River-herring restoration booming

RUNNING DEEP: The upper Pawcatuck River in Richmond and Charlestown has seen, over the last three years, the removal of two dams and the installation of a fish ladder. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE
RUNNING DEEP: The upper Pawcatuck River in Richmond and Charlestown has seen, over the last three years, the removal of two dams and the installation of a fish ladder. / PBN PHOTO/JOHN LEE

(Corrected, Jan. 3, 4 p.m.)

Millions of dollars in federal, state and private money have created a small boom in state-of-the-art, fishway construction projects on many Rhode Island rivers and streams.
Fish ladders are being put in, dams are coming down. And on the coast, in the port of Galilee in Narragansett, fishermen are working with scientists in new ways to come up with river-herring-avoidance programs.
River herring were vital to Native Americans and once supported a large commercial fishery. In 1969, East Coast landings reached 140 million pounds. In 2011, according to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, 2 million pounds were landed by states without moratoriums – Maine in particular. Since 2006 Rhode Island (along with Connecticut, Massachusetts, Virginia, and North Carolina) has enforced a moratorium on river-herring harvest to help replenish supply after years of over-fishing.
River herring live in the sea but, like salmon, use rivers and streams for spawning. Each spring many people come to enjoy watching the herring run. The fish, which average 10-12 inches long as adults, have become a symbol of conservation after they nearly disappeared from some local runs. In Rhode Island the major river-herring runs are: Gilbert Stuart, in Narragansett, Nonquit in Tiverton and Buckeye Brook and Gorton Pond, in Warwick.
In 2000, the R.I. Division of Fish and Wildlife counted 290,000 river herring at the Gilbert Stuart run. Last year, they counted 100,000, comparatively low but still above previous years.
“In 2005, the population crashed,” said R.I. Division of Fish and Wildlife freshwater biologist Phillip Edwards. “They crashed in all our runs. Gilbert Stuart only passed 8,000 fish that year.”
The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, the interstate agency responsible for river-herring management, has listed river herring as a depleted stock across their entire range, the Carolinas to Maine. In 2011, The Natural Resources Defense Council filed a petition with the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration to list river herring under the federal Endangered Species Act. During the inquiry that followed, NOAA determined there wasn’t enough stock data to warrant such a listing. Why the low numbers? Habitat degradation, climate change, pollution, predation by cormorants and seals and decades of over-harvest all have contributed, according to researchers. And the bycatch – the incidental take – of river herring in the commercial trawl fisheries has also been blamed.
Runs the past few years have been better in Rhode Island, showing a more positive trend, according to Edwards.
“They’re still way below where we’d like to be seeing them,” he added. “But things do look better.”
In Rhode Island, rivers seeing the most restoration work are the Blackstone, the Ten-Mile, the Woonasquatucket, the Pawtuxet and the Pawcatuck.
“There is a big surge in construction projects for fish passage right now,” said Christopher Fox, executive director of the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association. “Plenty of red tape to cut through – but things are happening.”
The Pawcatuck River fishway restoration in 2010 included the first (permitted) removal of a Rhode Island dam, the dam at Shannock Falls. Then, slightly upstream, at Horseshoe Falls, a new fish ladder was completed in 2011. The final dam at Kenyon Mill came down last September.
“The total budget of all three projects was $4 million,” Fox said. “Of that $4 million, $2.8 million came from President [Barack] Obama’s stimulus package. The other two big funders were NOAA and [the R.I. Coastal Resources Management Council]. Over the last five years, nearly $10 million has been invested in statewide fish-passage restoration work. In the coming few years, with work that is on the table, that number should hit $20 million.
Fuss & O’Neill, an engineering consulting firm in Providence, and Maryland-based KCI Technologies both worked on the design and engineering of the Pawcatuck fishway project.
During the Industrial Revolution, the Pawcatuck River powered manufacturing. But what may have helped 19th-century Americans certainly slowed the migration of river herring, eels, salmon and shad. The Pawcatuck River begins at Worden’s Pond and terminates in Little Narragansett Bay off Westerly’s Watch Hill. The entire 28-mile river has likely been unpassable to river herring since the mid-1700s, according to Fox. “Because of this fishway work,” said Edwards, “the Pawcatuck will be completely connected to the sea … helping not only river herring and shad, but also the ‘resident’ fish, like bass and trout.”
To re-establish the Pawcatuck herring run, the R.I. Department of Environment Management has trucked in fish from other runs, like the Middleboro run in Massachusetts and the Saugatucket in South Kingstown. Over the last two years, the efforts have released approximately 6,000 river herring into Worden’s Pond. Edwards expects to see the first fish returning to spawn in 2015.
“The goal,” Edwards said, “is to have a self-sustaining population of river herring returning each spring. We hope this run eventually could produce tens of thousands of fish.”
Young fish spawned in Worden’s Pond will imprint the “smell” of the Pawcatuck in their memories, their physiology. Fishermen have long believed river herring will smell the freshwater of their natal streams.
“Each run, each river and stream has to function properly to restore these populations,” said Jim Turek, staff member of NOAA’s Restoration Center in Narragansett. “The fish get fed on by every predator out there.”
Another key part of the river-herring restoration is happening in Narragansett’s Point Judith. But while millions of dollars have been spent restoring rivers, very little funding has been available for the study of river herring at sea.
During the winter two kinds of herring swim off our coasts.
One is the river herring. The other is sea herring. Unlike the river herring, the sea herring spends its entire life cycle in the ocean. Sea herring, which arrive in our waters from the north and east each winter, support a large, year-round fishery from Maine to New Jersey, about 100,000 tons, according to the New England Fishery Management Council.
In Galilee, about 10 small-scale, single-net trawlers harvest roughly 6,000 to 7,500 tons per year, according to landing reports from the fishery council.
The trouble is that both these herring can be found together – and a trawler’s net catches both. No one has figured out how to engineer a net that selects one but not the other. How this interaction of the two fish can be avoided is one of the hot topics in New England fisheries conservation work. “I’m getting more and more calls about the whole river-herring and sea-herring story,” said John Hoey, Director of NOAA’s Fisheries Northeast Cooperative Research program. “It’s making for some very interesting work – coming up with ways to try and be predictive, to try and figure out where and when river herring might be.”
On any given day, December into February this winter, you might run into fishery scientists from the University of Massachusetts School of Marine Science and Technology and the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries. You might find a Cornell University fishery biologist, a NOAA study-fleet computer programmer – all of them will be in Galilee working in collaboration with the fishing industry on the so-called River Herring Bycatch Avoidance Program.
“We are working very closely with the Rhode Island herring boats,” Hoey said. “We need them and they need us. This is modern cooperative fishery management – in its infancy.”
Jimmy Ruhle, who comes up to Rhode Island every winter from North Carolina on his trawler the Darana R, said he doesn’t target river herring. “We do all we can to minimize mortality and get away from them. If we work together as a fleet we can do this,” he said. “But all it would take, like in any business, is one or two bad players.”
Next year, NOAA will likely impose a river-herring bycatch cap – which some hope will serve as an important accountability measure in the sea-herring fishery – according to the New England Fishery Management Council. If the cap is reached the sea-herring fishery could be shut down off Rhode Island. The cap amount for southern New England sea-herring bottom trawlers will be 89 tons.
“I’m all for the bycatch-avoidance program, but I have my doubts,” said Save The Bay Baykeeper Tom Kutcher. “We need to be careful on this. One or two bad tows on the big … boats out of New Bedford could wipe out a whole run of river herring.” •

The original version of this story incorrectly identified Save The Bay Baykeeper Tom Kutcher as John Kutcher.

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