The image with this post probably seems a little surreal or abstract; it's certainly not an example of high-definition nature photography. But it gives a sense of what you see in April, when herring first arrive in a freshwater creek. You detect movement of some kind, but you're not sure. Your eye has to adjust to seeing the river bottom for the first time in months. Without polarized glasses, it's difficult to discern what's happening. But, if you stand still and focus on a spot in the river, soon you see them – and soon a whole school of them might appear.
Each spring for going on 30 years now, I've watched herring swim up Maryland creeks from the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay. They are blueback herring and, since 2011, protected from harvest by the state because their numbers are not what they used to be. In the used-to-be, they were so abundant that they were captured for decades in nets until fisheries scientists noticed the schools getting smaller. The same thing happened to the hickory and American shad that follow the herring from the Atlantic into the Bay during spring migration. These fish can travel more than 1,000 miles to reach their spawning pools.
A memory of my Massachusetts boyhood: My brother Eddie and I lying on stones along the historic herring run in Pembroke, trying to catch a single herring with our hands. We always failed, of course. But it was an exhilarating experience. We felt their strong, slithery bodies slip through and over our hands in the cold, freshwater of the old run, and we came away with our hands smelling of ocean.
The historic herring run in Pembroke, Mass.
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