Tom Pero has written the definitive story of the history of sea-run brook trout restoration from the very beginning – in part, because he was there.
Fans of any brook trout will be interested in this story – as this history may well be repeated on other brook trout streams.
Who knows – possibly this story applies to other types of streams as well.
Read the press release below and order your copy from Wild River Press today.
Books begin shipping mid July 2026.
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This new (2026) book focuses on coastal biodiversity and the effects of warming seawater on the ecology of Cape Cod’s spring-fed streams, which spawn and sustain surprising wild populations of native (salter) brook trout.
Salter
The improbable return of the magical sea-run brook trout to the little rivers of Cape Cod
Thomas R. Pero
Introduction by Chris Wood, President of Trout Unlimited
Hardcover with jacket
8.5 x 11 landscape format
257 pages all color on heavy matte stock
Hundreds of photos and historical maps
$75 standard hardcover edition
ISBN 979-89944716-09
Fifty years before removal of dams on California’s Klamath River and Maine’s Penobscot gripped America’s attention, a tiny band of radical dam-busters inspired by Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang took pick-axes and sledge hammers to an obsolete dam blocking a little river in Massachusetts.
The year was 1976, the country’s bicentennial. The grass-roots dam-removal effort was led—like Abbey’s fictional Hayduke—by a real-life Vietnam veteran, an everyday career plumber from Falmouth named Francis Smith. His life story and the stories of other remarkable river advocates are the beating heart of the new book Salter.
The impassioned narrative traces a modern environmental revolution on coastal rivers in New England. Old dams that no longer serve any practical purpose are being successfully targeted for demolition. Cranberry bogs that once turned pristine freshwater streams upside down and filled with destructive pesticides and habitat-wrecking silt are being restored to their original natural, nurturing, wild marshes.
Author Thomas R. Pero starts the chapter about these rivers by quoting Thoreau, who wrote, in 1849: “The streams of the Cape are necessarily formed on a minute scale, since there is no room for them to run, without tumbling immediately into the sea.”
Today, hundreds of millions of federal, state and private dollars are being leveraged to fuel this dramatic environmental success. At the center of the dynamic is a small but extraordinarily effective Massachusetts state agency called the Division of Ecological Restoration.
“It’s a real David-versus-Goliath story,” says Pero. Not too many years ago, taking out the dilapidated dams and crumbling culverts would have seemed impossible. Now, the aim of natural biodiversity is driving everything. “The tide is turning. We can make rivers sing.”
The book’s title, Salter, is an old Cape Cod colloquialism for a colorful native brook trout that migrates from fresh water to salt and back. The author calls the jewel-like salter an ecological “hood ornament.” Its surprising return, he says, is a living measure of the renewed health of these little coldwater rivers. The big ecological benefit are the vast numbers of alewives, blueback herring, shad, smelt and other sea-run species that are flourishing, now free to spawn upstream in their ancient streams. Downstream, their silvery offspring feed wild multitudes, from ospreys to striped bass to great blue herons to bluefish. Revived runs of American eels are swimming inland from the Atlantic Ocean to grow and mature, adding to the rich abundance.
The story, tragically, is not all about happy endings. Salter turns a glaring spotlight on the key to saving rivers on Cape Cod: restoration of the eelgrass meadows in the Cape’s shallow estuaries. Preventing this from happening is the ugly threat of nitrogen over-loading of bays from expanding residential sewage —human urine. Septic tanks, writes the author, are “lowered into the porous, quick-leaching soil like coffins.” The nitrogen moves through the Cape’s permeable groundwater aquifer. Explosive growth of algae turns critical tidewater habitat to a rotten, murky, oxygen-deprived mess.
Heating seawater from climate change may be the death knell to these fragile watersheds.
Salter is the definitive book on the subject. It is meticulously researched and masterfully written. The bibliography is exhaustive. Environmental journalists and local activists alike will find this volume an inspiring source of coverage about saving the coastal New England environment.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Thomas R. Pero was born and raised in Massachusetts. He served as the first full-time editor of Trout, the magazine of the national organization Trout Unlimited. During his 16-year tenure, twice the publication was named Conservation Magazine of the Year by the Natural Resources Council of America. Pero is the recipient of the Aldo Starker Leopold Wild Trout Medal for a lifetime of journalism dedicated to wild rivers and wild fish.
For possible excerpt rights to Salter, interviews with the author or other individuals featured in the book, please contact tom@wildriverpress.com
Telephone: 425-486-3638. Cover and other images available.