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Seeking days of plenty for the silvery alewife

By Adrianne Appel

Boston Globe, June 19, 2005

With the sun glinting off the water, his dip net poised, it seemed that fisherman Marco Fernandez couldn't ask for more earlier this month along the Charles River in Watertown.

Actually, he said, something was seriously amiss: There were only a few alewives to be caught. After five hours of netting, he had just six silvery 11-inch-long fish in his bucket.

''On a good day, I will have 25 in 10 minutes," said Fernandez, a commercial cleaner from Milford, who uses alewives as bait for striped bass, which follow the smaller fish up the river. He said he had seen just two good days this year, far fewer than in previous years.

Others who watch alewives, also known as herring, agree the fish have been scarce so far this year.

In a normal spring, tens of thousands of alewives push and flip their way up the Charles as far as Waltham to lay and fertilize their eggs in quiet river pools, before dying or turning around and heading back to their ocean home. In spots along the river, the water teems with fish, attracting seagulls and other birds that pluck them out of the river to eat. Fishermen also net the alewives to use as bait for lobster. The run typically begins in April, peaks in late May, and concludes in June when the water temperature rises.

This year, the river was quiet through April and May, with the fish just showing up within the past two weeks, say state biologists, environmentalists, and fishermen like Fernandez. The cold spring may have discouraged the fish from spawning, said Anna Eleria, an environmental engineer and project manager at the Charles River Watershed Association.

''We'll have to see what happens" and whether the overall number of fish that spawn this year is less than in an average year, said Eleria.

But some are worried that the fish, which also made a very weak showing last year, may be in trouble.

Paul Letsky, a fisherman at the Charles near California Street in Watertown, said the number of alewives he had seen this year was ''slim to nothing." A nurse from Worcester, he's been following and catching them for years.

Brad Chase, a marine fisheries biologist with the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries, said, ''I think it's been declining for a number of years. There are a lot of potential reasons, and we don't know why.

''Ten years ago, it was considered a very good run," Chase said. It's been three or four years since he has seen a strong run, he said.

The weak alewife runs are especially disappointing because beginning a few years ago, after significant planning and negotiation, the state, private foundations, and river advocacy groups poured money and labor into the repair of fish ladders in dams on the Charles, including the California Street dam, Eleria said.

A fish ladder is a chute that contains graduated steps (often made from wood) cut through a dam. Ideally, when fish swimming upstream run into a dam, they find the chute opening, then swim and propel their way up the steps.

If it weren't for the dams, the fish could swim all the way to the headwaters of the Charles, at Echo Lake in Hopkinton. Today, many fish are stopped in Waltham by the Moody Street dam, where the fish ladder still does not function properly, Eleria said. Some fish do manage to get through the Moody Street dam, but then they encounter dams in Newton. Unfortunately, the best spawning habitats, with quiet shallow water and a sandy bottom, lie between Waltham and Hopkinton, she said.

With the water quality of the Charles and the diversity of wildlife improving significantly over the past 10 years, the recent downturn in alewife numbers is especially perplexing, Eleria said.

''There's something else going on, because we are not seeing the fish," she said.

The river's flow has been slowed over the years due to the dams and water usage, but that would not account for the downturn, she said.

A weak run means that fewer eggs will be laid and fertilized, eventually resulting in a smaller population of alewives.

Chase, the state biologist, downplayed the possibility that foreign fishing vessels are taking excessive numbers of alewives offshore.

He offered a variety of other explanations: the fishes' spawning habitat has been upset by silt or pollution; they are dying in the ocean for an unknown reason; or too many are being fished out of the Charles. ''It takes fish to make fish," he said.

The department places limits on fishing, but these are sometimes ignored by people who come to the river at night, overfish, and then sell the alewives as bait. Poaching has increased significantly during the past 10 to 15 years, he said.

Chase said the run could be improved if more fish are allowed to pass through the Charles River Dam, which stretches 437 feet across the mouth of the Charles at the point where it pours into Boston Harbor.

The fish ladder at the dam is barely functional, and for years, workers there, like bridge operator Andy Williams, have opened the locks for several hours each day during the alewife run to let the fish swim up the river.

Chase said the dam workers make a ''good-faith effort, but it's not very efficient."

On a recent Saturday, Williams sat in his office, a glass-enclosed walkway atop the dam, high above the river. ''Sometimes you can see them skimming along the surface," he said of the fish below. He said he opens the locks for three hours at a stretch to let the fish through, depending on the tide and the amount of fish.

Down below, fishermen cast into the harbor for striped bass, using alewives as bait.

''I don't think the weather has anything to do with it, " Richie McKenzie of Medway said of the weak herring run. He believes overfishing in the river has reduced the number of herring. ''It was the same way with the pogies. Now they're gone."

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