Alewives returned late to smaller Maine rivers this year
By June 10 the fish were supposed to have come and gone already, but there they were. At first, they looked like a shadow in the water. On closer inspection, the dark blob resolved into hundreds, maybe thousands, of small silvery fish.
They swam against the current of the Damariscotta River, braving a large gathering of gulls looking for dinner. Just ahead, the fish faced an uphill climb through dozens of small stone pools built to facilitate their passage from the ocean to Damariscotta Lake.
Alewives and blueback herring, which look very similar and are known together as river herring, spend most of the year at sea. But each spring, they return to the inland waters of their birth to spawn the next generation.
“This year was an odd year,” said Mark Becker, the fish agent for the towns of Newcastle and Nobleboro, who oversees the two towns’ commercial harvest of river herring. The fish are sold to lobster fishermen to use as bait.
In Maine, alewives generally appear in May. But this year, their spring run got off to a slow start. At the Damariscotta Mills fish ladder, which straddles both Newcastle and Nobleboro, Becker declared the harvest over by May 31 because there weren’t enough fish. But a week later, they finally arrived, and big groups kept running up the fish ladder until mid-June. |
