The University of MaineDigitalCommons@UMaine

Maine Sea Grant Publications Maine Sea Grant

5-2008

Alewives: Feast of the SeasonCatherine V. SchmittMaine Sea Grant, catherine.schmitt@umit.maine.edu

Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/seagrant_pub

Part of the Natural Resources and Conservation Commons, and the Sustainability Commons

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UMaine. It has been accepted for inclusion in Maine Sea GrantPublications by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UMaine. For more information, please contactum.library.technical.services@maine.edu.

Repository CitationSchmitt, Catherine V., "Alewives: Feast of the Season" (2008). Maine Sea Grant Publications. 18.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/seagrant_pub/18

Each spring, alewives move upriver from saltwater to fresh, an annual passage to the

spawning grounds. Here, they work their wayto a fish ladder around a dam.

78

F E A S T O F T H E S E A S O NAlewives

HE TIME IS MAY, before the greening that will soon wash overthe spring landscape. A pale, fuzzy haze appears in the woods through-out coastal Maine, as white flowers emerge from the slender, leaflessbranches of certain small trees. These are the flowers of the shadbush,native to the Atlantic coast, so named because it flowers around the

same time that millions of shad are leaving the open sea and making their wayinto coastal rivers and streams.

In Maine, where shad run a bit later than in more southern regions, the flow-ers are more closely timed with the movement of such other river herring as thealewife (Alosa pseudoharengus) and the blueback herring (Alosa aestivalis).Alewives and blueback herring—also known as sawbellies, gaspereau, and gray-backs—spend most of their lives in the Atlantic Ocean, but they return to freshwater as adults to spawn in the same lakes andponds where they were born.

You can watch the alewives run upriver inDamariscotta Mills, at a historic fish ladderrestored by local residents in 1998. Climb thepath that zig-zags alongside the steep fishwayfor a close view of the fish as they crowd intothe flumes and pools. Watch the fish as theypower their way uphill, pausing to restbetween surges. Side by side, they faceupstream, driven forward by ancestral urgespassed from one generation to the next.Focused solely on reproduction, they havestopped eating. Occasionally an impatientfish writhes in anticipation of home, a tailflicks the surface in a splash of silver.

In the spring, incoastal rivers andstreams, the alewivesrun. It’s a sight to seewhen they do.

BY CATHERINE SCHMITT

T

www.maineboats.com | MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS 79

Using a dip net to harvest migrating alewives.Dennys Stream, Dennysville, circa 1930.

Alosa pseudoharengus

Joe

Tom

mel

eri

Imm

edia

te le

ft: ©

2008

Hea

ther

Per

ry. F

ar ri

ght:

Mai

ne H

isto

rical

Soc

iety

.

When they finally surmount the topof the fishway, the alewives will spawnin quiet coves of Damariscotta Lake,one of roughly 90 ponds in Maineaccessible to sea-run alewives. Someof the adults will die from exhaus-tion, others will return downstreamto the sea shortly after spawning.The newly hatched fish will spendthe summer in the lake before fol-lowing their parents to the ocean.

You can tell where the fish arerunning by watching the sky forhovering osprey, eagles, andgulls. Fish tend to pile up wheretheir route is blocked orslowed by dams or naturalfalls, attracting human andanimal predators. Shouldyou find yourself near

Winslow on a late spring day,follow the gulls down to the SebasticookRiver below the Fort Halifax dam. As thenoises of the falls and cars zooming by onthe road above fill your ears, you mightsee lobstermen gathering bait; they’ll bescurrying around on the ledges below the Ca

ther

ine

Schm

itt

80 MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS | April / May 2008 | Issue 99

Jake Sullivan waits for the alewife migration to begin on the Orland River.

www.maineboats.com | MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS 81

spillway, scooping alewives into plasticcrates as a nearby fisherman reels in a bigstriped bass.

“The feast of the season is alewives,”wrote Robert Peter Tristram Coffin ofthe fish runs on the Sebasticook River inthe nineteenth century, when one mil-lion herring would have swum up theriver, “for the fattest of the herring havereturned, and the land near all thebrooks is frosted with their scales.”

The river herring fishery is one of theoldest documented fisheries in NorthAmerica. Before the Europeans arrived,Native Americans wove sticks in intricatedesigns to trap migrating fish at themouths of rivers. Later, the spring fishruns were busy days and nights for earlycolonists in Maine, who dried, pickled,salted, and smoked millions of the bonyfish. Alewives and other river herringrepresented food after a winter’s scarci-ty, a sign that the warm season’s bountyhad begun.

Commercial harvests of river herringhave decreased over the last century allalong the Atlantic coast. Steep declines

in numbers in the past few years haveforced Massachusetts, Rhode Island, andConnecticut to place moratoriums onharvesting alewives and blueback her-ring. In 2006, the National Marine Fish-eries Service placed alewives on its list ofspecies of special concern. Commerciallandings in Maine have decreased in the

last 50 years by more than three millionpounds, although there has been a slightincrease in the last decade.

In many areas, the reasons for thedeclines in fish populations are stillunknown. In Maine, fisheries scientistslink local declines to a loss of habitat

access, either because of dams and otherbarriers, or because, according to GailWippelhauser, a fisheries biologist withthe Maine Department of MarineResources, stocking efforts have beenhalted.

Where the fish do have habitataccess, they are coming back in force.

The fish runs are strong enough in somerivers that alewife harvesting took placein 25 Maine municipalities in 2007,including the town of Orland.

Jake Sullivan tends the herring weirin the Orland River, a short tributary ofthe Penobscot River.

Watch the fish as they power their wayuphill, pausing to rest between surges.

