they tell one stream from another? They enter innumerable rivers,
streams, inlets, some of them in close proximity. One theory has it
that they are able to find their home waters by their characteristic
odor, their special composition, to which they were conditioned when
young. Even so, how did they get there? How can fish way offshore in
waters of a consistent temperature, without any landmarks, tell which
direction will take them to their home street? It is quite likely that
they would be able to detect the outlet waters where they merged with
the sea, but a stream may not reach very far, perhaps a few hundred
yards or more at low tide, before being totally absorbed. All the way
along the coasts, rivers and streams pour in fresh water, mixed in the
estuaries so that it is brackish when it reaches the sea. The sea water
increases in salinity as it gets deeper over the continental shelf. An
alewife may detect very slight differences in salinity comparatively
far out, but we are still not much closer to realizing how it finds its
way.
What it amounts to is that no particular factors seem to be able
to explain this directional ability of theirs. Not the response to
changing currents in the spring sea, not the perception by fish of
varying pressures in salt water, or of differences in salinity,
nor their possible ability to use the sun as a reference point in
navigation ... none of these approaches have yet solved the great
mystery. Do they have some special sense, some perceptiveness, about
which we know nothing? Scientists have measured and probed their
reactions for a long time, but so far have not found any evidence of
a special sensory ability. Biologically, fish do have several unique
characteristics. For example, they have an “air bladder” by means of
which they are able to adjust themselves to changing densities in the
water. They also possess a “lateral line” organ, consisting of a tube
or canal under the skin filled with mucus and connected to the nervous
system. This sense, closely associated with hearing, enables them to
detect vibrations of a very low intensity in the water and to avoid
obstacles, such as an approaching bank or another fish. Aside from
that, fish can smell, they have sight, and they have a sense of touch
and taste.
These known senses are what scientists count on in investigating the
migratory behavior of fish. They test their responses to different
stimuli. On that basis, one of the most recent directions to be
explored centers around the environmental factors which the fish
are subjected to, such as currents, temperatures, the physical and
chemical nature of the waters through which they swim. These factors
are supposed to guide them successively on their migrations and to be
so consistent year after year that the responsive fish return to their
streams of origin because they never got off the track. Different
schools, or age groups, of alewives would go to separate streams,
because they responded differently, as Gerald B. Collins puts it in
his study of alewives at Bournedale, “to the existing patterns of
environmental stimuli.” Homing, from the environmentalists’ point of
view, is neither a matter of memory nor mystery.
I do not have enough knowledge behind me to discuss such a method or
approach, but it does seem to have the advantage of comprehensiveness,
of taking the whole journey in. It does not depend on any single factor
to explain migratory behavior, and it provides a good long track of
exploration, step by step.
Whether the migrant fish behave as mechanically as this suggests,
or whether the factors involved are separately either as consistent
as they are supposed to be, or amount in the aggregate to as much as
they should, remains to be seen. We are still in the realm of theory,
however rationally expressed, and do not know yet how the fish find
their destination.
Can a fish judge its course by the sun, or by the circulation of the
waters of which it is so much a part? Can we talk about a homing
instinct, or orienting ability, in connection with it? What are we
defining? I don’t think I beg the question by finding it pertinent that
civilized human beings have to some extent lost their ability to find
their way in the woods, or no longer rise and sleep with the sun, or
that they are not aware of the changing tides. Some old directional
knowledge may still be innate in us, though we seem to think we have no
need of it. Our puzzle, or lack of definition, may lie with ourselves
as much as the alewives. In any case, what we try to find out by fact
or abstraction is already known to the fish.
They are still ahead of us. So much of their motion seems to be a part
of the race as a whole, synonymous with its great water world, that it
is almost as if they found their way like the wind and tides, elemental
forces that we find it hard to evaluate. We try to pin down that which
expands immeasurably beyond us.
VII
Port of Entry
With a certain amount of half-determined knowledge behind me, I decided
early one morning to follow up the question of how far the brackish
waters of the Stony Brook outlet extended into Cape Cod Bay, and so
went down to Paine’s Creek. This is the place where the stream, which
has been winding through tidal marshes like a small river, ends in a
basin where several dories are moored, then takes a last turn and long
curve, cutting through low dunes anchored by beach grass that border
the sands. I saw a kingfisher rising up over the creek, a green crab
shifting along the shelving bank; and on the beach were the remains of
a black duck, sodden, bedraggled, the feathers loaded with wet sand,
the breastbone sticking up like the white prow of a helmet, flies
buzzing over it--the smell of salted carrion around it.
