business of making them, as a good or even adequate fishway. There is
always an imbalance between the purposes they serve and the results.
All the same, fishways are the best we can do to remedy a situation
that blocked great populations of fish from entry to their natural
routes. They are built to try and bring back what man has taken away;
though it should be said that they are as much in man’s interest as the
alewife’s. Commerce is the main benefactor of their success.
Fishways help open up free passage to the fish, and so increase their
numbers. In a good fishway alewives can be counted or sampled. They can
be taken out and transferred to other areas that are to be stocked with
them. In other words, the removal of obstacles and the construction of
a fish ladder means, in most cases, that a run can either be introduced
or improved, and, above all, kept under control.
The trouble is that they cannot be built so as to result in
free-and-easy passage for the fish at all times. In fact, if they are
not properly placed, they can even be a hindrance. A fishway requires
engineering and research in its preparation. They vary greatly, of
course, according to local conditions. A fish ladder’s length depends
on the distance of the slope down which a flow is directed, or the
kind of banks, rocks, or stream formation through which it is built.
I imagine there are no ideal specifications. For alewives, fishway
construction depends in general on the size and habits of the fish and
the nature of the waters in which they travel. The great fish ladders
built for salmon at the Bonneville Dam, on the Columbia River, have
pools in them that are forty feet wide, sixteen feet long, and six feet
deep, each being a foot above the other. One foot is no problem to the
salmon, which have been known to leap as high as ten.
At Stony Brook the pools on the down, or north, side of the road are
ten in number and various in size, extending some distance downstream.
The first six are smaller and deeper than the others, being so designed
as to round a bend in the stream. Their depth, subtracting several
inches of sand that keeps washing down from the road, is about two feet.
[Illustration]
On the upper side, above the seining pool, leading from one of the pond
outlets, is a straight ladder, some twenty feet long. Its pools are
four and a half feet square and twenty-eight inches deep, each being
about five inches above the other, thus graduating to fit the slope.
Whatever their design, fishways are all built so as to assure the
alewives quick transit from one pool to another. In most cases they
seem to work satisfactorily, but unless they are well managed they
can effect full use of the stream by the migrant fish. Alewives have
their own crowd pressure and motion, their way of moving on, and any
reduction in their numbers at any one time or counterpressure, keeping
them back, may result in a decline because less will get to the ponds
to spawn.
Fishways are more rigid than a natural stream bed, though sometimes
less hazardous. Water levels change; the flow varies both in angle and
pressure; and managers of a good fishway must be constantly on the
alert for new conditions. A marked increase or decrease in the volume
of water, especially as it is reflected at the head of a fish ladder,
which usually has a gate or wooden dam of some kind, may create a
barrier instead of an aid. Unless the adjustment in the dam is just
right the head of water coming down may be almost impossible for a fish
to surmount.
Alewives are not like the muscular west coast salmon with their
spectacular leaps, as if shot by a giant sling. An alewife does not
leap over a pool and up a falls so much as swim through it rapidly,
being a much smaller fish and in smaller streams. If a head of water
coming over a dam or sluice is at the wrong pitch, the fish will not be
able to climb it. In designing a fishway an engineer has to take into
account the relationship between the water head and the angle of the
flow below it, which has to be translated into how far an alewife can
swim at what speed.
A fish is supported by water--an advantage over cumbersome human beings
in their own surrounding medium, the air--its specific gravity being
close to that of its own body. The fish is so made as to swim through
the water with as little resistance as possible. It also gets energy
from the water, orienting itself by the current, or the various changes
of pressure in the flow, the way a bird uses currents in the air. In
so far as a bird is streamlined too, and finds in air pressure and
weight the means to fly up and forward, their actions have something
in common. A bird, like an alewife, may lose its momentum if the angle
of climb gets too steep. Swimming and flying take place in fluid
surroundings.
