Part 8

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.

From the outward evidence all I can say is that these little ones do not start schooling to move out of the ponds until they are over an inch in length. I have seen them, still not much more than pin size, circling a few hundred yards above the outlet, but neither swimming with the flow nor letting themselves be drifted on. Logically then, the point at which they are stimulated to leave must coincide with growth, the rate of which depends on food and temperature in the ponds.

Warm-water ponds are more favorable to growth than cold-water ponds. They turn out better fish, larger and healthier. By the same token a cold spring and summer will result in a poorer crop of alewives. They will probably be hatched later. The colder pond waters will bring down the “plankton bloom,” in other words less food for the fish. As a result, young alewives going to salt water that year will be smaller, weaker, more subject to disease, and less able to escape their enemies.

It is just possible, then, that some spring when the annual run of alewives is smaller than usual, for no apparent reason, you might find an answer to the mystery in a cold season, four years before.

After the first young alewives have moved out, having attained the size and response necessary for it, you can see a gradual increase in size from early summer until autumn. One of the unsolved questions is why the earliest to go will not stay longer in the ponds. Why not relax, if a fish can, and eat well until autumn, as in fact large numbers of them do. Were they nearest the outlet? Perhaps the larger fish that begin to appear later on were hatched earlier and therefore came from farther back in the chain of ponds.

Of course there is nothing rigid about their timetable, nothing exact about their migratory behavior. Whatever stimulates it, their new momentum takes the form of a gradual circling out. I have heard that in some areas they will start down and then return when they can swim back up the outlet, if the force of the water is not too strong for them. They may be in a state of indecisive action for a while, or so it sounds, but most of them are moved to go at some time before winter sets in, though there have been many exceptions to the rule. John Burns, of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, tells me that he saw a “generous school of fry” one January, coming down under the ice of a frozen pond at Bournedale.

Perhaps this phenomenon of migration in the young fish is not susceptible of final analysis. Might that be because it is so simple, however complex in detail and circumstance, simple though intangible in the life rhythm it embodies? However slow or fast their response to it may be, the little fish must be obeying an organic, directional drive that goes back beyond history. As a part of their growing up they may develop the same kind of built-in response to the waters in which they find themselves as their parents schooling offshore in the spring; and they come to have an intercommunication that knows its way. It is not the adult call of sexual maturity that moves them, and yet they must have a biological need to start out together on the same living track.

I recognize how much an amateur may leave out of his calculations, and only proffer my individual guess that they follow the outward flow of the ponds when they grow to feel a rhythmic, habitual motion in them that responds to it and that belongs in its balance to the whole race of alewives between land and sea. The fresh-water minnows stay where they are, no matter how hard the pull of the waters may be. I have seen them lazing in the shallows while a school of little alewives darted over them, restlessly moving on. And as I followed the young migrants I saw in them a roaming, roving sweep like sea birds made for distant journeys.

I watched them coming down from July through October and into November, from the lush green of early summer to the red and brown of dry weeks in August, and on to the cool days of autumn when the sea turned a brighter blue and winds and clouds blew full--all the way almost to the hardening in of winter and its sullen skies. The alewife is a part of the life of Stony Brook and the ponds above it for at least seven months out of the year. And the fact that so many return again to the particularity, the uniqueness of these waters is a reminder of the power of living form and place together, the welding of those strands of near and far in the body of a fish, the body of the world. The fish egg rolls around on a greater axis than its own.

So the first of the tiny fish came down by the thousands during the first week in July. After that there was hardly a day until the middle of August when there were not at least a few to be seen in the brook. Gradually they grew larger, so that in August they were up to two inches on the average. The next big movement, after an August lull, began on September 6 and 7. Their size by then had increased to between two and two and one-half inches. A few were considerably larger. I measured one at the surprising length of four and one-half inches, and another, which escaped my net, looked to be well over five.