July 9, 2013 — After nearly two decades of lawsuits, appeals and international pressure, it was that unified voice of the Passamaquoddy, and the emerging science on the fish themselves, that finally broke the stalemate on the St. Croix. This spring Maine legislators voted nearly unanimously to re-open the gates to migrating alewives.
At the Milltown Dam in Southwestern New Brunswick, biologist Lee Sochasky stands knee-deep in splashing alewives, counting fish. The silvery, foot-long river herring are arriving by the thousands from the Bay of Fundy, a few miles downriver.
It’s a rite of spring here, but Sochasky says this year is different. Gates that had blocked a fishway upriver for more than two decades are now wide open, and alewives are free to return home to their ancestral spawning grounds.
“We’re expecting a big run this coming week,” Sochasky says. “This is the gateway to the St. Croix. From here, they’ll swim up to spawn for the first time in 23 years through the Grand Falls fishway to the upper lakes and flowages on the St. Croix.”
This fishway is in Canada, but the other side of the river is Maine. In most cases, political boundaries don’t mean much to free-swimming ocean fish. But alewives are anadromous, which means they live mostly at sea but spawn in rivers.
And Sochasky says this is an unusual river.
“The St. Croix is an international river,” she says, “the boundary between the United States and Canada. These fish don’t think of themselves as American or Canadian. And we have to manage them on an international basis also.”
Until recently, politicians in Maine disagreed. In 1995, a group of fishing guides convinced legislators there that alewives were outcompeting smallmouth bass, a fish popular with tourists in the St. Croix’s headwater lakes. The guides claimed the lucrative bass fishing economy was on the brink of collapse. So Maine passed a law that closed the fish ladder at Grand Falls Dam, 19 miles upstream from here.
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