Reviving Alewife Runs

by Fishermen’s Voice Staff

Adam Campbell is a lobsterman on North Haven, in Penobscot Bay. About 10 years ago he started raising oysters in a salt pond his property borders on the north side of the island. Patience and care has made Campbell a supplier of oysters to some of the best white tablecloth restaurants.

In the winter of 2008 Jeff Pierce of Dresden, Maine was on the island doing carpentry work when he saw Campbell’s North Haven Oyster Company sign and stopped in to buy a few oysters. There was 2 feet of ice on the pond at the time, so Adam started a chainsaw and harvested a few oysters for Pierce.

Pierce was wearing an Alewife Harvesters of Maine sweatshirt, which started a conversation about alewives.

Pierce is founder of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine. Massive ancient alewife runs in the rivers of Maine began to decline when industrial dams blocked passage and pollution fouled the water in the 1800’s. Recent efforts to remove unused dams, build fish ladders and reduce pollution have begun to restore the alewife stocks in Maine.

When Adam asked about the suitability of his place for alewives Pierce told him conditions there were ideal except for an 18-inch culvert pipe that went through a causeway that acts as a dam. That dam made the 16 acre pond, the culvert pipe filled the pond at high tide and remained submerged until the tide dropped. But Pierce said alewives would not swim through that 18-inch culvert pipe, it was too small.

Pierce became instrumental in getting contacts and funding for making changes to the culvert and restoring alewives at the fresh pond. Maine Coastal Planning, a part of USDA, the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) and the Natural Resources Council were all involved in the assessment, approval and funding of a new culvert. One goal was to protect the salt pond and the 80 acre fresh water pond which flowed into the salt pond. The fresh water pond also supplies drinking water to North Haven.

Campbell got on the DMR alewife stocking list. Alewives swim upstream to fresh water, spawn and swim back to sea in the fall. Coordinating the alewife run, the DMR harvest and the trip to North Haven was a challenge. The DMR would supply egg laden alewives from the Kennebec River, but their trucks were not allowed on the ferry. The trucks carried oxygen tanks to maintain oxygen levels in the water and the oxygen presented an explosion threat.

The private company Island Transporter was hired to bring the two DMR trucks out to North Haven. This $1600 expense would come out of Campbell’s pocket, but he said, “it was the easiest check I ever wrote”. The fish arrived on Memorial Day weekend 2011. The 2,800 alewives were poured into the fresh pond where they will spawn, the eggs will hatch and in August / September the 2 inch fry will swim down the stream to the salt pond and through the culvert back to the ocean.

In three or four years these alewives, imprinted by the pond in which they were born, will return there to repeat the cycle again and again. The pond will be stocked again next spring. A fish ladder is planned to make it easier for the alewives returning from the ocean.
The last commercial harvest of alewives at Campbell’s salt pond was in the 1930’s. The first the town recorded was in 1801, and the very first run was around the beginning of time.

The Maine DMR has been involved with alewife restoration projects for 25 years. The Damariscotta is an historic run but the success story of Maine’s alewife efforts is the Sabasticook River at Benton Falls. Between 2.7 & 2.8 million alewives pass the falls now and the project started with zero, said Nate Gray of the DMR. The Kennebec has also rebounded, some work has been done on the Saco and the Penobscot has just begun.

In addition to dams there is a fair amount of politics involved in getting restoration established. In southern New England municipal water politics have trumphed restoration of this keystone species. Washing the car and plumping up the lawn is deemed more important than this species which everything from whales down to bacteria live on. Humans are included somewhere that spectrum of what eats alewives.

The largest eagle aggregation is on the Sabasticook and all of the larger eagle aggregations are on an alewife river in Maine. Gray noted that it was a relatively short time between the 16th century and the 1940’s that our rivers were denuded of fish. We are now facing the reality, he said, that the resource is not inexhaustible and the importance of species like the alewife is apparent.

The restoration of cod, haddock, and all groundfish in the Gulf of Maine may be more dependent on the restoration of alewives than on the endless stream of failed federal regulatory amendments.

As a resource, alewives are eaten by many of the ocean’s fish. They are a food source for humans and the preferred bait for lobstermen. Alewives were an important food source in colonial New England. Until the late 1800’s barrels of salted alewives were shipped around the country for human consumption. Smoked alewives were also popular, but are rarely seen today. A source of lobster bait could be a very important resource for Maine’s most valuable fishery.

Campbell watches the entrance to the salt pond in the spring and fall to assure free passage. Brush or anything that obstructs passage will send the alewives somewhere else. As filter feeders alewives clean the water they inhabit. They arrive in time to feed on algae, which reduces summer blooms. This is a fish that works hard to be dinner for practically everything else in the food chain.

It will be a few years before Adam Campbell can harvest alewives at his pond for dinner or bait. In the meantime he’ll be harvesting and shipping 30,000 to 150,000 oysters a year from the salt pond before it freezes over.