RUNNING ON EMPTY

The sun is rising ever higher in the sky.  On Tuesday, for he first time in six months, days will be longer than nights.

Just off the coast, life is stirring.

Shoals of small, silver fish, back from a year spent offshore, are making their way toward small creeks and big rivers, on their way to rivers where their kind have spawned since the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier.

The fish are “river herring,” a catch-all term that includes both the alewife and the very similar blueback herring, and there are a lot fewer of them than there used to be.

When I was growing up in the ‘60s, on the southwest corner of the Connecticut coast, river herring began to crowd into local rivers toward the end of March, and stayed through the middle of May.  

In the Mianus River, close to my home, they flooded in at high tide, circling at the base of the dam that blocked their transit upstream.  Even when the tide was dead low, and the riverbed was nothing but stones washed by inch-deeps trickles of water, herring turned on their sides and drove themselves over the rocks and the gravel to the deeper pool cut by water pouring over the dam.

It was a spectacle, that we often stopped by just to watch.  

And it supported a unique fishery that saw men come to the river with long-handled nets and, much like herons, perch on the rock- and concrete-lined bank hoping to fill bushel baskets with herring, which they took home and pickled.

But at some point between then and now, that run just died.  

A trickle of fish still came into the river, but the big run, the spectacle, and the fishery were gone.  The dam cut off access to the upstream spawning grounds; bycatch in offshore fisheries for Atlantic herring (which, unlike river herring, spend their entire lives in the ocean) and Atlantic mackerel depleted the fish while at sea.

River herring runs along the entire Atlantic coast met the same fate.  Streams that once “ran silver” with fish were empty at life—not only of herring, but of the striped bass, ospreys and other predators that followed the run. 

A few runs remained relatively healthy, and others, including the one on the Mianus River, were partially restored after fish ladders, that allowed herring to get over the dam, were put in.  But most river herring runs declined sharply, and some disappeared as the river herring population fell to just 3% of historic levels.

Things got so bad that the Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition in 2011, seeking to have both species listed under the Endangered Species Act; despite the decline in river herring abundance, federal fishery managers decided that such a listing was not warranted in 2013.

However, actions are still being taken to rebuild herring runs.  

Here on Long Island, the Seatuck Environmental Association and its partners have initiated what they call the “Long Island River Revival Project,” which seeks to restore river herring runs as an important step toward restoring the overall healthy of coastal waterways. 

I help out Seatuck by monitoring local rivers for signs of returning herring.  A few years ago, I had the pleasure of seeing what might have been the first alewife to run the Carlls River, in Babylon, NY, in more than a century.  

Over the years, I’ve caught far, far bigger fish that didn’t give me a tenth of the thrill.

That first herring didn’t make it; it seemed to have fallen from a newly-built fish ladder, and was close to death on a gravel bar when I saw it.  But the mere fact that the fish was there held promise, and a camera built into the fish ladder later caught a number of herring successfully swimming past the dam and into the lake above.

In other states, there have been similar efforts to rebuild the runs, and some have been effective.  

In Maine, dam removal has led to a 3,000,000-fish run in the Sebasticook River, a run strong enough to allow the riverfront town of Benton to hold an annual Alewife Festival, which brings revenue into the town; the town is also spending some money to restore river herring to a tributary of the big river, hoping that

“a million more spawning alewives in the Sebasticook River may enhance our income in future years.”

That’s a worthwhile hope.

At the federal level, some actions have also been taken to help out the herring.  

Although efforts to make river herring a “stock in the fishery” governed by the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council’s mackerel, squid and butterfish management plan failed a few years ago and, as a result, there is no federal fishery management plan covering the two species, the Mid-Atlantic Council did decide to impose river herring annual catch caps on the Atlantic mackerel fishery.

“The cap starts at 89 [metric tons] but increases to 155 [metric tons] if mackerel catches surpass 10,000 [metric tons] and river herring and catches [sic] up to that point have stayed below 89 [metric tons].  Catch of river herring and shad on fishing trips that land greater than 20,000 lb of mackerel count toward the cap.  If [the National Marine Fisheries Service] determines that 95 percent of the river herring and shad cap has been harvested, a 20,000-lb mackerel possession limit will become effective for the remainder of the fishing year.”

The New England Fishery Management Council has also taken measures to protect river herring from incidental harvest/bycatch in the Atlantic herring fishery.  Pursuant to rules initially adopted by NMFS,

“Catches of river herring and shad on fishing trips that land more than 6,000 lb of herring count toward the caps.  Caps are area and gear specific.  If NMFS determines that 95 percent of a river herring and shad cap has been harvested, a 2,000-lb herring possession limit for that area and gear will become effective for the remainder of the fishing year.”

Although far from a perfect solution to the incidental catch/bycatch problem, the caps represent a step forward.  

From the time that its cap was first imposed in 2014, through all of 2017, the Atlantic mackerel fishery has never even reached 50% its maximum catch.  Things haven’t gone quite as smoothly in the Atlantic herring fishery, as the Southern New England Bottom Trawl gear category did catch about 113% of its quota in 2015, but even with that overage, the Atlantic herring fishery did not exceed its overall catch cap in 2015 or in any other year through 2017.

Unfortunately, things seem to be changing for the worse this year; river herring appear to be suddenly vulnerable to the big mid-water trawls. 

On February 23, NMFS announced that the Atlantic mackerel fishery had already exceeded its catch cap and that, as result, possession of more than 20,000 pounds of mackerel would be prohibited, beginning on February 27, for the rest of the year.

That announcement was quickly followed by another on March 12.  This time, NMFS revealed that the Southern New England Mid-Water Trawl Category of the Atlantic herring fishery had exceeded its catch cap, and that effective March 14, boats in that category could not possess more than 2,000 pounds of Atlantic herring.

Those two announcements do not bode well for river herring.  Although the catch caps will hopefully prevent further destruction of the river herring stocks, the 110 metric tons of river herring caught in the mackerel fishery during the first two months of 2018 amount to almost twice the river herring caught in that fishery through all of the proceeding four years.  

And it’s a pretty good bet that the big mid-water trawlers will be trying to find ways around the current possession limits.  

It’s not clear why so many river herring have been incidentally killed so quickly this season.

Maybe they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Or maybe the mid-water trawlers, aware that they didn’t come close to landing their caps in past years, have become more aggressive, willing to sacrifice more river herring in order to land more of their Atlantic herring and mackerel quotas.

But given the low numbers of river herring that returned to their spawning streams last season, it’s pretty certain that this year’s large incidental catches of river herring aren’t due to an increase in their numbers.

So as I get ready to begin my river herring monitoring efforts for another season, I have to question whether the measures currently in place are enough to stabilize, much less rebuild, dwindling runs of alewives and bluebacks.

And I have to wonder whether the streams that I watch will 

run just a little silver once again.

Or if they’ll keep running on empty, as they already have for far too long.