The sound of the waters along the creek is constant and musical,
following and followed up, broadly roaring, rushing, or slipping
lightly, as they rise, pushed back by the incoming tide, or run out
low and easy with the ebb. At low tide these creek waters spread
their channels and fingered rivulets some three hundred yards straight
out over the sands, to a point where they are joined by the waters of
Quivett Creek which has an inlet a few hundred yards upshore to the
west. Then the one channel finds its way past a fish weir until it is
lost in the salt waters coming in over a long bar in the distance. The
alewives also swim into the other creek; though not in the numbers that
run up Stony Brook, because of less access to spawning grounds beyond.
The tide was well out when I started to follow, or rather taste the
fresh water over the sands. The Brewster flats, as they are called,
were alive with light and constantly changing where they stretched
out on the earth’s curve. Minor investigation took place in maximum
horizons. I walked toward the weir, or fish trap, one of three in
the distance, long-poled stockades a quarter of a mile or so apart,
hung with nets like veils or the peaked coifs of nuns. A silver sun
was beginning to lift through sheets of low fog, and a cool wind blew
across the sands. It made my ears boom with that hollow sound of deep
marine that you hear in a shell. I saw a small flock of brant standing
off, their heads alert for danger, ready to thrust up and go when I
came. I approached lines of brown dunlins, red-backed sandpipers,
sanderlings, black-bellied plovers, which stood and scurried, peeped
and cried, flew forward into the wind for short stretches, and came
down again.
As the sun rose farther up, clouds began to be reflected in the lanes
between the ribbed sands, and there were thousands of gulls standing in
a silver, immeasurable distance, while those sharp, light arrows, the
terns, flew overhead. The flats with their brown deserts, their lakes,
and pools, and veins, were like the patterned floors, the reaches of
the great civilizations of man. The dawn fogs blew off. I was waking up
to an architecture of space.
Now from these tidal areas the plains of the sea rove out indefinitely.
You can get a look at the universal map without benefit of signposts,
and the coming on of fish represents great standards of inevitability.
“But look,” a scientist might say, “in this unlimited space of yours,
the mating animal only has a tiny area to travel in; a few miles at
sea, if in the case of the alewives, they do stay offshore, and perhaps
two or three miles inland. They are limited in space, and limited in
numbers accordingly.”
True, but we might add that it is this limitation, in alewives at
least, that makes increase possible. They are one of the most easily
managed of all marine species. Clear out the obstructions in their
way; restock a lake and river system, or pond and stream, and the fish
return, the population rises. Alewife management depends on their
almost relentless drive to go back where they came from. No life
insists on its locality more strongly. Home in their case is a definite
route, a round way, small if you like, but spinning in larger circles,
where birth leads back to its necessity.
So I walked the sea lands, following the alewives’ avenue of approach.
Well beyond the weir I began to get in too deep to qualify as an
investigator. I judged that the brackish water of the outlet went
at least five hundred yards out, and probably several hundred yards
more than that, before it flowed into the salt waters of the Bay and
then was lost in them. It seemed, during low tide at least, that the
alewives might detect the fresh water reasonably far out in the Bay,
disregarding the question of how they arrived at that point.
As I went back across the wind again, under the hovering, crying birds,
and saw where the waters of the two creeks came out, that strange fish
knowledge of where to go was still unbelievable. I imagined alewives
coming in here, or to a shore where there were even more creek inlets
fairly close together, and wondered whether the schools joined in
the Bay like concentric circles and then separated, each going to
the stream in which it grew up. I also wondered about that supposed
chemical sense, or sense of odor, that might explain the alewife’s
knowledge of its home stream. Would not the composition of the waters
of any one stream change greatly at various times of the year? It must
be very different in the hot summer, when the little alewives come
down to salt water, from the cool months of spring when the adults
came in. Would that not be just as important a factor as the stream’s
difference from another close by?
Two miles farther up along the shore is another inlet at the mouth
of Sesuit Creek. Many years ago the Sesuit and Quivett inlets were
interconnected at some point back in their tidal marshes; and before
the roads and banks were built that now divide them there was also
more access to several ponds in the vicinity, both large and small.
Since the glacial ponds of Cape Cod seem to fill up and dry out in
time, turning to wooded or grassy hollows, it is possible too that the
alewives had even more entryways, and went even farther inland, having
longer fresh-water routes to travel--water veins open and flowing
everywhere. In any event, the alewife population now starting up these
two inlets is very small compared to that of Stony Brook, which shows
that the fish are balanced in numbers according to the relative ease
or difficulty of getting inland to adequate spawning grounds. In part,
it also seems to be an added proof of the parent stream theory. The
fish know their way. For whatever reason, and whether or not they are
entirely consistent in coming back to the exact stream, it seems to us
that they have a remarkable sense of direction, although, for all we
know, it may not be any more remarkable than the accuracy of the tides
or the timing of the sun.
VIII
The Common Night
Did the alewives choose the night or late evening hours to come in by?
