Today, Hawkins will collect 200 Atlantic salmon eggs in his olive jar and transport them to a freshwater tank at his home in Douglas, N.B., about 160 kilometres southwest of the hatchery. There, the eggs will continue to develop, from nesting to hatching to eventually swimming to the surface to feed — all under the watchful eye of Hawkins’ camera.

“I like to think I have good fish husbandry, but this will be the test,” says Hawkins to Labadie with a chuckle.

Raising salmon eggs requires patience and persistence. Seven days a week, hatchery staff measure oxygen and temperature levels and remove any eggs that have blanched — the telltale sign an egg has died. The hatchery regularly provides eggs to local schools through its “Fish Friends” program, giving middle-school students a chance to nurture eggs into fry before releasing them back into their natal rivers. Today, the hatchery is extending that educational mission to Hawkins, a wildlife cinematographer who specializes in marine life.

Capturing these early life stages will complete his latest project: documenting, in unprecedented detail, the extraordinary journey of Atlantic salmon throughout their entire geographic range, which spans Canada, Greenland, coastal parts of Scandinavia and Europe and the United States, from freshwater spawning grounds to ocean feeding areas and back again. By opening a window onto the invisible, Hawkins hopes to advance Atlantic salmon education and conservation and help to reverse their precipitous decline. The 200 eggs destined for his olive jar are more than a new logistical challenge for a conservation filmmaker who has pioneered innovative techniques for capturing his underwater subjects. They’re a symbol of hope in the face of an unfolding ecological tragedy, and the raw material for images that may help determine whether future generations will ever witness the return of Atlantic salmon to Maritime rivers. 

Hawkins was 15 when he realized Atlantic salmon were in serious trouble — and he needed to help. He had grown up angling with his father, Mac, in the iconic salmon rivers around his childhood home in Upper Kingsclear, outside Fredericton. Father and son mostly fished the nearby Nashwaak River, one of seven tributaries of the Saint John River, but by 1998, the federal Fisheries and Oceans department had banned salmon fishing in the Nashwaak, following a pattern of closures due to sharply declining salmon returns that began in the 1990s in the Saint John River watershed. 

The pair moved to the Miramichi, but that watershed, too, showed troubling signs. Salmon returns peaked in the early 1990s, followed by a major decline from that period into the 2010s and to the present day.

Inside the hatchery in South Esk, Labadie uses a net to gently scoop the eggs into Hawkins’ olive jar, then hands it over. He caps the jar, twists it tightly, then places it in his cooler, stuffing an old blanket around it for stability. Outside, he scoops snow and packs it around the top to keep the eggs cool before zipping it closed. Labadie knows the value of what Hawkins is attempting; she’s seen first-hand how conservation efforts struggle without the public attention that captivating visuals can generate.

“We’ve been trying for so long to have a successful program to help with conservation, but salmon don’t have time. They don’t have time for more meetings and more policies and more protocols,” says Labadie. “In the next five to 10 years, maybe even less than that, Atlantic salmon could be gone from this area. It’s heartbreaking.” 

While Hawkins could easily film the beady-eyed eggs at the hatchery, his goal is to capture the critical early moments of the fish developing inside them. Filming in the rivers is logistically impossible — they’re mostly ice-covered at the end of March, and even in ideal conditions, the eggs nestle out of sight, buried in riverbed sediments in salmon nests called redds. When the eggs hatch as tiny fish, called alevins, with large yolk sacs still attached to their bellies, they remain hidden under gravel. Only once the salmon have absorbed all the nutrients from their yolk sacs do they emerge from stone cover as free-swimming fish called fry.

Inside his garage aquarium, Hawkins has assembled a redd using pebbles and sediments gathered from nearby rivers. He will film through the glass as the eggs develop and hatch into delicate, wriggling alevins. Then, with a bracket-and-arm camera system positioned above the tank, he will capture overhead shots of the fry as they swim to the water’s surface to feed. Throughout the process, he will slowly raise the water temperature to mimic the warming that follows the spring ice break-up. 

For the Atlantic Salmon Federation and other conservation groups that have long worked to protect the species, the footage is a critical tool: a way to make the salmon’s remarkable journey — and its precarious future — visible to a world that has largely forgotten these fish exist in the wild.

Neville Crabbe, vice-president of communications for the Atlantic Salmon Federation, says one of the biggest challenges for fish conservation is that the fish dwell out of sight, underwater. Large, charismatic animals such as polar bears are visually striking and easily impress, fuelling the fundraising and advocacy efforts that support their protection. Salmon don’t have that advantage, although the species’ remarkable journey — migrating thousands of kilometres from river to ocean and back again, battling rapids and waterfalls to return to the exact stream where they were born — carries an inherent drama that resonates with people once they witness it.

“What Nick has been able to do is to go under the surface and capture Atlantic salmon in their most intimate moments, which engenders a real appreciation for the skills, abilities and unbelievable character of this fish species,” says Crabbe.