On a crisp but sunny afternoon at precisely 4:30, my friend Nora began her solitary watch over the submerged fish ladder that allows the indefatigable herring to cross into Yarmouth’s Long Pond, each of them intent on making more herring.
The duration of Nora’s vigil lasted precisely 10 minutes. She never became distracted enough by my questions or the nearby traffic to take her eyes off the wooden ladder. Her job was to count the herring that passed into the pond, and to make that count accurate.
Should one of them push their silvery body of 10 inches or so all the way up the ladder and into the pond, Nora said, ``I want to applaud,’’ and then added, ``Inwardly, I say hooray!’’
After all, the fish, as emblematic in these parts as the cod and lobster, had come four miles from the Atlantic up Parker’s River to reach their annual spawning ground. Along the way, some were eaten, others simply grew weak and never made it.
Counts like Nora’s twice-weekly exercise had been going since 2007, right after a moratorium was imposed on harvesting the much-depleted fishery. When her watch was done, she opened the box hung on a nearby post that held the necessary paperwork so she could write down the number of herring she counted. That data was collected at 17 similar spots from Falmouth to Wellfleet from mid-March to see just how well the species was doing, And, just as important, whether habitat restoration from clearing out the branches and leaves in the rivers by volunteer crews to the multimillion-dollar infrastructure projects that include culvert replacement were doing any good.
The answer to those questions is a qualified maybe. Mike Palmer, restoration ecologist at the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, which oversees these annual counts, told me last year was a down year, but this year’s numbers are somewhat encouraging—emphasis on somewhat.
Nora’s team captain, David Sutherland of the Cape Cod Salties Sportfishing Club and volunteer supervisor of Long Pond’s 25 counters, sees signs of hope. By the last monthly count on April 30, 484 had been spotted, crushing the total at the same time last year, which was under 400.
Encouraging, says Palmer, but not even close to conclusive. As for the future of the species, Palmer tells me: I wish I had a crystal ball.
What IS certain is the herring’s rich history. It became as important as food, bait and fertilizer to the peninsula’s earliest settlers as it was a meal for the osprey, stripers and other critters. The rights to fish herring were sold in Colonial times by towns including Wellfleet, turning a tidy profit that subsidized village infrastructure. Herring were in such demand that they nearly made the endangered species list, according to Sutherland, if not for that moratorium 20-plus years ago.
It’s the army of volunteers that have taken it from there, folks ranging from high school students to retirees like Sutherland who was a biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife and my friend, Nora Lockwood Tooher, an accomplished journalist who years ago tutored this neophyte through his first ugly attempts at a news story.
Why does Nora count? It’s a chance, she said, to give back for the privilege of living here on Cape Cod. Amen to that.
I’m proud of my friend and all the others for the attention paid to the herring run, certainly one of the Cape’s natural wonders, which are what make this place so special.
Back at the fish ladder that afternoon, Nora saw no herring and promptly landed a zero in the paperwork. Demoralized? She reminded me of the words of her team captain, Sutherland: When counting herring, zeroes are just as important as one’s and five’s.
May we regard all our apparent losses with an equal measure of equanimity.
