The run

For a little while I felt satisfied that I knew the alewives only chose to come in on the night or late evening tides, until they proved me wrong. I say they proved me wrong because I give myself no credit for more than moderately ignorant perseverance in following up a hypothesis. The alewives did a good deal of proving and disproving for me. They would probably show me up again.

At the beginning of the third week in May there had been a fresh run of fish crowding into the Herring Run, if not as heavily as those that came in a month before. After the migration starts there are very few days in either April or May when some fish are not to be seen in the brook waters. One man can only judge by eye plus the amount of barrels being hauled out as to how many there are in any period, but there may have been a climactical run during the week after the nineteenth of May when the high tides came at night. On the twenty-first I had been taking temperature readings, out of curiosity and to keep up with the advancing season. It had been around 40 degrees Fahrenheit during the night and rose to 47 at 7:30 A.M., 53 at 9:00 and 55 at 9:30 as the sun’s rays heated the land. Just offshore, down the beach from Paine’s Creek, at around 9:30, high tide being at 9:57, the temperature of the salt water, more consistent than the land, was 49, and the reading I then took of the brackish water at the mouth of the creek was 51.

I noticed a small crew of alewives in the tea-dark channel. Had they come in the night before? They were schooling back and forth, as though getting accustomed to the waters in which they newly found themselves.

The tide began to turn. The waters going out at the creek mouth were yellow-green. I walked along the beach, and the surface of the Bay was long and smooth, a blue-green stretching and easing under a light wind with purple patches showing above seaweed and shelving banks of peat. I could hear the slow, gentle, labial sounds of the lightly ebbing waters. There was a small school of unidentifiable minnows turning and slipping-in-silver just offshore. A long frieze pattern of gull tracks showed, where the sand was damp, crisscrossed here and there by the little tracks of sandpipers and plovers. This cool, seaside world seemed full of equipoise to me, with a searching air of freedom playing over.

There had been several clumps of herring gulls standing in shoals in the creek where it flowed out into the Bay. I noticed that some of them had begun to fly up. Then I saw a great black-backed gull swoop at the water farther out, and a number of herring gulls beyond it plummeting down, then chasing each other over the surface. They were after fish, but what kind? I went off for twenty minutes to get some field glasses, and by the time I returned the gulls had increased by the hundreds. Big clouds of them were circling and moving in from up the coast, higher and higher like drifting paper, some of them way up in the blinding blue sky, but coming closer, joining the feast.

I could see that the gulls were diving straight down the course of the Paine’s Creek waters where they went out into the Bay, and that the fish they flung up between them clearly had the general size and shape of alewives. What was going on then was a great interception. The fish in their deliberate way had found the mouth of the creek, and made their instinctive move to go in, but as the water became shallower during the ebb tide they were ripe prey for the birds and there was no turning back.

The violent, reckless activity of the gulls went on all morning. In the way they have of riding each other: “You’ve got it. Show you can keep it!” they were picking up fish, dropping them, and running away with them again, in a scrambling frenzy. There seemed to be almost more excitement, more energy, spent in the chase than in the fruits of it, though they gobbled what they could. I could hear an over-all sound of struggle as their wings rushed and they yawked and screamed. This world seemed pantingly, gruntingly, wildly busy.

The victims of this natural slaughter seemed to have moved on a little, with their fatal determination, but as the tide and morning ebbed the white, frantic crowd above them seemed to stay in the same general area. It was not likely that many fish managed to reach the inlet. I imagined them dashing from side to side or circling in panic, the crowd knowing nothing but its own entity and safety. I talked to a man who was watching the scene from the window of his car. He told me that there had been a high bluff, washed away some years back, from which you could actually see the fish in the water as they struggled to swim in.

“We had a good stream went out there that wouldn’t a happened,” he said, suggesting that if there were a deeper channel meeting the Bay waters, most of the fish might be able to get up the creek in comparative safety.

Along this stretch of rhythmic work of greed and death little groups of gulls began to settle down on the water, glutted and loaded down. Then long lines of them, looking like white shoals, rested on the water upshore, digesting their meal. Low tide that afternoon came at 3:57. By two o’clock when the sands began to show, well out toward the weirs, the great tribal company of gulls were finished with the hunt. For a mile along the flats they were standing into a stiff wind. In the distance I could see a litter of dead fish along the bed of the creek waters. When I walked out I saw them, silver, blue, and white, with brassy tints from the sun, flung along, strewn on like debris through a wide city square.

Even though there may be no waste in nature—with everything used, fired, and consumed in the interactions of the living world—what an enormous, careless expenditure! The bed of the outgoing waters was paved with this alewife coinage for hundreds of yards. Each one I picked up, and there were thousands, had its body scraped and clawed, or its head torn, its eyes gouged out. For every one gobbled during the chase there must have been many more left uneaten. Remembering what the night fishermen had said, it seemed like an indiscriminate feast, and it was not clear to me that the gulls were primarily after roe. But since fish eggs are a delicacy to other animals, gulls may find a special enjoyment in them too.

So the alewives did not choose to come in by night or evening only, seeing that they chose to come in by day—provided there was much choice in the matter. I heard the theory put forward that they must have been chased in by bass; but if they were so chased, it did not seem likely that they would choose the narrow waters of this particular creek for refuge, or have that much calculation in them. That is not why they came in. Those thousands of years the alewives had migrated provided their own track. The fish knew instinctively when and where to go, and all risks were incidental to that. The only possibility was that they might have been schooling around in the farthest reaches of the creek waters in the bay and were hurried in by the bass; but they were there first. Many others may have gone in the night before. Those trying to come in during the morning waited their turn after an ebb tide. This rhythmic deliberation and then going seemed very characteristic of the fish as I had watched them in inland waters, and in a larger way it might be similar to their schooling in salt water. I found out subsequently that the alewives coming into the Bournedale run in the Cape Cod Canal do so both day and night, but that there is less chance of the gulls intercepting them there because of the deeper waters.

I went down to Paine’s Creek the following morning, May 22, and the frenzied hunt was going on again. I had checked the previous night and did so the night of this day too and there were no fish coming in, so far as I could tell. There was no sign of them in the water during the late evening, no sound of their soft slapping on the surface later on.

It is my impression that though they start into the creek in the dark—perhaps not later than ten-thirty or eleven o’clock—they do not move upstream very much until daylight comes. Sunlight stimulates them, or, to be exact, its radiation. You can see them swimming up faster in Stony Brook after the bright sunlight warms the water in the morning.

They might enter the creek more successfully under the protection of fog, or darkness, combined with deep water, but did not prefer such conditions to broad daylight. When the temperature was right and they were physiologically ready, alewife schools began to move in from salt water on an incoming tide ... swing in might be a better term, since a circular movement is characteristic and sends them on. According to my observation, incidentally, this is very likely to be counterclockwise. In any case the power and direction of the migration came from their combined rhythmic impulses.

Alewives seemed to me to demand a study of universal motions and their interrelationships. The body of a fish must have in it the declination of the globe and all its years. If I had read some of my limited science reading correctly, there was a time system in the world of life which had nothing to do with clocks, and their specific minutes and hours. It was built into its creatures so that their stages of development, their growth and movements, followed the direction and change of all other forces affecting them. It is a running world; and who, in that context, is more automatic than another?