Upper Mill Pond when I reached it, and little waves scudded ahead. I
walked on the north side where sandy banks descended to the shore,
shaded by pitch pines and covered with viburnum bushes and bearberry,
a pink-blossomed, shiny-leaved ground cover locally known as “hog
cranberry.” There were stretches of amber sand, small stones, or
gravel, along the pond’s edge. A fat sucker jumped for a fly and
crashed heavily back into the water.
All at once I heard a light thrashing and noticed a large water
snake under a blueberry bush. It had dropped a small salamander that
was twisting over and over on the ground, its damp body collecting
bits and shreds of dry leaves. As I came up, the snake hung over a
low-lying branch and watched me, its mouth slightly open with a little
toothed white and pink jawline showing. I picked up the salamander and
dropped it into the pond, where it hesitated for a few seconds and
then wiggled away into a patch of green ooze and deeper water. With a
stick, I tossed the snake twenty feet away, thus establishing myself as
universal arbitrator.
As I walked and watched along the shore I saw one group of alewives,
and then another, running by, looking light-colored and bright in the
sunny water. Sometimes these groups seemed to be made up of one female
escorted by several males, but the closer they came to shore the more
intermingled they were, and it was not clear to me that this was a
definite pattern. When she is running upstream, the female’s eggs
are unripe, but ripen soon after arrival in the ponds, provided the
water temperature is high enough--between 55 and 60 degrees may be the
average spawning temperature during the big April and early May runs.
As to the act of spawning, the female, depending on her size, deposits
anywhere between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand eggs (each some
0.05 inches in diameter) in shallow places; and because they are
sticky they adhere to gravel, sticks, stones, or whatever they settle
on. The males, who have been following the females closely, immediately
cover the eggs with milt, thrashing and scattering it with their tails.
The eggs hatch out in some six days’ time when the water is at 60
degrees, and in three days or less at 72.
When I first watched them spawn I saw a group of alewives run, circle,
and weave offshore, sometimes slowing up at deeper holes on the bottom,
or behind rock-protected water, and then come in close, with one quick
impulse. They raced in together to the gravelly, shallow edge, through
water not much more than ankle deep, with a sinewy, rippling motion.
Then in the shadows under an overhanging shrub there was a flipping,
whirling, and thrashing, a breaking of the surface. The female slapped
up against the side of a rock with a rising, shuddering motion of the
body as though it were shaking everything out of it, while the others
simultaneously writhed, coiled, thrashed tails, and shimmered through.
Then it seemed to me that there were a few seconds in which they slowly
reassembled their senses to go elsewhere. The word “deposit” was hardly
active enough.
A fat pond sucker was hanging around the center of activity, following
the alewives slowly like a small sunken log. It was obvious that eggs,
to this crude, crass, lazy taster of a fish, were the ultimate delicacy.
There were other occasions when the alewives, in greater numbers,
swam next to the shore, spawning in what might have been concentric
groups for several hundred yards. Some at the edge would be coiling
and thrashing while others swam on or circled back. The fish that were
farther out in the pond ran nervously, with eager movements, making
quick turns as if reconnoitering, or practicing for a culminating
turn. They collected suddenly when spawning, with quick, spontaneous
decision. I noticed that the males while running in would often
shoulder or press the females on. The characteristic thrashing whirl
they make is sudden and amazing, almost like a pinwheel in a short
burst.
Their attendants, the pond suckers, would loll in the slow rock of the
pond waters. They are large, soft-looking fish, with round, pink fins,
and white, fleshy lower lips with which they go nibbling and nuzzling
with snail-like speed over the bottom. The alewives by contrast are
small, gray, and quick. If alewife eggs are deposited between rocks the
suckers go down in after them, and, if the water is shallow enough,
present the odd picture of a large topheavy body sticking down with its
tail above the surface.
It is not I think, incongruous to apply the word love to a cold-blooded
fish. In this spawning act there is an imperative rhythm, with grace in
its preparation and power in its fulfillment.