The difficulty in making an artificial aid like a fishway comes from
the problem, in part, of understanding a fish’s behavior; of meeting
its needs; arranging its passage; trying, if not to control nature, at
least to be a substitute for it. The positive results are plain to see,
but there is something almost as elusive about it as trying to explain
a fish in human language.
At one point along the Herring River in Harwich is a concrete fish
ladder, twenty-five feet long and six feet wide. The pond above was
high, after this same rainy spring, and the waters were roaring and
frothing down. The alewives migrating upstream were being held back.
Only a few I noticed were getting through. The flow had tremendous,
deep force, so that the resting pools were not serving their function,
and most of the fish that did manage by extraordinary effort to reach
the head of water at the top were not able to pass it.
The racing torrent dropped to a wide, shallow basin which ended in the
river winding on within its banks. A continuous long line of fish kept
swimming through to the bottom of the ladder, where they would vainly
skip and twist and strain through the water’s force. Then they swung
back in a semicircular arc across the basin and re-formed at its edge.
There was a wide shiver on the water. They wheeled as in a dance, or
like the planets in pursuit of light, where they ran up again into
the flood. It happened time after time, in this futile but concurrent
motion, a beauty to watch--its tension, effort, and relief were exactly
co-ordinated with the water. These fish _were_ the water. But I
saw in them the mechanics of breath ... contraction and expansion; and
systole, diastole, balance and counterbalance, within the dynamics
of all nature. They showed the push of life against a current, its
running back and leaping forward, its fulfillment and defeat. It was
the alewife circle again, as we have ours, in a motion of entirety; but
almost impossible to translate.
“You never enjoy the world aright,” wrote Thomas Traherne, “till the
sea itself floweth in your veins.” In the knowing and encompassing
sense of his word _enjoy_, we will never know alewives until the
motion, lift, light, weight, and changing beauty of the water is in
some degree a part of us. In any case, we will never build the perfect
fishway.
XIII
Persistence
When the little wire gate on the upper side of the seining pool was
left open during the weekends the fish could pursue their destiny past
the concessionaires. One weekday night during the last run in May some
prankster took the gate out and caused much excitement in the alewives
committee.
“Gawd! Gawd! ... running all night long. Here’s the town selling this
young feller the fish, and he doesn’t get any. We’ll have to put a
padlock on it ...” etc. etc.
I may have had such a delinquent impulse myself at one time, but I kept
it way down.
There are two streams falling into the seining pool. Both start as pond
outlets some fifty yards above, one with the fish ladder going down
from it, and the other falling into a pool that ends above the old
mill, the water of which can be used to run the water wheel on occasion
by being diverted to a wooden sluiceway, instead of taking its natural
course down over rocks into the seining pool. This second stream cannot
be traveled by fish going up to spawn although they can go down it on
their return journey.
One weekend I watched the fish at the top of the ladder as they jumped
over the board dam, to meet at last the quiet stretch of pond water
above it. The waters were growing green with algae as the season
developed, and were penetrated by deep shadows, blue shafts from the
sun, yellow and pink reflections from the spring leaves on the bank.
Some were unable to make it and slipped back into the rushing, narrow
flow in the ladder, and then tried again. Jumping the dam, they would
give a final, vibrant, struggling push into the smooth, heavy weight
of water over the rim and then shoot off, wriggling away, easing into
a new peace. The impetus of this leap was enough to send some of them
skittering along the flat surface on their sides, like skimmed stones.
Others going into the pond would start back again toward the head of
the ladder, and then return and wait a while as if they wanted company.
As some new arrivals came they would swim a kind of half circle in
relation to them, and then all would go on, having established a
communication; but the general movement was a bolt into deeper water
and then a rejoining into groups as they went on. After that, where do
they go?
As far as fish migration in general is concerned the spawning route
beyond Stony Brook is not very great. Roughly, the distance from the
outlet through Lower Mill Pond and Upper Mill Pond to the end of
Walker’s Pond is about two and a quarter miles. Upper Mill is the
largest of these, being about one and a half miles long and a quarter
mile wide. Where the fish spawn in this area is not too easy to find
out at first. Their preference as to spawning grounds seems to lie
along stony, pebbly shores, or shallow beaches. Many of them, before
spawning, will travel to the farthest reaches of any given water route.
