Herring Hearsay

In what should be America’s most important river-herring refuge, superstition suppresses these imperiled fish.

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This from Albion Goodwin of Pembroke, Maine—governor-appointed fish-and-wildlife advisor to his state and the man who, on behalf of the Grand Lake Stream Guides Association, has probably done more than anyone to set management policy for river herring in the Pine Tree State’s vast St. Croix River system. “They’re trash fish; they’re of no value.” Maine has more river-herring habitat than all other states combined. And the St. Croix—which, from source to sea, defines the boundary between the United States and Canada—has more river-herring habitat than all other Maine rivers combined.

More on Goodwin and the guides later. But first some background on the fish. “River herring” is the collective name for two close relatives, rarely exceeding 14 inches in length and so similar they’re managed as a single species: the alewife; and the slightly sleeker, smaller-eyed blueback herring.

No spring tonic was more curative to the spirits of winter-weary anglers than the first pulse of river herring in rills and rivers from Nova Scotia to Florida. One morning in mud season, water that had appeared lifeless the day before would surge with a storm of protein from the Atlantic. Below towering hydroelectric dams and tiny, crumbling mill races, at the outfalls of giant fish lifts and rickety fish ladders, they’d spiral like star clusters, spooking themselves, dashing down-current and then moving back and holding. Easing into the northern and southern estuaries with this rich forage were all manner of inshore and even pelagic fish such as striped bass, bluefish, cod, haddock, pollock, tunas, mackerels, sharks, weakfish, redfish, snook and jacks.

River herring (many of which die after spawning in fresh water) transferred nutrients from the fertile marine environment high into sterile, glaciated feeder streams where eggs and fry and rotting carcasses fueled vast aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The sea energy flowed into aquatic insects, thence to fish, frogs, turtles, salamanders, warblers, flycatchers, bats, ospreys, herons, egrets, kingfishers, otters, minks….

In New England and southern Canada, Atlantic salmon kelts would recondition themselves by gorging on ascending river herring. Weeks later the spawned-out herring would provide “cover” for ocean-bound smolts (nourished from parrhood on herring fry and roe) as they swept tail-first past ravenous predatory birds and fish.

Hitchhiking on river herring were glochidia, the parasitic larvae of freshwater mussels that detach and colonize the bottom of streams and still water, feeding fish, diving ducks and mammals and maintaining water quality by filtering out organics. In short, river herring were, as Aldo Leopold wrote of passenger pigeons, “the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity”—in this case, the fat of the sea and the precipitation of the sky.

I suppose I’m not quite correct in referring to these fish in the past tense because they’re not quite exterminated. For example, in 2007 a total of 69 river herring (all bluebacks) were counted at the Holyoke, Massachusetts, fish lift on the Connecticut River. This was down from 630,000 in 1985. In response to the range-wide plunge toward oblivion, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Massachusetts have placed moratoria on harvest of river herring. And the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has declared them “Species of Concern.”

Some have attributed the decline to the concurrent resurgence of striped bass, but most biologists consider this a lame theory. “It doesn’t make sense that a predator that co-evolved with its prey could chow it down to this level,” says Steve Gephard, Connecticut’s anadromous fish chief who grew up on the Connecticut River in the days before the striper crisis and remembers when tributaries “ran black, to use the cliché, with river herring.”

Also concurrent with the demise of river herring has been a gross proliferation of industrial, midwater trawlers targeting the Atlantic herring, a non-anadromous cousin. “We don’t have the data to support anything, but many, many of us feel that by-catch in the Atlantic herring fishery is a factor,” says Gephard. “In the past, it seems that there has been an unwillingness to examine by-catch…. I suspect that no one wanted to heap constraints on one of the few remaining viable commercial fisheries in the Northeast. However, closer examination indicates that there is a lot of unreported by-catch in this fishery (as judged not by observer data but by professionals monitoring the docks and the fish markets).”

Back to Albion Goodwin and the Grand Lake Stream Guides Association, the driving forces behind river-herring management on the most important river-herring river in our most important river-herring state. In 1981, improved fish passage at Milltown, Maine, allowed river herring (all alewives) access to much of their historical spawning habitat in the St. Croix system, including Spednic Lake, mostly in New Brunswick.

In this part of Maine, fishing guides make most of their living not from the indigenous brook trout or landlocked salmon but from the alien smallmouth bass that have suppressed both these natives, particularly the former. As native alewives were recovering, Spednic’s alien bass were crashing. To the guides this could mean only one thing. They proclaimed that alewives were responsible. For those who knew something about bass and alewives —fisheries biologists, for instance—this seemed unlikely. Bass were doing splendidly everywhere else in the system. In fact, they were doing splendidly everywhere else in the world where they cohabitated with alewives. In many of these waters, the alewife forage base is what enables bass to reach trophy size.

While there were no studies, it’s far more likely that Spednic’s problems resulted from a new regime of summer water draw-downs for agricultural irrigation, also concurrent with the bass crash. While bass eggs and fry are known to consistently thrive among alewives, they are known to consistently die among, say, trout lilies and tiger swallowtails.

The best description I’ve seen of the guide’s reasoning issues from John Holyoke of the Bangor Daily News. “Primitive people,” he explains, “believed that trees caused the wind to blow. Every time the wind blew, the branches were flapping back and forth. The harder the branches flapped, the harder the wind blew.” Obvious solution: chop down the trees.

As Fred Kircheis, then director of the Maine Atlantic Salmon Commission, told me at the time: “The fact that we have anadromous alewives and bass happily coexisting in other places in the state doesn’t influence the guides’ opinion. They know what they know.”

Accordingly, the guides prevailed on their local state legislators to sponsor a bill requiring the Maine Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife (IF&W) to block the St. Croix’s alewife run at the Woodland and Grand Falls dams. The bill—which may well be illegal because the U.S. and Canada had agreed to manage the river as an international waterway—became law in 1995. An outraged U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service warned IF&W that if the fishways weren’t opened by 2003, the state could lose its annual $2.5 million in Wallop-Breaux funding. The threat proved hollow.

The law also outraged the Canadians. To maintain genetic stock for restoration—in the event that Maine ever came to its senses—they began moving alewives around the first dam at Woodland. Still, the run fell from about 2.5 million to a few hundred fish. Overseeing the trapping and trucking of alewives has been Dr. Fred Whoriskey of the Atlantic Salmon Federation, based in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. “There was a sense of shock among Canadians that on this mutually-agreed-upon international waterway unilateral measures like that would be taken,” he says. “Our mandate is to conserve fish stocks, not knock them down to almost nothing. The only threat of anadromous alewives to any other fish is indigestion.”

In 2001, enlightened Maine legislators attempted to repeal the law with a bill supported by the Maine Department of Marine Resources and IF&W. It passed in the state Senate but was shouted down in the House, thanks largely to guide-generated misinformation recycled by then Representative Albion Goodwin (D-Pembroke).

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