Sometimes the war cry of gulls, in small flocks settling on the shore
waters or rising up, told me where the alewives were, but most of the
time I found them in accustomed places like that stretch of shore on
the Upper Mill Pond. Sometimes I could hear them splashing before I saw
them. They seemed to be more inclined to spawn when the water was not
too rough. On the other hand, I watched them spawning when the ponds
were very choppy and the small waves were pushing them as they thrashed
at the edge. Once, on the south side of the pond, I noticed the suckers
before the alewives. There were twenty or more lined up as if they were
giving the bottom a slow going over. When groups of alewives ran in and
characteristically heaved, flipped, and writhed at the edge, the big
suckers would move up closer. They were so oblivious to anything but
their slow gluttony that I could tap them on the head with a stick.
Occasionally a couple of alewives would give a sucker a little rush, a
brief chase, as much, so it looked, by way of sport as aggressiveness.
They were certainly incapable of damaging it very much, and it could
not be driven away for long. An overdose of suckers in any one area
seemed to discourage the alewives a little and make them move on, but
on the whole they too were so intent on what they were doing that they
hardly noticed anything else. They had to fulfill themselves; then,
stunned, go on. The eggs were expendable.
XV
The Return
After the first week in June there were very few if any alewives coming
up over the dam at the head of the run. An increasing number, on the
other hand, were going down, and I could find very few in the ponds. I
was to see them returning well on in July, which indicates that while
many, perhaps a majority, will leave the ponds a few days or a week
after spawning, others may stay there for weeks longer. For reasons
known only to the individual fish, occasional strays have been found
lingering in fresh water well into the winter.
On the morning of June 10, after a lapse of a few days in which I
had seen only a few returning, a boy who was weekending on the Upper
Mill Pond told me he had seen thousands go by in the direction of the
Herring Run. So they were still schooling for the return to salt water,
progressing again by accumulative motion. In a few weeks some of the
little ones, hatched out earlier, would start down too.
I stood on a rock and looked down into the water along that peaceful
stretch above the dam. This is an area where Indians gathered and
camped when the alewives were running, spearing them, or taking them
with nets made out of reeds. Many Indian artifacts have been found on
the surrounding slopes. On this June day insects were settling down
on the still surface. A shower was due--the air heavy. An alewife
slanted slowly up to the surface and then dropped down again. It left
a perfect circle behind it that gently widened over the blended images
of clouds, leaves, and rocks. Then as other small circles, raindrops
falling, began to show on the water, a belt of flying herons passed in
reflection. A breeze corrugated the surface slightly and the fish swam
slowly on toward the roar of the seaward-casting falls.
The returning migrants now have a choice between two outlets: one at
the top of the fish ladder, and the other at a board dam where the
water drops into a long pool above the old mill. At the far end of the
pool the waters fall again a short but precipitous distance, often
roaring full and hard down the rocky slope into the seining pool.
The alewives use both outlets, but the majority seem to prefer the
falling second stream to the ladder by which they came up, perhaps
because it is the point of greatest flow. Where they drop down over
the falls it looks to the proportionate, or disproportionate, senses
of a human being almost suicidal. Most go over tail first. Then they
appear to be dashed headlong down the jagged incline that ends in rocky
narrows going off at an angle to the pool. One after another they
flip and fall, their bodies bent like bows, and flash finally, swift
and vibrant--not, surprisingly, having been broken to pieces--at the
bottom. Occasionally a fish near the end of the slope will frantically
try to skitter back up. Presumably it is trying to reduce the speed
at which the ground is going by it, in the way a man tries to brake
himself when running downhill. But this almost helter-skelter falling
reveals almost as much of the alewife’s supple strength as its leaping
up against the current.
As June went on and polliwogs turned to frogs, the leaves came fully
out, clover and buttercups were blooming, and the pond algae had
increased at a fast rate so that a thick green scum gathered behind the
dam, and the pond waters were yellow-green. Still you could see the
fish gathering at intervals massed sometimes fifty feet or more behind
the two outlets. There is a small wooden footbridge over the board dam
at the head of the pool. When I lay down on the bridge and looked under
at the curved lip of the water I could see the fish gathering behind.