So I had been told. By daylight evidence, the fish population increased
at the Herring Run on the mornings following a nightly high tide. I
had also heard that there were more alewives running during the tides
of the full moon, in the farthest monthly reaches of ebb and flood;
but this was a correlation that would be hard for me to make without
more years to judge by. In the middle of May on the days just after the
first quarter of the moon, which came on the sixteenth, the fish seemed
to be running just about as hard as they did during the days preceding
the full moon in April, which had appeared on the twenty-fourth.
Judging accordingly, it seemed as though their migration had its own
ebb and flood during those months. All this was not much better than
impression plus hearsay, but there seemed to be some justice to the
night tide theory, so, to begin with, I went down to the shore late one
evening during an incoming tide to see if there might be any sign of
the alewives.
About eight o’clock, an hour before high tide, the tide was running
strongly in at Paine’s Creek. The channel in the marshes flooded over
its banks and marsh grasses were floating and stirring as the swaying
waters rose around them. It was near dark. I could see some seaweed
flinging by against the sandy bottom at the mouth of the creek, and a
big, ghostly green eel slithered up at the edge of the bank the waves
were licking, seemed to look up at me, looped back into the water, and
disappeared; but it was too dark to see much more than those black
clumps of seaweed racing by. I saw a group of gulls standing in shoal
waters beyond the beach, where waves were rolling in hard under a
steady northwest wind. The sun’s cauldron had dropped down, a raw,
glistening orange-red, into the sea and back of the curved horizon,
leaving its horizontal flush behind.
[Illustration]
I walked back under the lee of the sand banks bordering the curving
creek. The tide was pulsing and roaring, its waters loping in to the
creek which began to turn a harder, darker blue under the sky. Then I
began to hear the innumerable soft slaps of fish breaking the surface.
The alewives were making their entry from the sea.
And the gulls proclaimed their coming. Out in the Bay, they began to
gather by the hundreds, clambering up with a scrambled yelping and
hollering. The last smoky, red line of sunset was disappearing and
they hovered over it in a maddened, high, wide swarm like huge bees.
It grew darker, and a black-crowned night heron, or “quawk,” sometimes
“quok,” a name true to the sound it makes, flew by with rounded wings
against a star. The gulls began to disappear, streaming faintly like
ashes against the last fires on the sea, but still crying vastly and
collectively toward a world of distances. And in terrible simplicity,
the alewives were swimming toward the inland gauntlet they would have
to run, having a title, by their common, wild, and ancient advent, to
all great kindled things. Who will see more than that in his short
life, with its many meetings and separations?
I by an old and natural right felt a fierce water-deep wonder of the
spirit. The beyondness in me went back to its beginnings. I thought of
the nights on which children I have known were born, and of the voyages
of war, leave-takings at railroad stations and at ports of embarkation,
and of dreams in which I struggled toward new meetings and other lives.
The wind blew through the arches of the stars, and the surfaces of the
dipping earth, water, and sky in their lasting communion made me dizzy.
I felt a cold inevitable grandeur, below consciousness, a swim and go
in an uttermost wild world, past home or my life’s memory.
So by this evidence the alewives came in at night, and, as a further
discovery not to be denied, so had I. Perhaps it was the closest
I would ever get to the non-human fish in a darkness where all
the components of existence ran the same race. That real depth,
fish-oriented, nakedly omnipotent, fills men when they recognize it
with more awe than their limited worlds can encompass.
As I started back, about a quarter of an hour before the full tide,
headlights swept over where the road ended at the shore, and in a
minute or two a couple of fishermen lurched down the sand with high
rubber waders on, carrying their casting rods. They stood on the beach
in the dark, one of them coaching the other in baiting his hook. I came
up and spoke to them, hardly able to make out their faces. The older
one, he who did the coaching, told me that they had just got a pail of
herrin’ from the Brewster run to use as bait. They had hopes that there
would be some bass here, the famous “stripers” chasing the alewives in.
They brought their long rods sideways and back to sling the bait out
into the black and silver waves. The older man spoke low words against
the wind, and I strained to hear him. Suddenly he thought he felt what
must be alewives nosing his line and bumping against it on their way
by into the mouth of the inlet. Last year, he told me, he had seen
hundreds of them dead on the flats, and the gulls, he said, had slit
their sides open as if with knives to get the roe. The waves had begun
to slacken off when I left, and the fishermen were still casting, but
without much hope of a strike.
IX
The Hunt
For a little while I felt satisfied that I knew the alewives only
chose to come in on the night or late evening tides, until they proved
me wrong. I say _they_ proved me wrong because I give myself no
credit for more than moderately ignorant perseverance in following up a
hypothesis. The alewives did a good deal of proving and disproving for
me. They would probably show me up again.
