River Herring in the Bronx River

I’ve lost track of the number of communities that are working to revive spring spawning runs of anadromous herring – alewives and blueback herring, in particular. Greenwich has a fish passage at a dam on the Mianus River since 1993, Stamford is planning to remove a dam on its Mill River, the state DEP helped pay for a fish passageway on the Oyster River in Old Saybrook, and there are many others.

New York City is now getting into the act, releasing a mess of alewives taken from Brides Brook in East Lyme into the Bronx River, at the Bronx Zoo. Here’s how the Times covered it.

Alewives and blueback herring, which are smaller relatives of American shad, are in dire shape in the northeast, and need all the help they can get. Click on April 2005 in my archives, to the right, and you’ll see a handful of posts I wrote about it last year.