Against the steady rush and whine I could hear a dull, deep change in
sound as the fish suddenly turned and plummeted over. Their bodies,
enlarged behind a green curve of water, had a metallic sheen, a dull
silver, as they would wheel in, loom up, and drop away. I came back at
night, and could still hear that heavy sound in this lens, or gong, of
water.
In each new phase of migrant action there is an old ceremony. The
alewives approach the dam, in groups of varying sizes. They circle,
withdraw, and swim back again. Some of them swim between the two
outlets as if to decide which one to take. Coming closer, they show
an increasing animation, a quicker circling and flipping, as if the
outward pull of the water resulted in a more vital excitement between
them. After many more starts and withdrawals, lasting anywhere from
fifteen minutes to an hour or more from the approach of a given group,
or school--using that term in the sense of larger numbers--one or more
fish will drop over, and then the rest will follow.
I watched one school making these ceremonious retreats and approaches
for two hours. When they finally started dropping over I counted some
fifty fish a minute for about fifty-five minutes, until there were only
three left. This remaining three must have lacked the common stimulus
to go, the rhythm of sufficient numbers, and they stayed behind, as
more fish began to draw in closer from the pond. I have seen this
often. Sometimes seven, nine, and up makes enough of a group to start
over on its own; very occasionally one alewife will go it alone; but it
does seem as if a certain variable minimum will not take the move upon
itself.
Though a single fish may be the first to go over, or to advance
upstream, it is hard, from my observation, to attribute any leadership
to individuals, male or female. The crowd provides its own pressure
and momentum. Perhaps the circling of these groups and schools, and
their dropping over, might be analogous, though it is a looser motion,
to a flock of sandpipers flying off simultaneously as if they were
cast out by a lithe, invisible wire, and then turning on an instant,
glinting in the sun. The impulse is in the rhythmic unity of the group,
even though in the case of the fish some may be left off or behind
until they are rejoined in it.
The speed at which they drop over seems to depend on the size and
pressure of the oncoming school--population pressure, in other words,
unless pressure of numbers is a better term, which must also affect
the timing of their entry from the sea. Sometimes they go over:
one--two--three--four--one a second; but if the group is small the rate
may be ten to twenty a minute. Finally there are those few fish left
behind that circle around at the outlet or turn back into deeper water
where another school will be coming up.
All morning, as the alewives massed, circled, and dropped, there was
one fish that kept wandering through and over the others in a puzzling
way. It was a conspicuously darker color, which is characteristic
of blindness, as I learned later on. Its loss of sight, then, had
deprived it to some degree of the community action, though it had been
able to feel its way toward the outlet. Occasionally one that looked
exceptionally tired and slow would drop over the falls by itself. I
noticed also that those which were scarred and infected seemed to have
lost some of the fire of communication.
To the casual eye the spent fish may not look any thinner or weaker
than the rest, though when they hit the seining pool they are obviously
in no hurry to move on, but circle slowly around it for some time.
Their flesh, for the human carnivore, is of poorer quality than when
they came in from salt water. Going back to history again, it seems
that the recipients of alewives in the Caribbeans were not always
pleased with the product. There were complaints in the eighteenth
century, as I have indicated, and in the early nineteenth as well,
when plantation owners in the West Indies objected that this food was
doing bad things to their slaves. They said that alewives taken when
they were going downriver after spawning were “poison fish,” and “the
very worst food that can be given to slaves, as it both disheartens
them, keeps them continually murmuring, and brings on those scorbutic
diseases so common among negroes in that climate.”
Bad food or not, they were in all things directional, with the water
and the season, moving on and out, taking the rhythms of perpetuation
with them, these “reflex machines,” bearers of strong tides. They had
been giving me something of a lesson in cosmic weather, though I was
still a hopeless beginner. From one place, one road, around one circle,
they had led me through so much variety that I was left to wonder at
my omissions. The man-made world must still have far to go to learn its
inner and outer relations to a greater, expanding world of lives that
are given, not made.
