More than two years after the completion of multiple fish passage projects in western Hancock County, the effort appears to be paying off as alewives swim in greater numbers up the Bagaduce River watershed each spring.
Those and other projects have contributed to a resurgence in the upstream migration of alewives, which are a key food supply for bigger wildlife, as well as a growing source of income for Maine fishermen who sell them as food or springtime lobster bait.
From 2017 through 2021, the towns of Penobscot, Sedgwick and Brooksville worked with conservation groups to remove barriers that prevented fish from migrating between the tidal Bagaduce River and five ponds in its watershed.
The idea was to help restore runs for fish, especially alewives, that travel upstream from Penobscot Bay and reproduce in the ponds. The fish spend most of their lives at sea but return to freshwater each spring to spawn. Adults then head back downstream to the ocean, leaving behind their offspring until the young fish make the same seaward run a few months later — and return in later years when it’s their turn to lay and fertilize eggs.
While this spring’s alewife run is still underway, observers are optimistic it will rival last year, when the numbers leapt past what they had seen before. In 2022, for the first time in about a half century, alewives swam upstream into each of the five main ponds that drain into the Bagaduce — Frost, Parker, Pierce, Wight and Walker.
In Wight Pond in Penobscot, more than 125,000 returning alewives were counted in 2023, according to Mike Brown, a scientist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources.
“Traditionally, we’d been seeing numbers around 50,000 to 60,000,” Brown said. “There’s been a significant increase in river herring in that watershed in the past five years.”
River herring is a term that refers to both alewives and blueback herring, two different species that fill similar ecological niches with migratory springtime runs upstream to freshwater ponds.
Bailey Bowden is a Penobscot fisherman who has volunteered countless hours over the past decade to try to restore and improve fish passage in the Bagaduce watershed. With the support of local officials, he teamed up in the 2010s with Ciona Ulbrich of Maine Coast Heritage Trust and others from The Nature Conservancy and Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries to get federal funding for the work.
“I learned this from my grandfather and grand-uncles and uncles,” Bowden said about fishing for alewives in local streams each spring. He said that before the dam at Wight Pond was taken out and replaced with a series of low terraces that the fish can swim over, he would stand at the side of Winslow Stream and lift the fish over the dam with a net.
“I was hand-dipping 30,000 fish myself, every year,” he said. “This run is [now] really healthy and vibrant. I’m all about sustainability.”
Even with the dams removed, Bowden and others voluntarily count fish that swim upstream and remove beaver dams that block their migration.
Bowden is hoping Penobscot can get approval from interstate regulators to open a commercial alewife fishery at Wight Pond, similar to other places in Maine where full-scale commercial fishing is allowed. He has a special experimental permit to harvest there, but says the pond could support a full commercial harvest.
“I’m only allowed 22 bushels each year, but we could probably easily get 500 bushels,” Bowden said.
One bushel is roughly the equivalent of 10 gallons.
But for Bowden, restoring the alewife population is not just about income. The fish reflect the health of the watershed as a whole by serving as a food source not just for people, but for other species, too. Eagles, otters and bigger fish such as striped bass all eat alewives.
“It’s all interconnected,” Bowden said. “You’ve got to get people to understand that.”
Statewide harvest volumes in recent years reflect the pattern seen in the Bagaduce watershed.
In the 1950s, millions were harvested in Maine annually, peaking at 4.5 million pounds in 1956. Landings steadily declined and then, from 1987 through 2001, stayed below 1 million each year.
Annual landings bounced above and below 1 million pounds for a few years in the 2000s, but they have stayed above 1 million since 2008. And in three of the past five years, they’ve topped 2 million, with 2022 and 2023 each netting the highest catches since 1980.
For the first time ever, the value of the annual statewide harvest surpassed $1 million in 2022, and then again last year.
Other fish passage improvements in the past decade have helped boost those annual returns, according to Brown. Projects on the Penobscot River, on Togus Stream in Augusta, and on the Pennamaquan river in Pembroke — where state regulators installed a webcam that the public can use to help count migrating fish — have made it easier for alewives and other species to swim upstream. At China Lake, improvements on Outlet Stream resulted in river herring counts going from zero to more than 2 million last year, he said.
Other ongoing restoration projects include Center Pond off the Kennebec River in Phippsburg and the Sabattus River near Lewiston.
The support of communities in the Bagaduce watershed played a critical role in the improvements to that fish passage, Brown said, and he hopes other Maine communities will follow their example, potentially growing the commercial fishery even more.
“All these runs happen everywhere at once,” he said.
