Part 7
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.
A light wind was running straight down the long surfaces of the 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.