What further connections are there, say, between the sun and sight,
between our tactile senses and the medium of earth and air in which
we are born, between the moon and the tides and the rhythms of water
and of blood? Who knows more about the universe--I with my conscious
measurements, my personal faltering, or the poor fish with its
unthinking precision through the various unknown? Can we not combine?
In any case, whatever human beings decide about what is effective or
ineffective, what shall stay or what shall go, the alewives know where
they live.
The crowd in the seining pool moved slowly, in a wide circle around
its rim. Most of their inland enemies had gone now. The human hunters
had driven away. The herring gulls had flown to other feeding grounds.
Not that one enemy or another made much difference to them, except in
terms of sudden fear. Like their eggs, they were expendable. Nature’s
ruthlessness, the using and the building up of that which fed and that
which was food, would keep them on the way of primordial energy. For
the same reason they were also spenders--one of the great sacrificial
coinages of the living world.
Still this point in their migration before the return to salt water
might be called a place of demobilization, a separation center. They
swam slowly around in the pool, passing between each other, but always
a part of the circle, each fish with its body and its large black
eyes leading forward, obedient to it. They dispersed very gradually
throughout the day. One small group after another broke off, sparks
from a wheel, and the fish let themselves be carried back down the
brook where the outlet of the pool led under the road. In the run
below where they went back step by step to the sea--whose pull was in
them--they faced up against the current, their orientation, with a
tired, slow weaving. I noticed a little perch attendant on them. It ran
down backward with the large procession, giving the alewives a look of
ceremonial grandeur. I have seen sunfish join up too, although there
could be a point on the approach to brackish water when they decide
that home life is better than parades. These motions must be catching,
communicating to other lives and races than those in which they
originate. All have their way stations, or orbits, along a route that
is being followed out with primal grace and power.
XVI
The Young Follow After
When the last adult alewife of the season drops down Stony Brook for
the tidal inlet and the sea, it has left the renewal of its continuity
and motion behind it. The little alewives follow out the route of their
elders with a silent animism, sent by ancient habit and unknown need.
The repetitive ways of the anadromous fish come out of geologic time.
On the long track since then, the adults, reaching their spawning
grounds, have had the drive of the sperm toward the egg. From the top
of a falls to the depth of the sea there are equivalent lifts and falls
in their own being. The young, tiny and perishable though they may be,
have the same inalienable motion in them.
After hatching, young alewives form dense schools, and begin to feed
on the plankton--tiny organisms and plant life--in the pond waters.
Occasionally they can be seen flipping on the surface. They are subject
to attack by all kinds of predators: perch, pickerel, frogs, herons,
kingfishers, water snakes, and many others, from the time they are out
of the egg. Landlocked waters are often stocked with spawning alewives
for that very reason. The fry make an excellent diet for such popular
game fish as bass, trout, and salmon.
The survivors begin to move out of the ponds about the beginning of
July. In other areas I have heard that the majority do not start
down until September. The first time I saw them was on the second
of July, when they were being drawn down by the thousands through
the dam opening at the head of the fishway. They were scarcely over
an inch long, and as they came in from the ponds they reflected the
summer-green of the water. Their eyes seemed huge in proportion to
the size of their bodies. They were poured down the boiling water
of the ladder, tossed around like chips and slivers, spilled down
helter-skelter; but where the current slowed, farther down the brook,
they held together in the fashion of their race.
There is an account, in a _Report of the Alewife Fisheries of
Massachusetts_, 1921, of some alewives hatched out in the
fisheries at Sandwich, Massachusetts, in June of 1919. The eggs were
put in water of 72 degrees Fahrenheit and half of the lot, in that warm
temperature, were hatched in only forty-eight hours. “In the surface
water were thousands of tiny alewives with food sacs nearly transparent
in appearance, and with tails resembling fine silk threads. The tiny
creatures, about one-fifth of an inch in length, wiggled through the
water with surprising activity. The eyes in both the egg and the
hatched fish were but faintly visible. At the end of ninety-six hours
their size had increased considerably, the outline of the yolk sac and
the body was plainly marked, and the eyes showed prominently. By this
time all the eggs had hatched. In cold water the period of development
is retarded proportionately to the lowering of the temperature.”
