Herring Hearsay

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).

Here’s what Goodwin told me shortly after the bill’s defeat, his voice rising until he sounded like a cicada: “The director of IF&W cannot introduce alewives without a vote of the legislature…. That includes the marine resources idiot, too. They’re two commissioners from away—one from Arizona and one from Virginia. I told the governor to hire a Maine person who knows the lakes and rivers, but he’s from Virginia. What does he care? Fred Kircheis is running for cover ’cause I told him I was all done funding him. I’ll shut him off, and he’ll start running back to Minnesota. The goddamned Canadians wanted to raise alewives for fertilizer and bait. I told those sons of bitches to build a fishway on their side of the river. I sent ’em all packing: ‘Get the hell out of Calais before I have you run out as terrorists.’ And away they went a-running.”