At the beginning of the third week in May there had been a fresh run
of fish crowding into the Herring Run, if not as heavily as those that
came in a month before. After the migration starts there are very few
days in either April or May when some fish are not to be seen in the
brook waters. One man can only judge by eye plus the amount of barrels
being hauled out as to how many there are in any period, but there may
have been a climactical run during the week after the nineteenth of
May when the high tides came at night. On the twenty-first I had been
taking temperature readings, out of curiosity and to keep up with the
advancing season. It had been around 40 degrees Fahrenheit during the
night and rose to 47 at 7:30 A.M., 53 at 9:00 and 55 at 9:30
as the sun’s rays heated the land. Just offshore, down the beach from
Paine’s Creek, at around 9:30, high tide being at 9:57, the temperature
of the salt water, more consistent than the land, was 49, and the
reading I then took of the brackish water at the mouth of the creek was
51.
I noticed a small crew of alewives in the tea-dark channel. Had they
come in the night before? They were schooling back and forth, as though
getting accustomed to the waters in which they newly found themselves.
The tide began to turn. The waters going out at the creek mouth were
yellow-green. I walked along the beach, and the surface of the Bay was
long and smooth, a blue-green stretching and easing under a light wind
with purple patches showing above seaweed and shelving banks of peat.
I could hear the slow, gentle, labial sounds of the lightly ebbing
waters. There was a small school of unidentifiable minnows turning
and slipping-in-silver just offshore. A long frieze pattern of gull
tracks showed, where the sand was damp, crisscrossed here and there by
the little tracks of sandpipers and plovers. This cool, seaside world
seemed full of equipoise to me, with a searching air of freedom playing
over.
There had been several clumps of herring gulls standing in shoals in
the creek where it flowed out into the Bay. I noticed that some of them
had begun to fly up. Then I saw a great black-backed gull swoop at the
water farther out, and a number of herring gulls beyond it plummeting
down, then chasing each other over the surface. They were after fish,
but what kind? I went off for twenty minutes to get some field glasses,
and by the time I returned the gulls had increased by the hundreds. Big
clouds of them were circling and moving in from up the coast, higher
and higher like drifting paper, some of them way up in the blinding
blue sky, but coming closer, joining the feast.
I could see that the gulls were diving straight down the course of
the Paine’s Creek waters where they went out into the Bay, and that
the fish they flung up between them clearly had the general size and
shape of alewives. What was going on then was a great interception.
The fish in their deliberate way had found the mouth of the creek, and
made their instinctive move to go in, but as the water became shallower
during the ebb tide they were ripe prey for the birds and there was no
turning back.
The violent, reckless activity of the gulls went on all morning. In
the way they have of riding each other: “You’ve got it. Show you can
keep it!” they were picking up fish, dropping them, and running away
with them again, in a scrambling frenzy. There seemed to be almost more
excitement, more energy, spent in the chase than in the fruits of it,
though they gobbled what they could. I could hear an over-all sound of
struggle as their wings rushed and they yawked and screamed. This world
seemed pantingly, gruntingly, wildly busy.
The victims of this natural slaughter seemed to have moved on a little,
with their fatal determination, but as the tide and morning ebbed the
white, frantic crowd above them seemed to stay in the same general
area. It was not likely that many fish managed to reach the inlet. I
imagined them dashing from side to side or circling in panic, the crowd
knowing nothing but its own entity and safety. I talked to a man who
was watching the scene from the window of his car. He told me that
there had been a high bluff, washed away some years back, from which
you could actually see the fish in the water as they struggled to swim
in.
“We had a good stream went out there that wouldn’t a happened,” he
said, suggesting that if there were a deeper channel meeting the
Bay waters, most of the fish might be able to get up the creek in
comparative safety.
Along this stretch of rhythmic work of greed and death little groups
of gulls began to settle down on the water, glutted and loaded down.
Then long lines of them, looking like white shoals, rested on the water
upshore, digesting their meal. Low tide that afternoon came at 3:57. By
two o’clock when the sands began to show, well out toward the weirs,
the great tribal company of gulls were finished with the hunt. For a
mile along the flats they were standing into a stiff wind. In the
distance I could see a litter of dead fish along the bed of the creek
waters. When I walked out I saw them, silver, blue, and white, with
brassy tints from the sun, flung along, strewn on like debris through a
wide city square.
Even though there may be no waste in nature--with everything used,
fired, and consumed in the interactions of the living world--what an
enormous, careless expenditure! The bed of the outgoing waters was
paved with this alewife coinage for hundreds of yards. Each one I
picked up, and there were thousands, had its body scraped and clawed,
or its head torn, its eyes gouged out. For every one gobbled during the
chase there must have been many more left uneaten. Remembering what
the night fishermen had said, it seemed like an indiscriminate feast,
and it was not clear to me that the gulls were primarily after roe.
But since fish eggs are a delicacy to other animals, gulls may find a
special enjoyment in them too.