Side by side, they face upstream, drivenforward by ancestral urges carried from

one generation to the next.

82 MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS | April / May 2008 | Issue 99

“Got a few so far,” Sullivan told me on thetelephone one night last May. Sullivan is quiet,a man who thinks before he speaks and choos-es his words carefully. This was only his secondyear tending the weir.

The next day I found Sullivan at the weir.An osprey sat in a tree, several cormorantsskulked about the rocks, a bald eagle driftedin and out of view, the shiny curved head of aharbor seal bobbed in the distance. As wewatched for the telltale ripple on the surfaceof the river that signifies the fish are running,men stopped by to visit with Sullivan and checkon the fish. They clutched cups of hot coffeeand talked in modest Downeast accents; mostof them, like Sullivan and me, were new to thisgame.

The alewives may have been nearby thatday, but they weren’t running. As much as Iwanted to hold a silvery alewife in my handsand feel the sharp serrations on its belly andsee the sun reflecting off the grayish-greenish-blue of its back, no fish funneled into the mazeof sticks that made up the weir. Sullivan and hisbuddies would have to wait for another day toshovel trapped fish into barrels. What were thealewives waiting for? Some cue, some subtle

The herring weir in the Orland River.

Cath

erin

e Sc

hmitt

www.maineboats.com | MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS 83

change in temperature or flow thatwould spur the school upstream.

Alewives will migrate great distancesto reach their inland spawning areas, asfar as 130 miles in the case of the Penob-scot River, although they will also spawncloser to the coast, in freshwater covesbehind barrier beaches. The run beginswhen the water temperature reaches 40to 50° F, which in Maine occurs any timefrom late April to the middle of May.Blueback herring and shad arrive abouta month later, and by mid-June the her-ring run is over.

Herring provide food for a vast vari-ety of animals and other fish, whetherthey are in the ocean during the fall andwinter, or in inland waters during thespring and summer. The list of preda-tors includes striped bass, bluefish,weakfish, tuna, cod, haddock, halibut,American eel, rainbow trout, browntrout, landlocked salmon, smallmouthbass, largemouth bass, pickerel, pike,white and yellow perch, seabirds, baldeagles, ospreys, great blue herons, gulls,terns, cormorants, seals, whales, otter,

mink, fox, raccoon, skunk, weasel, fish-er, and turtles.

Restoring populations of alewivesand other herring may bolster otherstruggling species. For example, whenlarge numbers of migrating alewives arein rivers at the same time that youngAtlantic salmon are moving downstream

in spring, alewives are more likely to beeaten. As a result of this “prey buffering,”more of the salmon survive their jour-ney. Some fisheries scientists think thatriver herring may be a key component inrestoring Maine’s groundfish stocks.According to Ted Ames of the PenobscotEast Resource Center in Stonington, thedisappearance of river herring may have

disrupted the traditional movement pat-terns and arrival times of inshore spawn-ing populations of Atlantic cod, becausecod are a major herring predator.

Theo Willis and Karen Wilson,researchers at the University of SouthernMaine, with funding from the NortheastConsortium and Maine Sea Grant, have

been trying to look for these links inplaces where river herring are still abun-dant, such as the Damariscotta River.

“We worked in the Damariscottaestuary this spring, summer, and fall,”said Willis. “As far as we could tell, therewere no fish around big enough to eat anadult alewife in the spring. The fall wasa different story. From the mouth of the

What do the alewives wait for? Some cue, some subtle change in temperature or flow that would

spur the school upstream.

84 MAINE BOATS, HOMES & HARBORS | April / May 2008 | Issue 99

Damariscotta River out to the WhiteIslands we caught cod, pollock, mack-erel, and a few other species stuffed fullof baby alewives.”

Because of the potentially importantrole of alewives in the ecology of coastalwatersheds, much effort has been direct-ed toward restoring river herring popu-lations. River herring will return to acoastal stream when barriers areremoved and habitat improved, evenafter having been absent for many years.

Alewives readily use most types offishways. Gail Wippelhauser of theDepartment of Marine Resources saidthat state-of-the-art fish lifts have beenbuilt in many rivers to allow fish topass upstream over dams. At biggerdams on the larger rivers, such as theKennebec, Androscoggin, and Saco,fish are collected and trucked to upriv-er spawning areas. Downstream pas-sages or controlled water releases athydropower dams allow for the safedownstream movement of adult andjuvenile fish. Since the early 1970s,over $12 million has been spent on fish

passages to restore runs of alewivesand other sea-run fish in Maine. Wip-pelhauser said that alewife runs in theKennebec and Sebasticook Rivers havebeen steadily high since Edwards Damwas removed in 1999. The Penobscot

River Restoration Trust, a coalition ofthe Penobscot Indian Nation, conser-vation organizations, state and federalagencies, and the PPL hydropower cor-poration, is proposing to remove twomajor dams on the Penobscot River toprovide access to hundreds of miles ofriver herring habitat.

The trust hopes that as fish return to

the tributaries and ponds they once knew,the herring population will increase,which means that existing runs, such as theone in the Orland River, will improve aswell. The more there streams fat with her-ring there are, the more birds, mammals,

and other fish will benefit. By encouragingthe growth of the herring population, wewill encourage the strengthening of ourcoastal food web.

Catherine Schmitt is a science writer at Maine

Sea Grant. Her last article for MBH&H was

“Maine Oyster Cult,” which appeared in the

March 2008 issue.

Restoring populations of alewives andother herring may bolster other struggling

species. Some fisheries scientists thinkthat river herring may be a key component

in restoring Maine’s groundfish stocks.