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The run

Chapter 3: FOREWORD
By John Hay
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Nature/Gardening/AnimalsScience - Biology

About This Book

A naturalist chronicles the seasonal journey of an anadromous fish along coastal streams, combining close field observation, natural history, and local lore. He tracks timing and weather that cue migration, describes the fish’s life cycle from saltwater growth to freshwater spawning and return, and examines river structures, predators, and human interventions that shape the migration. Interwoven are technical explanations, informal history, speculation about behavior, and meditations on fragility, persistence, and interdependence between species and landscape. The narrative progresses through arrival, ascent, spawning, juvenile dispersal, and the animals’ outward migration, closing with reflections on conservation and the limits of human understanding.

To my father and mother:
Clarence Leonard Hay
and
Alice Appleton Hay

FOREWORD

This book mirrors an attempt to go farther afield, from one man’s center. Its writing represented a kind of migration in itself. We all undertake them, whether we like it or not, near or far. To follow on the track of fish, birds, or any other animals, might be both discovery and repetition, because it might mean to go exhaustively into the nature of being alive. The alewives helped to open the world for me, although the outcome of their circling was always beyond knowing.

Above all this book is about one race which has an equal status with us in the great motions of this planet. Men may be highest, or so men say, but they cannot be complete without granting equal dignity to the unsurpassed uniqueness of other forms of life. One ought to be able to say: “Here is a life not mine. I am enriched.”

Not a great deal has been written specifically about alewives, but the three published works I found most useful as an introduction were: Fishes of the Gulf of Maine, by Bigelow and Schroeder, published by the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service; A Report on the Alewife Fisheries of Massachusetts, by David Belding, published by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation in 1921; and Factors Influencing the Migration of Anadromous Fishes, by Gerald Collins, Fishery Bulletin No. 73 of the Fish and Wildlife Service. I also received some helpful information from the Fisheries Research Board of Canada; and the Department of Sea and Shore Fisheries of the State of Maine, as well as its Department of Inland Fisheries and Game. Maine has been undertaking an important research and educational program with a view to rehabilitating the alewife fisheries.

I am greatly indebted to Hal Turner of Woods Hole, Dr. David Belding of Welfleet, and John Burns of the Massachusetts Department of Natural Resources, Division of Marine Fisheries, for answering my questions so readily and courteously; and of course, much thanks to Harry Alexander. He guards a good run.