October 26, 2023 — A black unmarked truck is rumbling across Chain Bridge, its back seat piled with camo, firearms, coolers, and gear. Up front are two game wardens with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

“The water is so low,” one says, eyeing the Potomac out the window. “The lowest I’ve ever seen it in my career.”

Over the bridge, on the Virginia side, they stash their truck in a gulch by the woods, hike a deer trail, then split up. One descends the hill toward the river. The other climbs a steep bluff, stopping by a stand of oaks. Beneath him, a small stream empties into the Potomac, and he trains his binoculars on its mouth. There, he sees it: white glimmers on the water, the surface churning with fish. The herring are here, leaping into the tide pools. The spawning run is on.

Each spring, from the depths of the North Atlantic, millions of herring migrate up coastal rivers in vast schools, often crossing hundreds of miles to spawn. For weeks, they battle the currents, the predators, the pollution, the storms, drawn irrevocably to their natal waters—the streams and creeks where they were born—where they’ll shoot clouds of roe and milt into the water, then ride the current back out to sea. For many of them, Chain Bridge is the finish line; beneath its concrete piers is the mouth of Pimmit Run, a small creek choked with rocks and industrial rubble, one of the best herring hatcheries around.

With one hand, Sergeant Rich Goszka holds his binoculars to his face, and with the other, he grabs his phone. “There’s fish in the eddy and they’re trying to spawn right now,” he tells his partner, Mark Sanitra, who’s camouflaged somewhere below. “I can see them flashing from up on this hill.” Just then, a man in a gray shirt wanders a few dozen feet up the creek and sticks his hands into the water. “Yeah, I see him,” Goszka says, his voice testy. “Hang on—just hang on. Yeah, he’s trying to catch them by hand.”

 Read the full article at the Washingtonian