Others, depending perhaps on how far the season is advanced and on
their bodily development, will either go the entire distance and then
return part way, or spawn before they get there.
It may be that the earliest, coming in during the month of March, or
early April, when the pond waters are still cold, will go farther
than the later arrivals. Their eggs develop more rapidly as the
temperature of the water advances, from around the late forties say,
at the beginning of the season, to a maximum of 72 or 74 degrees. When
the spawn is not ready they may keep going, schooling, roaming in the
ponds for days. But there are no hard-and-fast rules about which of the
alewife schools goes where, and any generalizations would have to be
varied to suit conditions in other localities where they are found. At
one extreme they may travel for six or eight miles up a tidal river,
or at another they may come into a pond connected with salt water by a
waterway or cut only a few feet long.
Many of them swim up headwaters as far as they can go, through the last
ditch to its stagnant end. I have heard of their going through marshy
land in the direction of Pine Pond, a small pond beyond Walker’s,
once connected with it I believe. There were cranberry bogs in this
land, bordered by wire fences. The alewives would slip sideways under
the wire so as to get to the other side. This is characteristic of
them. When in very shallow water, inches deep, hardly enough for their
bodies, they will skitter on, almost flat on their sides at times,
going as far as they can until the water gets deeper.
Occasionally they have been known, on their way upstream, to butt their
heads against a leaky dam where the flow of the water continued to come
rather than go up a fishway to which it had been rerouted. (In one case
an old log dam obstructing a stream had enough leaky cracks in it so
that fish slithered through them.) Such behavior may not make sense
from our point of view, but it is part of a life necessity to them.
Returning alewives are not concerned that we bypass a stream or send it
off its course. They continue to follow the direction and limits of the
flow that is in them, even as it might have been before we came.
Behind their persistence, if one term can encompass enough, is
the “homing instinct.” This is not only a matter of reacting to
environmental waters, but insisting on that area where they were
spawned, and where they grew, in the first few weeks or months before
they migrated to salt water. In trying to rehabilitate the alewife
population, men in fishery management are greatly helped by this
powerful drive to return. Sometimes they are hindered by it.
There have been some areas in which the construction of dams across a
stream or river has almost destroyed an old run, although there were a
few fish left over, making a yearly, token migration. They continued to
come in and spawn below the last, impassable obstruction in their way;
but when the dams were abandoned and removed and new fishways built so
that they could travel upstream to the headwaters, the alewives stayed
where they were. They did not migrate beyond their original limit, and
the population failed to increase. It was as if there were an invisible
wall in the water where the last, accustomed barrier had stood. Not
until the headwaters above were newly stocked with spawning fish was
there any chance of the run being fully used.
This built-in reaction to home waters might go back for thousands
of years in an unobstructed stream, or, in a new run, only three or
four. It has its limits, and its wisdom. What can go farther back, or
forward, than its own birth?
When I started watching the alewives I heard of one phenomenon that
seemed to me to surpass all analysis. It tempted me to look for magic.
The run that comes up from Nantucket Sound on the south side of the
Cape by way of the Herring River goes through a pond called Hinckley’s,
then through a stream ending in a fairly large body of water called
Long Pond. The migrating alewives are also able to go into another pond
out of Hinckley’s--north of it, and east of Long Pond--called Seymour
Pond, but the majority seem to spawn in Long Pond, from which there is
only one clear exit. The fish must go back to Hinckley’s, the way they
came. But this outlet was not always the same. Early in the nineteenth
century the natural outlet was a brook going into Seymour Pond, but it
was blocked and banked off by the construction of some cranberry bogs,
and the present outlet was dug some five hundred yards away. Now the
extraordinary thing is that on their return, the alewives still school
in the banked-up area of the old outlet. I went over there and could
find nothing to distinguish it from the rest of the sandy, water-lapped
shore, except that there was a slightly boggy area on the other side of
the road where the brook used to run, and a trace of its route through
the underbrush.
