A multimillion dollar replacement of a failing fishway on a St. Croix River dam will begin next year to reopen 600 miles of sea-run fish habitat.
Congress recently awarded $7.8 million for the new fish lift at Baileyville’s Woodland Dam. It is one of several projects on the river aiming to boost the state’s fishing industries by returning populations of fish once common there — particularly alewives.
The existing six-decade-old Baileyville fishway, located at the Woodland Pulp paper mill dam, is at risk of failure and limits migration of fish returning inland to spawn, according to the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
Its replacement aims to open 60,000 acres of alewife habitat and increase passage for river eels.
The project should benefit Maine’s high-value lobster and elver industries, said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins, who advocated for the funding as vice chair of the U.S. Senate appropriations committee. The fish lift has also received millions of dollars worth of grants from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Program, plus the Maine Jobs Recovery Act.
Alewives, also known as river herring, are a lobster bait source, food for other commercially harvested fish like tuna and halibut and another prey for predators of the endangered Atlantic Salmon, according to the Maine DMR. Young American eels supply the lucrative elver industry.
Restoration projects across the state have returned historic alewife runs in recent years, including on the Kennebec, Penobscot and Sebasticook rivers.
Projects elsewhere on the St. Croix, including last year’s removal of a Calais dam, are also expected to increase shad, blueback herring and sea lamprey populations.
DMR’s director of the bureau of sea run fisheries and habitat, Sean Ledwin, said the project could create the “most significant” river herring population in the country, hosting “tens of millions” of fish each year.