River herring running early in West Gloucester
Gloucester Times
By Sean Horgan Staff Writer
Mar 31, 2018 Updated Apr 1, 2018
The last day of March broke sunny, blustery and cold on Saturday, but that didn’t deter about 30 volunteers from making the year’s first visit to the city’s alewife fishway in West Gloucester. It didn’t stop the fish, either.
The alewife, or river herring, usually wait until waters warm up to more comfortable temperatures before making their journey from the Atlantic Ocean into the Little River and up to the Lily Pond for spawning, before retracing their routes back to the sea.
But not this year.
“We’ve already got fish,” Eric Hutchins, a marine habitat restoration specialist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, told the volunteers and interested parties assembled along the banks of the fishway next to the West Gloucester water treatment plant. “They came early this year.”
Perhaps the fish heard good reviews of Gloucester’s new marine ecosystem that has emerged, with the help of the city, NOAA Fisheries and the state Division of Marine Fisheries, out of the ruins of an old concrete fish ladder. Alewives, it’s well known, like to gossip.
But the presence of fish so early was viewed as a harbinger of another busy season along the fishway that is used by glass eels as well as the river herring, especially given Saturday’s cold water temperatures — about 7 degrees Celsius, or 44.6 degrees Fahrenheit.
“This is really cold water for them to come back in,” said Tammy Cominelli, the city’s new shellfish — and by extension, alewife — warden who helped lead the morning’s guided tour with Hutchins and Tara Trinko Lake from NOAA. “They usually like the water to be about 12 degrees Celsius (or 53.6 degrees Fahrenheit). So, this is an early run for them.”
The fishway certainly has grown in popularity for the finned creatures who uses it as part of their natural spawning cycle.
Hutchins said the first two fish spotted last April 1 appeared at 8:28 a.m., and researchers and counters didn’t spy another until April 11. Then things took off. By the end of the next day, counters had tabulated more than 100 fish making their way up the rocky-bottomed fishway.
At the end of the 2017 season, researchers and volunteers had counted about 3,300 alewives heading for the Lily Pond. In 2016, they saw about 215.
The fish only are counted on their way up the fishway and only if they reach the counting station at the top.
Hutchins started Saturday’s tour at the bottom of the fishway, along the pool formed from water from the Little River flowing under Essex Avenue.
As if on cue, two fish appeared, fighting upstream against the strong current right in front of the volunteers, many of whom will return throughout the counting season (April 1 to May 31) as members of a cadre of more than 100 that help with the daily series of 10-minute counting sessions.
“What could be better than sitting beside a river and counting the fish as they go by?” Hutchins said.
The official counting actually was set to begin on Easter Sunday, so Saturday still represented spring training for the fish. Ditto for the volunteers, who seem to have established a passionate following for the fish and the fishway.
“I’ve been coming here for years,” said Kris Francis, a volunteer who lives across Essex Street from the fishway. “I love nature and to be able to watch the fish fight their way up the stream is really something special.”
On some visits last year, Francis said, he saw hundreds of the river herring swimming up the fishway.
“And I’ve seen thousands of the eels down in the lower pool,” he said. “So many you couldn’t see the bottom of the stream.”
The eels, according to Trinko Lake, will make their way into the Lily Pond, where they could remain for 30 years or more. The river herring, however, have a much shorter stay.
“They will spend about three to six weeks in the pond spawning before making their way back down and returning to the sea,” Trinko Lake said. “The babies, though, will stay anywhere from one to three months. They’re all pretty much out of the system by October.”
Contact Sean Horgan at 978-675-2714, or shorgan@gloucestertimes.com. Follow him on Twitter at @SeanGDT.
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