s been taking kids on salmon-replenishing trips for 11 years. Each year, they take a tank of 200 eggs, watch them evolve into fish fry, and release them in cold northern waters.

The bus pulled into the quiet park to meet Dick Bell of the Connecticut River Salmon Association. His group gets salmon eggs from the state Department of Environmental Protection and teaches schoolkids to raise and release them. Bell passed out red plastic cups and gave each kid a little fry to pour into the stream.

Students had been waiting for this moment for months. They knew the salmon’s life cycle by heart, spitting out the stages — “Parr! Smolt! Fry!” — with ease.

“You’re doing a wonderful thing, trying to bring a creature back from extinction,” he told the eager cup-holders. Years ago, the salmon flourished in the streams. They swam north to cold, fast waters like the Eight Mile River, where they could lay eggs safely under rocks. Once grown, they swam south to the Atlantic. When it was time to lay eggs again, they made the trip upstream.

Then “the dams got to them,” explained Bell. Manmade barriers prevented upstream trips. About 200 years ago, the species all but vanished from the waterways of the Connecticut River, he said. Today, with “fish ladders” built into dams, Bell’s group thinks salmon have chance at a comeback.

With 850 dams in the Connecticut River, they’re tackling a tall task. Bell called reintroduction a “long shot,” but he’s seeing some small progress. Last year, 186 Connecticut-River-born fish made their way back up the streams after their journey to the Atlantic. His group works with Barnard and 62 other Connecticut schools to contribute to the effort.

Students leapt to the task. Squatting down in the moss — eww! — they poured the creatures out. “Where did it go?” asked one, peering into the stream.

Others poked through the trees, moss and mud to hunt for living things. “I saw a spider eating its prey,” said fourth-grader Benjamin Tramel. “I never seen that before — well, on TV, but not in person.”

Nigel Banks said the trip was even better than last year. “I saw more living things than I expected,” he said — “I saw a frog that that I didn’t expect to see there.”

Kennesia Graham discovered “different kind of rocks — silver rocks that you never seen before.”

“The best thing I found was a slimy thing!” said Troi Branham, pointing to a sketch she’d made on a clipboard. It reminded her of the anemone she’d seen in class. Earthworms caught her eye, too. “I don’t see a lot of worms where I live.”