Was there any reason at all why these fish should be able to detect
an old route cut off a hundred years ago? The direction of its flow
no longer existed as currents in the water. Yet the “damfool herrin’”
were certainly behaving according to report. I could see them, a school
of several hundred, running freely along the shore, slipping lightly
over the sand through the unruffled pond waters. When they reached the
area of the old outlet they began an almost puzzled circling, which
continued for some time before they swung back again. There should have
been a common-sense reason for it, but I was tempted to ask, “What is
verifiable truth?” and not stay for an answer.
This story does not end in mysticism. It was suggested to me that there
was a certain amount of seepage at the outlet, probably going under
the bank and road, which the alewives felt and to which they reacted.
I can only say that all has not been told about their sensitivity and
perceptiveness ... transmitted from generation to generation through
thousands of years. I was quite sure at least that they knew more about
Long Pond than I.
Even if all the long-range problems about their movements cannot be
fathomed, there are enough local ones to keep a searcher busy. Given
enough persistence of one’s own, they may all be solved; helped of
course by the consistent fish. As the weeks went by I learned about
most of the local areas where they spawned. I had noticed a school
running offshore in the Upper Mill Pond, although I had not seen them
in the act of spawning. But there was one place where I had seen them
without knowing why. A few miles west of Stony Brook the fish come into
the tidal inlet known as Quivett Creek, where they appear to reach a
dead-end stretch of marsh ditched for mosquito control. I had tramped
around in this boggy region, seen a few alewives there, and come to
the quick conclusion that this was where they spawned. No one of whom
I inquired in the vicinity could tell me otherwise. I did not know
whether it was logical or not. They were not inclined, apparently, to
spawn in the full ebb and flood of the tides, but looked instead for
quiet waters. On the other hand, I had a pamphlet from the Fisheries
Research Board of Canada which said, about alewives: “... in the
Miramichi and other river systems extensive spawning takes place in the
swift waters of the main tributaries.” This was not swift water but it
drained and flooded daily. However, the fish did not seem to stay long
in the ditches, for whatever reason. It was hard to believe that they
would return to the Bay so quickly, when they had come to spawn.
Being puzzled about it, I went back some days later. I walked again
through the marsh at low tide when the ground was firmer, and finally I
saw where the main flow narrowed into one of the ditches, then ran into
a very small, almost imperceptible culvert that went under the highway,
Route 6 A. Sure enough, on the other side of the road, in a ditched
area tangled with briars, I could see many fish, slowly crowding
on--but this was not the end of it either.
Beyond was an impenetrable tangle of woods and thickets and an old
abandoned house, reproachfully dying, with large empty eyes where the
windows were, tall, unpainted, with dark-brown clapboards, and broken
inside. You could reach this house from a side road off the highway.
To one side of it was a small pond, which I had caught a glimpse of
before, covered with water lilies in the summertime. I went in over a
long high bank, part of an old road, that ran back of the house between
the tangled ditches and the pond. There seemed to be no access from one
side to the other; but toward the middle, on the side of the bank where
the ditches ended, I saw a few alewives circling in a pool of still
water. Then I heard a light splashing on the other side. I walked over
through the thickets and saw a number of fish wiggling and thrashing up
and over a little neck of water that ran out of the pond.
On one side this action, and on the other an apparently aimless moving
through rocks and sodden branches in the water. Undoubtedly there was
an old, hidden culvert that ran under the bank, but the underground
passage must have been partly clogged and certainly very small. So
the alewives that came into Quivett Creek spawned in that pond. Most
of them had probably been hatched there. The flow from the sea had a
logical termination. What else, the fish might ask me, had I expected?
