'Really curious': Something fishy is happening in Oak Bay's Bowker Creek

Bowker Creek in Oak Bay, B.C., is shown. (CTV News)

A mystery has appeared in Oak Bay’s Bowker Creek, and Gerald Harris – a director with the Friends of Bowker Creek Society – is working with other volunteers to get to the bottom of it.

The strange happenings involve two adult female coho salmon that have appeared in the creek, which has not seen spawning salmon in years.

That’s good news for Bowker Creek, but the mystery is: why coho salmon?

Four years ago, in 2020, chum salmon eggs were brought in from the Goldstream Hatchery and placed in an egg incubation box in the creek. Those eggs turned into fry and eventually swam out into the ocean to live their best life.

This year is the end of those chum salmon’s lifecycle, and the Friends of Bowker Creek Society was hoping to see the fish return to the creek to spawn.

So far, there have been no chum, just the two coho.

"It was really curious,” said Harris. "Did somebody put it here? And why?"

The coho salmon were also hatchery-raised, meaning they were born in some other river or creek, and would have ended up in Bowker Creek either accidentally or because they were moved there by humans.

The society doesn't yet know which of these explanations is true, but Harris likes to believe this is a natural phenomenon, and not a human prank.

"This is a little sub-wonder of nature that there's a small percentage of salmon that always don't find their creek and go into some other creek by mistake,” said Harris.

The beauty of that possibility is that if those salmon did spawn – which is not believed to be the case, Harris said – Bowker Creek could once again become a salmon-bearing body of water without any human intervention.

"We believe that this is something that happened through evolution as a way for salmon populations to spread to new creeks,” said Harris.

Now, the Friends of Bowker Creek Society is waiting and monitoring the creek daily to see if those chum salmon return as well.

"Ultimately, we would like two species of salmon plus cutthroat trout, but we're starting with chum salmon right now," Harris said.