Herring count very high this year in Pembroke
Wicked Local Pembroke
By Mark Burridge
mburridge@wickedlocal.com
Posted May. 7, 2016 at 6:55 AM
With nearly a month of counting time still to go, the number of herring pouring through the run in Pembroke seems to be very high this year.
“We’re having a great year,” said Art Egerton, of the Pembroke fisheries commission. “We’ve had 92,000 fish already.”
Pembroke has two options for counting the army of fish passing through the herring run. First, there are volunteers that stand and count for 15 minutes at a time, so they create a baseline that can be extrapolated. Secondly, there is an electronic counter, which delivers an exact count.
Over the last few years, Pembroke has seen an increase in the number of fish being counted at the herring run.
Egerton said this year’s count is good, even by the already good numbers.
“It’s well above what we had last year,” he said. “It’s taken a big jump.”
Egerton said the increase is likely due to the efforts of commission members.
“The fisheries commission spent a lot of time taking obstructions out of the stream,” he said.
Sara Grady, watershed ecologist for the north and south rivers watershed association, said the counting season ends at the end of May except for the South River, which goes until mid-June.
She said the data collected from the volunteer counters is formatted and put through a program to make an estimate for the run. She said Pembroke is the only run where this is possible though because there is a high enough volume of fish.
“It’s the most active of the four herring runs,” she said. The others are in Norwell/Hanover, Scituate and Marshfield.
Egerton said that even though counting season ends soon, the herring will continue to pass until September or October.
“It goes by temperature,” he said.
In fact, he said the herring started earlier than usual this year.
“We were like, ‘okay, here we go,” he said.