XIV
Spawning: the Dance
During the third week in May, when the run seemed about over I had
still not seen them spawning, although I had heard a description of it
from my local authority, Mr. Alexander.
“A kind of swish dance is what they do,” said he, giving a hula-hula
motion with his hands.
Harry also described them as sidling up at the shallow edges of the
ponds, rocking as you would rock a baby; and then shooting out the
spawn, their fins lifting up with the effort. The pond suckers, as he
related it, would swim up to grab the eggs almost as soon as they came
out of their bellies.
What about that school I had seen running along the shore of the Upper
Mill Pond?
“Well, they were kind of getting acquainted, you know. Just cuddling
together!”
This was on May 25, as I have it in my notes, and when I started out
from the Herring Run to walk up to the ponds above it, Salvadore was
still there with his truck, barrels, and net; but he said he was going
to quit soon and deal in some redfish (another name for rosefish,
or ocean perch). The redfish made tougher, better bait for lobsters
anyway. While he had been in Brewster he had netted forty barrels a day
on the average, sometimes as many as eighty, but he told me that he
had not yet reached the four-hundred mark. One barrel, weighing some
two hundred pounds, might contain around three hundred fish or more,
so that about 120,000 alewives might be pulled out of Stony Brook in a
season, though I imagine this is a very low estimate. I have heard it
said that there are a potential two thousand barrels in the Brewster
run during the full season, taking all fish. In an abundant year
there might be close to six or seven hundred thousand adult alewives
migrating up the brook. Even so, subtracting the mortality, the
necessary minimum of fish allowed through the gate during the week have
a very heavy job to do to assure the return of hundreds of thousands of
their race in three and four years’ time.
Because of some kind of alewife caution or deliberation, not enough of
them were going into the seining pool to make a good haul. They were
delaying on the down side of the road. Salvadore waded in with his
rubber boots on to drive them under and through the bridge, but they
hardly budged, so he crouched down with little more than three feet
of height for body room, and swashed in after them. They skittered
before him, landing with a simultaneous series of quick dashes into the
pool.
It was a warm day. There was a new lassitude in the air, and the sweet
smell of lilacs. The gulls were gone that had flocked in quarreling
and screaming when the run was heaviest, hovering and rising over the
waters and their hordes of fish, bold enough sometimes to perch on the
bridge over the run, looking very large, with their pale-yellow eyes
glaring as naked as stone.
Once I saw a herring gull display its fantastic eating capacity by
dropping down into the fish ladder, grabbing an alewife, and swallowing
it whole. Down went the fat, foot-long fish in a few gulps, headfirst
so that neither scales nor sawbelly would stop the progress. Then the
loaded gull flew very heavily away as I came up, the alewife’s tail
having barely disappeared.
Now, in place of gulls, there were a few dove-gray, black and white
quawks perched on the outer branches of overhanging trees like heavy
sculptured ornaments, or standing in the water with their spear-head
bills ready poised for a frog or small fish. I have heard it said,
incidentally, that these night herons keep the gulls away. I have never
witnessed any aggressive action between the two races. On the whole
they seem to respect each other’s territory and to keep their distance
from each other; but I have seen quawks and gulls together waiting for
little alewives on the flats beyond Paine’s Creek.
In the brook there were still some fish ascending, but many more were
going back. It is a little hard to tell the difference at first, since
both face up against the current, but the returning alewives gradually
drop back, and many of them have the characteristic white marks on them
of fresh-water fungus infection. The strain of spawning and using up
their store of fat makes them thin, slow, and weary. They have lost a
good deal of their vigor, though not to the extent of preventing the
return journey.
In spite of this “spring fever” day it was not that the greatness of
events was over ... only the first great toppling of a wave, only the
first violent forwardness with its illimitable sounds and changes.
There was a steadier greenness on the trees, and blossoms on the
high lilacs. The run waters went on with a constant wail and wah, if
without the turbulence of a few weeks earlier. I left the Herring Run
and walked up into the warm pine woods to try and find the culminative
point of the migration.