Sunday, May 26, 2019

THE SONG OF THE PASSENGER PIGEON ECHOES IN FISHERIES DEBATES


People much like us have been on Earth for more than a quarter-million years, which might be just an eyeblink in geological time, but is more than long enough to establish patterns of behavior, and to explore all of the pathways to both enlightenment an error.  


“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which has been done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.”
I started thinking about that, and its connection to fisheries management, while reading Ed Van Put’s excellent book, The Beaverkill, a while ago.

Anyone at all familiar with the history of angling in America will recognize the Beaverkill as one of the nation’s legendary trout streams, the home waters of some of the best-known fly fishermen in the country, and one of the places most associated with the forms and traditions of fly fishing in the Northeast.  However, while The Beaverkill is generally focused on the river, its trout and its anglers, it includes a far broader narrative that also encompasses the region and the people that have lived and moved through since pre-Columbian times.

Passenger pigeons are a part of that story.

At one time, they were a very significant part.  As Van Put tells us,

“Passenger pigeons nested in immense numbers, covering thousands of acres; they chose areas of dense forest, with plenty of forest and mast…
“Pigeons flying through the sky, wave after wave, in countless numbers, presented an image of ‘fearful power that frightened beasts as well as man…
“Trees were filled with nests, often fifty or more in a single treetop…so many pigeons would collect in the trees that their accumulated weight would break the branches, leaving the nesting site desolate, as if a great hurricane or tornado had swept through the forest.
“Noise and chaos were companions of the nesting ground, and the screaming and squealing pigeons made when roosting could be heard for miles: 'From an hour before sunset until nine or ten o’clock at night there is one continued roar, resembling that of a distant waterfall.’
“Even when feeding on the forest floor, pigeons were a sight long remembered.  They were so numerous and close to one another that the ground could scarcely be seen, and those who witnessed these events marveled at how they left not a leaf unturned in their search for beechnuts.”
In other words, there were a lot of them.  Or, to borrow a term from fisheries management, the biomass was extremely high.

It was so high that, when the pigeons migrated into the Beaverkill country to nest, the migration triggered a great hunt that, in those days before regulations, saw people turn out to kill birds in numbers that are unimaginable today.

“When they were in season, nothing was talked of, or eaten, but passenger pigeon.  To those settlers trying to survive the rugged existence of Catskill mountain life, they were a welcome source of food…They were salted down in barrels for winter use and shared with less fortunate neighbors whose food supply was not as plentiful.
“While some were killed for home use, the greatest number found their way to  markets in major cities. Commercially minded men were attracted to this great natural resource and killed or captured pigeons primarily for sale to restaurants and hotels…
“Once a roost was located, roads were cut into mountainsides to enable wagons to haul pigeons to market.  Buyers would erect coops or cages for holding live birds and haul in barrels and ice for shipping dead birds.  Day after day, two-horse wagons loaded with pigeons would their way out of the forest…If a rafting freshet coincided with nesting pigeons, most every raft leaving the upper Delaware carried a load of the birds…”
Billions of pigeons filled the forest, but billions of pigeons were also killed, and the pigeon hunters found themselves running up against a harsh but unavoidable reality:  High biomass, by itself, doesn’t guarantee the health of a population, whether we’re talking about passenger pigeons in the early 19th Century or fish such as black sea bass today.

Even with biomass at extremely high levels, removals—the number of individuals taken out of a population—matter.  High levels of abundance may allow higher harvests, but there is still an upper limit on the amount of mortality a population can sustain in the long term.  Today, we have science-based harvest limits, for both birds and fish, that seek to balance biomass and removals. 

Such limits are a critical part of the management process,  Even so, they’re often not popular when people see an abundance of game or fish and, concentrating on only one side of the picture, want to kill more. 

Back in the early 1800s, there were no such constraining rules, so we shouldn’t be shocked by what happened next—although we probably should be discomfited when we see some people trying to lead us down a similar road today.

The passenger pigeon population, unable to sustain the pressure that people were putting upon it, began to decline.
As Van Put notes,

“Reports by sportsmen repeatedly indicated that the passenger pigeon was in trouble.  The size of the stocks kept diminishing, while the destructive forces exploiting them multiplied.”
While he wrote about passenger pigeons, and what they were going through a century and a half ago, a lot of East Coast anglers would certainly nod their heads in agreement, and make no exception, if someone used similar language with respect to striped bass today.

What happened next seems to be part of the striped bass story, too.  Just change the dates, the species, and some of the places, and the story sounds much the same.

“By 1890, pigeons were scarce everywhere in the East.  Traditional hunting grounds were now being abandoned, and the birds were being drawn westward into the forests of Michigan, Wisconsin and Canada.  Even though everyone was aware of the wholesale slaughter of pigeons for commercial purposes, there were those who refused to believe the birds were in danger of becoming extinct.  They believed that, owing to the birds’ persecution, the pigeons simply disappeared to a distant an unexplored part of the country and hid themselves.  [emphasis added]”
It’s impossible not to draw parallels between that overly-optimistic view of the pigeon stock and today's unsupported claims that the striped bass population is not overfished, as the most recent stock assessment reveals, but instead is still thriving somewhere offshore.

It’s a claim that’s not limited to striped bass.  Over the years, I’ve heard the same things said about bluefish, about bluefin tuna, and about cod and other species that were not doing well, advanced by people who earned their livings catching fish, and might be temporarily inconvenienced if landings were cut back.

It's as if we haven't learned anything in the past 150 years, and so still make claims about fish doing fine in some distant and undiscovered locale.  It seems that some are determined to reprise the passenger pigeon’s song.

I’m not suggesting, as I write this, that the striped bass population is in any way imperiled.  As of the end of 2017, the female spawning stock biomass was still three or four times as large as it was in 1982, in the depths of the last collapse.  And even in ‘82, the stock remained a long, long way from extinction.  On the other hand, if fishery managers don’t take prompt and effective action to rebuild abundance, things could get quite a bit worse than they are right now.

In the case of the passenger pigeon,

“The cry for their protection was a long time coming, and once the birds began their downward spiral, it was too late.”
The bass stock seems much more resilient; it recovered from collapse once, and there is good reason to believe that, should it become further troubled, it could recover again.
But belief is a long way from certainty, and there’s no doubt that some things have changed.  There’s no guarantee that the bass population could recover so quickly again.

No one born in the last hundred years has seen a live passenger pigeon.  Even their parents probably never heard a flock in the woods scream and squeal.  Yet, even today, the passenger pigeon’s song reprises itself at fishery management meetings.

We hear it when fishermen try to justify bigger kills based on the size of fish stocks, but ignore the size of the kill.

We hear it when people deny stock declines by claiming that the fish “have just moved,” although data denies their contentions.

We hear it when people only think of themselves, today, and not of the world that their children live in tomorrow.

No one should be singing that sort of song anymore.


“History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
I never thought that old Red got much of anything right, and in his quote, he's wrong on more time.

While the passenger pigeon’s demise was certainly a tragedy, should history repeat itself, whether with striped bass, winter flounder or any other species of bird, beast or fish, it would not be a farce.

It would just be a greater tragedy, proving that there truly is nothing new under the sun, that what we have done once, we will do again, and that we truly can never learn from our mistakes.



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