Last 4th of July, my wife and I were about 12
miles east of Fire Island Inlet, New York, fishing in 60 or 65 feet of water,
trying to find a few fluke.
It was a tough slog.
Most years, the various lumps and holes off Fire Island host good
numbers of squid, and there are usually some pretty nice fluke hanging around,
feeding on the squid and vulnerable to well-presented baits.
This season was different.
Fluke were still chasing the squid, but squid were hard to come by;
normally productive structure waqs uncharacteristically barren, and I was
seeing only the occasional light-blue scratch, showing squid hovering over the
bottom, on my fishfinder. Fluke fishing
had not been productive.
On that sort of day, I pay more attention to my electronics
than to the rod in my hand, and my mind tends to wander, thinking about where
to go next and what piece of bottom might be holding enough bait to attract a
few decent fish.
Maybe that’s how the school of big fish got so close to the
boat without being noticed.
There were at least three dozen of them, possibly more than
fifty, and the smallest was at least three feet long. At first, I wasn’t sure what they were. In early July, you expect to see bluefish,
and maybe striped bass, two or three miles south of Long Island. But these fish were neither.
Their backs were too dark.
Too much of their bulk was pushed forward, into broad shoulders, giving
them a front-heavy, wedge-shaped appearance that was completely at odds with a
slim bluefish or streamlined striper. I
was hoping that a bucktail dragged in front of their noses would help end the mystery,
but before I could grab a casting rod launcher, the fish suddenly spooked and
were gone.
As they disappeared, a grayish-bronze flank flashed in the
sun.
It had been a school of black drum.
Had they not made such a hasty exit, and had they given me the chance
to hook up, fight and ultimately bring one of them into the boat, I probably would
have violated New York State law, not because I caught the fish, but because I almost
certainly would have let it go.
Yes, you read that right.
The New
York State Environmental Conservation Law, Section 13-0337, Subsection 2,
declares that
“Starfish, drills (Urosalpinx cineria), periwinkles (Litorinia)
and drum fish (Pogonias chromis) when taken shall not be returned to the waters
of the state.”
All of those listed creatures eat shellfish, and predators
naturally compete. So the most effective
shellfish predators in New York, the state’s shellfish industry, decided that
life would be a lot more profitable if they could kill off their competition.
That is just what ECL Section 13-0337 is designed to do.
It’s an old idea, going back to the days of royal
gamekeepers over in Europe, who were hired to kill off any hawks, weasels,
wolves, lynx or anything else (including human poachers) who might make their living
dining on the nobility’s grouse or the king’s deer.
The same sort of thinking crossed over to the west side of
the ocean and gave birth to similar notions of killing predators so that people
might kill more of their prey.
Beginning in the late 1800s and extending into the mid-20th
Century, both Maine
and Massachusetts paid a bounty for every seal killed, in hopes of making
more fish available to such states’ commercial fisheries. Such effort almost certainly depleted the
local gray seal population, and now that the seals are recolonizing their
former range, some
are calling for federal laws protecting the animals to be amended, so that
people may legally kill them again.
While such attitudes are newly resurgent in New England,
they never died out in the West. The
United States Department of Agriculture maintains a Wildlife
Services agency which spends most of its time and most of its taxpayer dollars
shooting, poisoning and trapping cougars, bears, wolves, coyotes and any other
meat-eating critters with the temerity to eat someone’s sheep or cow.
The fact that a lot of that killing takes place on public, federal
lands, which don’t belong to the livestock’s owners, seems irrelevant to
Wildlife Services, even though most taxpayers would probably rather either see
such predators remain alive and accessible to hikers, hunters, photographers
and the public as a whole.
In the same manner, the shellfish industry, abetted by the
State of New York, have usurped the public’s right to access and enjoy black
drum.
That might seem to make little difference because, for many
decades, black drum have been only occasional visitors to New York’s coastal
waters. However that wasn’t always the
case. In his 1999 book, Heartbeats
in the Muck, A Dramatic Look at the History, Sea Life and Environment of New
York Harbor, ichthyologist John Waldman notes that
“Black drum, absent for a century, were the scourge of Staten
Island oyster planters and were commonly caught around Manhattan to weights of
seventy pounds, the Harlem River and the Battery being prime locations.”
