Bradford Chase of the Massachusetts Division of Marine Fisheries is standing beside the Johnson’s Flume herring run in Harwich, where I’m watching him check and measure a bucket of twenty just-caught fish.
He's here soon after the town of Harwich opened a recreational herring fishery for the first time in twenty years.
“You have two species here, alewife and blueback herring,” Chase says. “We're trying to see when the bluebacks arrive. These fish have been all alewife so far—299 female. We do this at eight sites in Massachusetts and track age, sex, length, and species. It helps us understand if the populations are healthy. And we do feel this population is healthy enough to support a small harvest.”
The fish Chase is counting today are part of that harvest: the first in the state since Massachusetts placed a moratorium on harvesting river herring in 2005. Alewife and blueback herring are anadromous: fish that spend most of their lives out at sea but return in the spring to swim upstream into local rivers and ponds to spawn. Historically, the return of the herring has been a sign of spring, and a huge local fishery, but in the early 2000s, populations got so low—down an estimated 99 percent from historic highs—that Massachusetts made possessing and catching the fish illegal for anyone beyond tribal citizens.
“Since then, there’s been steady improvements in many runs,” Chase says. “Not huge improvements but steady improvements. We always wanted to reopen the runs, to give people the chance to shore harvest like we’re seeing here today for bait or for food.”
The decision has been controversial. Members of the Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe showed up when permits went on sale, both to protest the opening of the resource to non-natives and to buy permits to keep as many as they could off the market. Still, the opening of a small recreational harvest has gone ahead. Stephanie Ridenour is the Director of Natural Resources for the Town of Harwich.
“The harvest to date is about half a percent, so it's very minimal,” Ridenour says. “It's supposed to be a small harvest. It is a cultural celebration--being able to take a little bit, whether for bait or for sustenance, and really having some appreciation for the resources we have in Harwich.”
The day I visited the run, most people said they were taking the fish not to eat but as bait. Scott Adams, who lives in Harwich, was able to scoop up the twenty fish his permit allowed in just a few minutes.
“It doesn't take very long when they're running, because usually the locks are all full,” Adams said. “If you look down, you'll just see them everywhere. This is basically what it was like 22 years ago when we used to come down. It’s like bass candy.”
Harwich can shut down the fishery at any time if fisheries managers believe the harvest is becoming unsustainable. When I reached out for comment from Mashpee Wampanoag Tribal members, elder Kitty Hendricks-Miller told me that she believes it’s already unsustainable and that the decision to open the harvest is premature and should wait until the promising numbers we’re seeing keep increasing.
Biologist Barbara Brennesel, who helps monitor the herring run in Wellfleet, says given the huge decline in river herring populations that’s taken place all over the state during the past century and the very modest recoveries most runs are just beginning to see, defining what sustainable means—and what baseline we’re sustaining—is tricky.
“I don't think it's going to have a big impact the way that they've structured this,” Brennesel says. “But I want to backtrack a little bit and say that these are fisheries management plans and the fisheries manage the harvest based on maximal yield with sustainability. They're not the Division of Marine Conservation and Recovery—it's fisheries.”
In other words, a sustainable fisheries management plan is written to sustain current populations—not to try to restore them to historic highs. Here’s Chase again.
“Clearly we haven’t come back to those levels,” he said. “But at the same time, this run has posted two counts in recent years of a million fish. And to us, a million fish was always a sign of a big run. So, I think there’s been some improvements that can allow a modest harvest. But we have to acknowledge that we're not turning the clock back.”
It’s a shift that’s opened a bigger conversation—about what traditions we’re preserving and why, and how in a changing world we can best balance our own needs with the health of our local ecosystems.