In a month the young alewives were about three-fifths of an inch long
and by autumn between two and four inches. At three-fifths of an inch
they look more like a sand eel than an alewife--an observation quoted
in the same report. When they are an inch and a fifth long they look
more like the adults. Their bodies are shorter at that size and they
have a large head and relatively large eyes. When they reach one and
two-fifths inches, about the size of those I saw, they look much the
same, but with the addition of the alewife’s sawbelly--“serrations of
the middle abdominal scales.”
It may be that in times past little alewives have been unable to
migrate out of the waters in which they were hatched, and local races
of a landlocked variety were established. The landlocked alewives
are much dwarfed in comparison with the salt-water variety. Some
years ago there were a number of complaints from householders in New
York City that small fish were coming out of the faucets. The Deputy
Commissioner of the Department of Water Supply, Gas and Electricity,
referred the matter to the New York Aquarium, which investigated and
found that these were none other than landlocked alewives: _Pomolobus
pseudoharengus_. They had been spawned in the Kensico Reservoir,
and in the autumn they passed through the 5/8-inch mesh of the screens
at the outlet. This might suggest the migrating habit of their ocean
cousins. A friend of mine, getting the parent stream theory turned
around, speculated as to whether a study might not show them returning
from the same faucets over a period of years!
But no conclusive evidence was found that these fish were following
out any consistent migration. For a period of eight years during the
course of the survey hardly any fish were reported as dropping into the
kitchen sinks of New York.
One interesting thing about the landlocked alewives is that they
are subject to mass mortalities, or “die offs,” for reasons yet
undecided. In some areas, like Cayuga Lake in New York State, this
happens occasionally, but in others, Lake Ontario, for example, fairly
regularly. This does not necessarily happen after spawning, so invites
no analogy to the west coast salmon. Many of the dead fish have not yet
reached sexual maturity.
As to the normal, coastal migration of the fry from fresh to salt
water, why do they leave when they do? Is there any theory that can
account for these little fish suddenly moving out of the waters in
which they were born, so rich with the fresh-water food that gave them
their initial growth? Are they fleeing their enemies? Yet the young of
the fresh-water fish are preyed upon too, and they stay behind.
There is an explanation about salmon fry which has them gradually going
seaward in order to escape the brighter light in the shallow fresh
waters; but is there anything in the constitution of an alewife that
is not accustomed to sunlit waters? They do not escape them so much
as seek them, because of their warmer temperature. Aside from that,
I would think, from my own observation, and the comments of others,
that they have no preference between the dark and light along their
way--they run through both--but do not like a sudden change. For
example, they waited all one morning before coming out of the shaded
waters under Stony Brook Road to go into the brightness of the seining
pool, only moving when a shadow fell across it that was cast by the old
mill.
If the adults swim toward the coast in the spring because of some
change in their make-up consonant with changes in the waters where they
swim, is there also some change in food and temperature which makes
the young start to leave fresh water at a particular time? The little
alewives are creatures of such sensitivity to their medium, to its
changes, and to what they eat, that a factor in the timing of their
migration might be some internal discomfort, or so it was suggested
to me. To begin to find out, a scientist would have to follow all the
stages of a little alewife’s birth and growth, tracing where it goes,
what it eats, and what the temperature, depth, and density of the
water is along the way. He would also have to do this for every age
group that leaves the three ponds from July through October, analyzed
pond by pond, since conditions differ in each one. During this period
the little fish leave at all stages in the seasonal development of
the ponds, while not all of one age group seem to go with the others.
Many appear to stay in the ponds for several months. So attempting
consistency with such findings might result in more indigestion for the
investigator than the fish themselves.