Now, after a long absence, it appears that black drum are
trying to return to local waters. My
friend John McMurray, who owns and
operates One More Cast Charters, ran into schools
of big black drum on the surface, not
too far from Staten Island, for two consecutive summers less than ten years ago.
I suspect that those encounters left John a serial violator
of the Environmental Conservation Law, because I don’t believe that he or his
customers killed any of the fish…
And there’s no reason why they should have.
With striped bass always riding a teeter-totter between
abundance and decline, with bluefish notoriously “cyclic” (whatever that means,
but they do seem to suffer wide swings between being seemingly everywhere and
being dismayingly scarce), and with weakfish even more “cyclic” than the blues,
few anglers would complain if another big, hard-fighting fish moved into the
neighborhood.
It is moving season.
Steadily warming waters, which aren’t expected to start cooling down any
time soon, are pushing
fish such as black sea bass farther up into New England. Warmer
winters will probably have a negative impact on striped bass spawning and,
hence, abundance, and it’s not impossible that environmental changes could also
be causing other things that scientists are seeing, such as poor
summer flounder recruitment.
It would sure be nice if warming waters could bring us some good as
well, such as the return of black drum.
Section 13-0337 of New York’s Environmental Conservation Law
is just another misconceived attempt at ecosystem engineering, that tries to
place blame for the loss of New York’s shellfish on the black drum, oyster
drills and starfish, which have coexisted with clams and oysters for millennia
without doing any harm (I’ll leave periwinkles out of the discussion, as they’re
an invasive species native to Europe, which appeared in local waters during the
1880s), while ignoring the real cause of the molluks’ decline.
As Waldman notes elsewhere in his book,
“Long a mainstay of the Indians of the region, oyster beds
stretched from Croton-on-Hudson to Raritan Bay—perhaps 350 miles of shelled
bottom. European settlers were soon
eating oysters raw, broiled on coals, boiled in fat, and preserved in vinegar…the
Carwitham Map, depicting the harbor in 1730, depicts the entire cove that forms
the New Jersey shore of the Upper New York Bay as one gigantic oyster reef.
“…Although a craze for the ‘luscious bivalves,’ as they were
actually called, peaked in the United States in the mid- to late 1880s,
oystering in New York Harbor decline because of overharvest, siltation stirred
up by channel dredging, and increased pollution…particular beds were gaining
reputations for producing oysters that tasted like petroleum…”
Such events didn’t only happen in New York Harbor. An
article that appeared in the New York
Times on July 25, 1985 was titled, “Overfishing and Pollution Imperil
Clam Industry,” and went on to say that
“The Long Island clamming industry, once the nation’s leader,
has fallen into a decline that experts fear could lead to virtual extinction.
“…Overfishing and pollution have been blamed for the clam
shortage, and scientists believe the harvest must be limited before the stock
becomes exhausted.
“As increased
urbanization has polluted fisheries, baymen have been forced to concentrate on
those that remain. As a consequence,
more clams have been taken than have been replaced.
“…The baymen, who say they are barely surviving under current
conditions, vigorously oppose restricting the catch. Instead, they hold out hope that nature, in
time, will replenish the waters.
“’God will take care of it,’ says Tony Viggiano, leader of a
baymen’s group here. ‘He can make more
clams by accident than man can think about.’
“…Almost everyone agrees that clam stocks were diminished by
widespread illegal harvesting during the late 1970’s. Harvesting the seeds – juvenile clams less
than an inch thick – eventually cut the adult population…
“Moreover, poaching clams from polluted waters was widespread
until a few years ago…
“Poaching was popular among the baymen, Mr. Viggiano said,
because they believed that fishing restrictions were unnecessarily harsh and
that clams in restricted areas were healthy…
So it becomes very clear that the loss of New York’s shellfish
beds weren’t due to black drum. Or due
to starfish. Or oyster drills.
That, in turn, makes it clear that ECL Section 13-0337 is a very bad law, which should be promptly repealed.
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