The run

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?