April 26, 2012 – It’s not easy counting river herring. Occupational hazards include eye strain from staring at the same spot of water for 10 minutes, boredom when the fish aren’t there, and panic when they surge past in such high numbers that counting seems impossible. There’s also the occasional aggressive swan or swooping seagull to contend with.
Being a herring is no piece of cake, either. Bowing to nature’s imperative, the fish migrate in the spring from the ocean back to their birthplaces in freshwater ponds up and down the East Coast – a course studded with such obstacles as hungry striped bass and cormorants, low water, trawlers’ nets, human poachers, manmade dams, and pollution.
“It certainly is a gantlet they have to run through,’’ said John Sheppard of the state Department of Marine Fisheries. “It’s almost like a war of attrition just to get to the spawning grounds.’’
This year, however, the herring are winning that battle, with record numbers of counters reporting thousands of fish.
At Weymouth’s herring run in Jackson Square, for example, the count was up to 200,000 as of April 20, and the season has weeks to go, according to town Herring Warden George Loring.
While far lower than the peak of 860,000 fish recorded in 1995, the count is on track to overtake last year’s approximately 260,000, he said. And that number was up from 80,000 in 2005.
“There have been some spectacular pulses of fish coming through [in Weymouth]. It’s just been shoulder-to-shoulder fish, if fish had shoulders,’’ said Scott Dowd, a freshwater biologist at New England Aquarium and member of the Weymouth Herring Committee.
The high numbers in Weymouth and elsewhere along the coast south of Boston are welcome news to those who have been watching the river herring population dwindle in years past.
While there have been some fluctuations, the number of herring declined so much that the state has banned river herring fishing and sales since 2006 to allow the stock to rebuild, according to Sheppard.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe.