The Founding Fish (11 page)
Authors: John McPhee
Almost in afterthought, he remarked that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Serviceâconsidering the costs of everything from boats and gasoline to waders, lures, and rodsâhad computed the dollar value in the Northeast of one shad caught in one day from a boat ($45) and from shore ($22.50). “If you've got seven hundred and fifty thousand shad in the Kennebec River and the catch rate is ten per cent, they're worth three million to six million dollars. Multiply that by all the rivers in Maine, and the value of a restored shad fishery is huge. But not as huge as some things. Try duck meat, try woodcock, if you want to see a big number.”
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rifting on the Delaware in the evening, I sometimes go down through the flat shallows and the rings of spawning shad. Their dorsal finsâout of water like shark fins, like conning towersâare sketching out the rings, males hanging close to females, nose to gill. This is in June, usually, but the spawning begins in May and goes on into July. Some individuals mate and move on upriver, mate again and move upriver. Others seem to choose a deep pool and stay in it, day after day for a week or two, going off into pebbly, sandy shallows to copulate at night. They will even mate in the daytime if the day is dark enough with clouds and rain. The spawning grounds are known to fishermen as shad wallows.
rifting on the Delaware in the evening, I sometimes go down through the flat shallows and the rings of spawning shad. Their dorsal finsâout of water like shark fins, like conning towersâare sketching out the rings, males hanging close to females, nose to gill. This is in June, usually, but the spawning begins in May and goes on into July. Some individuals mate and move on upriver, mate again and move upriver. Others seem to choose a deep pool and stay in it, day after day for a week or two, going off into pebbly, sandy shallows to copulate at night. They will even mate in the daytime if the day is dark enough with clouds and rain. The spawning grounds are known to fishermen as shad wallows.
People on the river still say that when the Dutchman's breeches bloom, it's time to go for shad. Or when forsythia blooms. And, of course, when the shadbush blooms. Almost everyone mentions the shadbush, but few as gracefully as the fish-and-fishing encyclopedist A. J. McClane: “The shad comes into New England's rivers when the shadbush blossoms in clusters of white flowers and a mottled brown caddis or shadfly emerges in great clouds from the water to dance in a warming sun.” The biologist, like the shad, will prefer to note the temperature of the water. While schools come into the river when the water gets up beyond forty Fahrenheit, and spawning begins around seventy, the fish are so individual and idiosyncratic that even after the shadbush has turned from white to greenâin the middle of May at the height of the spring migrationâthey are everywhere in a river from sea to source. Radio-tagging has shown that they can go thirty miles in a day if they want to. They may not want to. The migration, at its peak, is bewilderingly spread out. While shad are still being netted by commercial fishermen in Delaware Bay, the vanguard of the run is three hundred miles upriver.
Since shad seem to require a large critical mass in order to detonate successful spawning, they go into the slow shallows in considerable numbers and make those endless Olympic rings. After fishing since April to invisible fish, a fisherman could ask pardon if he feels a little lust himself on seeing the circles in the river. I will confess that I have paddled to the edge of shad wallows and permitted a small dart, presented by a fly line, to drift into one of those sun-and-planetary systems. Whatever else might be made of it, to do thatâto cast a
-ounce dart into that sceneâis to know what it is to be ignored. Try again. Again. The dart is in front of their noses, ignored. The various fish are like collected crop dusters working the same field. Very rarely, a buck will hit the dart, perhaps to protect the spawning ring. The buck is usually furious, as who, copulating, would not be if yanked out of bed on a barbed
bit of wire? The buck leaps, flips end over end, dives, races, sounds. One ran so far with my line that the backing was about to expire. I stopped the line and the hook flew out of the fish.
-ounce dart into that sceneâis to know what it is to be ignored. Try again. Again. The dart is in front of their noses, ignored. The various fish are like collected crop dusters working the same field. Very rarely, a buck will hit the dart, perhaps to protect the spawning ring. The buck is usually furious, as who, copulating, would not be if yanked out of bed on a barbedbit of wire? The buck leaps, flips end over end, dives, races, sounds. One ran so far with my line that the backing was about to expire. I stopped the line and the hook flew out of the fish.
If you drive to the upper Delaware from central New Jersey, as I do frequently in spring, you go around the end of Jenny Jump Mountain, and, on Route 46 in Manunka Chunk, first glimpse the river. It tells you sometimes more than you hoped to know. Early on, it may be high, fast, and wide, its riffles drowned where no one could stand, and later it is low and channeled, its anatomy exposed. When you see scaffolding thereâas you do every yearâyou know that your season is over. The scaffolding stands in the river, far out from either bank. Weighted and firm to the bottom, it rises maybe three feet above the river's surface and is capped with wooden planks. Bow hunters stand on these platforms and shoot arrows at shad.
A week or so before, a bow hunter could have stood on one of those platforms and shot all day, hitting nothing. A bow hunter could sooner stop a ray of light than a high-season swimming shad. But now, at the end of time, the archers are able to hit them because the shad have slowed way down. They are languid as they swim, their bodies in sinuous motion, the big forked tails slowly sweeping. I stopped there to eat a sandwich one day, and saw three men standing like Saracens on three mid-river parapets. They were peering into the water, bows drawn. Their arrows were connected to lines that were connected to reels. Suddenly an arrow entered the water. The bowman reeled in and lifted up a big shad pierced straight through. After withdrawing the arrow, he dropped the shad in the river. The evident purpose of the line was to enable the archer to retrieve the arrow. Shoot and release.
People speak of a “mud taste” in shad taken in late season. They say the shad “taste of the river.” They do taste different, sometimes, but they have not been eating and the taste is not from the river. Fasting since they left the ocean, they have sustained
their energy by depleting their own bodies. “Someone is calling it mud taste for lack of a better term,” Boyd Kynard has remarked. “It's off tasteâfrom oil depletion, muscle breakdown.”
their energy by depleting their own bodies. “Someone is calling it mud taste for lack of a better term,” Boyd Kynard has remarked. “It's off tasteâfrom oil depletion, muscle breakdown.”
Like Atlantic salmon, shad spawn and die; and like Atlantic salmon, some shad spawn and do not die. The correlation with latitude is distinct. In the St. Johns River in Floridaâthe southern extreme of the range of the speciesâthey all die. Below Cape Fear, North Carolina, spawned-out shad, with few exceptions, die. In the rivers of the middle statesâin the Delaware, the Hudson, the Connecticutâroughly fifty per cent die. In the rivers of Maine and Canada, most shad spawn, go back to the ocean, and return in later years to spawn again. Typically, a doomed roe shad in Florida carries twice as many eggs as a northerly roe shad that spawns and survives.
In the Delaware, as in other Middle Atlantic rivers, shad that survive turn and go downstream very soon after spawning. Fishermen call them downrunners. Of their number, fewer than ten per cent will return another year to spawn again. In Maine rivers, about a third of the migration will come back and spawn again, some of them four or five times. The shad in West Coast rivers survive and repeat in percentages comparable to Maine's. (All Pacific salmon, after spawning, die.) Generally, shad that are repeat spawners are larger than virgin shad. A six-pound roe is experienced; a three-and-a-half-pound roe is almost certainly a virgin. Almost. The Delaware River's eleven-pound one-ounce, all-timerecord shad was a seven-year-old virgin.
When the fish slow down and in themselves declare the end of the season, you can stand on a rock in the river and watch them go by. These are the ghost days. The fish, always in single file as they climb into faster water and advance the migration, are gray and spectral. But they keep going. You can dangle a dart in their path and watch them in hundreds swim past and ignore it, but if you throw out a proper cast and let it swing downcurrent an occasional
shad will hit. They may be tired but they're not defeated. One evening in late June, standing in white water, I lost three out of five asâwith ten thumbs and dimwittedâI impatiently thought I could horse them into an undersized net. They had let themselves be reeled in as if they were docile. They rebelled when the line was short. One was a big roe shad. Her resistance was about fifty per cent of what it would have been a couple of weeks earlier. She somersaulted three or four times but did not clear the surface, flipping instead like a racing swimmer. That day's diary says, “She was, in two senses, a depleted roe. But keep perspective on the struggle she put up. Half a shad is twice a trout.”
shad will hit. They may be tired but they're not defeated. One evening in late June, standing in white water, I lost three out of five asâwith ten thumbs and dimwittedâI impatiently thought I could horse them into an undersized net. They had let themselves be reeled in as if they were docile. They rebelled when the line was short. One was a big roe shad. Her resistance was about fifty per cent of what it would have been a couple of weeks earlier. She somersaulted three or four times but did not clear the surface, flipping instead like a racing swimmer. That day's diary says, “She was, in two senses, a depleted roe. But keep perspective on the struggle she put up. Half a shad is twice a trout.”
Below Holyoke Dam, Armand Charest once told me about a fisherman at the end of the season who caught a shad that had been lying dead on the bottom of the Connecticut River. The dart was hooked perfectly in its lip. I could not quite match that feat, but thirty miles upstream, at the Rock Dam in Turners Falls at the end of one season, I did hook into a roe shad that died on the line. It thrashed around for a couple of minutes but did not move in the net, or thereafter. I thought of the matter of “mud taste” and was wary of its future on the table. I wondered if the flesh would be deteriorated, and was a little wary about baking the fish. That night, nonetheless, I stuffed it and baked it. Even that specimen was, indisputably,
Alosa sapidissima.
Its specific name means “most savory.”
Alosa sapidissima.
Its specific name means “most savory.”
S
had fry and fingerlings are eaten, evidently, by just about every kind of predator that can get its mouth around them, while shad in turn prey all their lives only on the animal titbits collectively known as zooplankton. After four or five days growing in eggs, shad fry hatch out into the river by the hundreds of millions, and are decimated immediately by minnows, shiners, and almost any
small fish that happens to be aroundâeaten alive even as they are still absorbing their own yolk sacs. About five weeks laterâas larvae in cloudy black massesâthey are consumed in even greater numbers. Small wonder that some parents are instinctively driven to place their young as far upstream as they possibly can, to be nearer sources of zooplankton, where they might gain a slight advantage in speed and size over others they will join. As juveniles âtwo, three, four inches long across the summerâthey look remarkably like miniature adult shad in every detail but their huge, disproportional eyes.
had fry and fingerlings are eaten, evidently, by just about every kind of predator that can get its mouth around them, while shad in turn prey all their lives only on the animal titbits collectively known as zooplankton. After four or five days growing in eggs, shad fry hatch out into the river by the hundreds of millions, and are decimated immediately by minnows, shiners, and almost any
small fish that happens to be aroundâeaten alive even as they are still absorbing their own yolk sacs. About five weeks laterâas larvae in cloudy black massesâthey are consumed in even greater numbers. Small wonder that some parents are instinctively driven to place their young as far upstream as they possibly can, to be nearer sources of zooplankton, where they might gain a slight advantage in speed and size over others they will join. As juveniles âtwo, three, four inches long across the summerâthey look remarkably like miniature adult shad in every detail but their huge, disproportional eyes.
Juveniles spend the summer in and around their birthplace. When the planet orbits far enough to lower the water temperature to sixty degrees, nearly all of them move downstream, joining others and then others and millions of others in the great mass transfer of energy known to science as the outmigration. A small number of juveniles hold in the river all winter, as do a few adult shad. But nearly all juveniles join the outmigration. Temperature is not the only factor drawing them toward the ocean. Cellular structures within them have changed, and they are losing their ability to live in fresh water.
Now comes a scene that in aesthetic appeal all but equals the circles of June. Everyone who is still on the water in very late summer and early fall (long since fishing for something else) remarks on the dimpling of the baby shad. They are coming down the river in galactic schools, and at dusk especially they will turn the water white. They dimple, dapple, leap into the air. They seem like a squall of silver rain. It has long been said that they are jumping for insects. What the human eye sees, as it observes the dimpling of the shad on the blue river bordered with turning leaves, is early Impressionism rooted in the Hudson River Schoolâthe peace and the quiet of Nature with touches of silvery motion in it, an Arcadian pastoral vision. To a side-scan sonar, it looks like this: bronzebacks
that can take in two and more shadlings in one swallow are coming up under the juvenile shad and eating them from below. That would make you dimple. A bronzeback is a smallmouth bass. In complete terror, the young shad are struggling for the top of the water column, and many leap into the air. Boyd Kynard, who has done some of the sonar studies, says the fish that lead the dimpling are coming from the bottom of the school. Others follow, while the school as a whole tries to turn itself inside out and upward. “The predators attack only those individuals in the low part of the school. So the school struggles within itself for the higher positions, and dimpling results. It's a survival mechanism.”
that can take in two and more shadlings in one swallow are coming up under the juvenile shad and eating them from below. That would make you dimple. A bronzeback is a smallmouth bass. In complete terror, the young shad are struggling for the top of the water column, and many leap into the air. Boyd Kynard, who has done some of the sonar studies, says the fish that lead the dimpling are coming from the bottom of the school. Others follow, while the school as a whole tries to turn itself inside out and upward. “The predators attack only those individuals in the low part of the school. So the school struggles within itself for the higher positions, and dimpling results. It's a survival mechanism.”
Historically, American shad encountered few predators in Northeastern rivers. For most of the nineteenth century and back through all of colonial time, the rivers in autumn were sluggish with fingerling shad. Kynard calls this the “precentrarchid community.” Centrarchids include sunfish, crappies, and black bass (a term that incorporates smallmouths and largemouths). Centrarchids are native to the American South, and were introduced into the Hudson and the Connecticut. There were some in the Delaware but more were stocked. Channel catfish also gobble up juvenile shad, as do pike, perch, and muskellunge. Sturgeons gorge on them, and so do striped bass. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the striper populations were strongly on the rise in the Connecticut, the Hudson, and the Delaware. In fall, they were resident in the main-stem Delaware from mile 1 to the sea buoy. Of the overall effect of every kind of bass on shad, Kynard says, “They really hammer 'em.”
Human beings do not much alter the outmigration. The shadlings get past dams. I will confess that when I left Waldoboro I went down to L.L. Beanâat Sam Chapman's suggestionâand bought some artificial mosquitoes on No. 22 hooks. They were so well tied they seemed to be ready to drink from your arm. On a 6X
tippet, you lay the mosquito on the river and pull it along the surface where it cuts a miniature wake. Pow! Zap! The tenderest of shad are fighting for your mosquito. You hook, land, and pocket six or seven, and, as soon as you can, saute them in butter. You cook the whole four-inch fishâhead on, scales on, fins intact. And that's what you eatâinnards and outards, head and tail, the whole baby shad. Sapidissima!
tippet, you lay the mosquito on the river and pull it along the surface where it cuts a miniature wake. Pow! Zap! The tenderest of shad are fighting for your mosquito. You hook, land, and pocket six or seven, and, as soon as you can, saute them in butter. You cook the whole four-inch fishâhead on, scales on, fins intact. And that's what you eatâinnards and outards, head and tail, the whole baby shad. Sapidissima!
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