Striped bass are the favorite catch for recreational saltwater fishing enthusiasts in New England. River herring, a.k.a. alewives and blueback herring, are the favorite food of striped bass. But catching river herring for use as bait has been banned since 2006 due to the sharply declining stocks of the species.

Enter the poachers.

"Most striper fishermen have switched to other baits," said state Environmental Police Sergeant Bruce Parziale, who was monitoring activity along the Charles River in Newton and Watertown from a patrol boat early this month. "But frankly, a lot of them are still sneaking down" and scooping up herring, he said, "despite the ban and everything we try to do to stop them."

The three-year ban, imposed by the state Division of Marine Fisheries, has left the state's environmental law-enforcement officers with a classic something-has-to-give situation, chasing illegal herring harvesters who have become increasingly more difficult to catch.

The ban resulted from a precipitous crash in herring stocks during the first half of the decade, with fish counts in the Charles and other rivers declining 75 to 90 percent from traditional levels. In rivers where the herring were once counted in the millions, numbers fell to a few hundred thousand, and in some cases, far lower. Federal environmental officials have listed river herring as a "species of concern."

Mike Armstrong, a program manager with Marine Fisheries, said that state environmental officials should have a good idea of exactly how herring populations are faring in the Charles later this year, thanks to a pilot project that uses video equipment to monitor fish stocks. As part of the project, which the agency is conducting with the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, researchers have been collecting data throughout the spring with a camera installed near the Watertown Dam, and will be developing software this summer to enable accurate fish counts from the video feed.

"It's pretty exciting," Armstrong said. "It's a huge data hole we're going to fill."

One problem for the herring - and the Environmental Police - is how easy it is to catch the foot-long fish during their spring run, when they congregate in the shallows to spawn. The only tools required are a bucket and net, and a poacher can easily scoop up several dozen and be off with them in minutes, Parziale said.

"Look, they're right there," he said, pointing to a shallow area next to a dock at the Community Rowing boathouse on the Newton side of the river, where he had tied up his patrol boat.

Sure enough, only a foot or so from the bank, at least three dozen dark-backed herring darted back and forth in water barely 5 inches deep, at times leaping into the air in the excitement of their spawning drive.

Parziale said the poachers seem to be getting smarter, and as a result officers have handed out only a handful of citations this year.

In past years, officers would find several offenders at a time in the same place. They once caught a bait-shop operator as he loaded herring into a large holding tank, complete with an aerator, on the back of his truck. The Environmental Police, part of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, even ran a sting operation on the Mystic River last year in which one of their officers posed as a poacher and secretly alerted uniformed officers nearby when other poachers were bringing their catch back to their vehicles.

Even for poachers caught in the act, though, the fines aren't much of a deterrent, Parziale said. A first offense costs $50, or roughly the price that a bait shop can charge a fisherman for four dozen herring. There are other infractions - such as fishing without a license - that the officers can pile on to increase the fines levied on a poacher, he said.

Officer Bill Woytek, who was patrolling the Watertown and Newton banks by truck and by foot early this month, said that the area also has a large number of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe who are used to eating herring as a staple of their diet. Language and cultural barriers have created some problems, he said, but most seem to have received the message.

That was evident when Woytek spotted an elderly couple sitting on an embankment near the Watertown Dam, the farthest point upriver that herring can reach and a prime spot for poaching. The man was fishing Tom Sawyer-style with a line on a long pole with no reel, but nearby was a large net that could have been used to harvest alewives or blueback herring.

"No herring, no herring," the woman said the instant that she spied Woytek in his dark green Environmental Police uniform.

After showing Woytek that her 85-year-old husband was properly licensed to fish, the woman, who declined to give her name, said that her husband just loved to fish, and that they didn't particularly care what they landed. Which was a good thing, she said in halting English, because he hadn't caught much recently.

"Last year, no fish," she said. "This year, too. No fish."

Woytek later said he believed they were telling the truth, because the mesh on the net they had brought was a bit too large for scooping up herring. They probably brought it along in the hopes that it would help them land a river carp, which can run as large as 30 pounds.

From a health standpoint, Woytek said, the couple would probably have been better off catching herring, since carp live in the river year-round and feed off the bottom, which is still the most polluted part of the Charles.

Herring, in contrast, are an anadromous species, which means that they live most of the year in the ocean but return upriver in the spring to their freshwater spawning grounds. As river fish go, they would be among the cleanest and safest to eat - if it were legal to harvest them - officials said.
According to scientists and river advocates, the travails of human parenting can pale in comparison to what herring must endure to produce offspring. That is particularly true of Charles River herring.

If they can survive in the open ocean and not get caught by the boats that troll for their salt-water-only cousins, the Atlantic herring, their journey upriver begins in Boston Harbor. After running a gauntlet of hungry stripers and other predatory fish patrolling the inner and outer harbors, the herring must pass through the Colonel Richard Gridley Locks at the Charles River basin, waiting patiently for a boat to pass through before they can continue their expedition. Woe to the herring that gets stuck in the locks with a hungry striper.

From there, they travel up through the basin, dodging cormorants and hawks as well as any stripers that have managed to make it through the locks with them.

The lucky survivors make it to the shallows along the river's banks in Watertown, Newton, Cambridge, and Brighton, where - assuming they are not snapped up by poachers - the females lay between 60,000 and 300,000 eggs each.

While that may seem like a lot, it hasn't been enough to bring the stocks back, despite the ban and the best efforts of enforcement officers like Parziale and Woytek, who say they have seen only a marginal increase in the number of herring in the Charles over the last three years.

Lisa Capone, a spokeswoman for the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, said the Division of Marine Fisheries will recommend that the ban on herring harvesting be extended past this year. Public hearings on extending the ban will probably be held in the fall, she said.

"We just haven't seen an increase in the population that we need to yet," Capone said.