Herring Hearsay

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.”