The Fish Are Spawning in the Mianus in Greenwich Again This Year

About 90,000 anadromous fish -- alewives, mainly, but blueback herring as well -- made it over the fish ladder on the Mianus River in Greenwich in the spring of 2007. That number amazed fisheries biologists, because river herring populations have been dropping all over, and it's illegal to catch them in Connecticut.

Back in March, at the Long Island Sound Citizens Summit conference in Bridgeport, Steve Gephard, the director of inland fisheries for the Connecticut DEP, made a presentation and said that there were 44 fishways -- passages to help spawning fish make it over dams -- in Connecticut, and a 45th being built in Darien.

By coincidence he sat down next to me after his talk, and I asked him about Greenwich. He said the incredible number of fish on the Mianus was an eyebrow-raiser but that for reasons they don't understand it might also be an anomaly, a one-time surge that they can't explain.

But that does not seem to be the case. The Greenwich Time ran a Q&A with Brian Eltz, an assistant in Greenwich's conservation department whose job it is to coordinate the river herring count. Here's an excerpt:

What's been going on over at the fishway?

At the fishway, we've had a tremendous herring run this year. We've passed about 82,000 river herring so far and about 77,000 of the alewives and the bluebacks just started coming out. We have about 20 volunteers there who have been helping, so we've been able to collect good data.

How is our fishway unique?

Well, it's got the best run in the state of herring at a fishway.

What does that mean?

We have the highest number. What it is is that we have a lot of good habitat like the pond and being so close to the coast. It's good access for fish to come in and spawn in that habitat.

So it's not an anomaly. But it's still hard to explain.

Legislative Help for Anadromous Fish in Wallingford

More spawning news: Wallingford has approved construction of a fish ladder at the Wallace Dam on the Quinnipiac River, here.

There are two amazing things about this:

1) for years, the executive director of the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association has been netting fish and lifting them over the dam, so they can continue upstream to spawn (of course spawning is one thing; getting back down to the salt water later is another). They call this a fish rodeo.

And 2) the executive director of the Quinnipiac River Watershed Association is Mary Mushinsky, who also happens to be a member of the Connecticut State Legislature and the assistant majority leader.

That means the state legislature has two professional environmentalists in its ranks. Here's the other. America is a big country and I'm sure Connecticut isn't the only state where this is so. Nevertheless, it's encouraging.

Help Fish Spawn in Greenwich

The number of fish that swim upstream to spawn in Long Island Sound's watershed is ridiculously low. Every stream -- literally -- used to have a spring run, but dams have blocked them off. To compensate (we're always trying to compensate for our environmental mistakes; we never seem to recognize them ahead of time and avoid them), a number of towns have worked with the Connecticut DEP to build fish ladders and passageways.

One of the best and most active is on the Mianus River, in Greenwich. If I lived near closer, I'd volunteer to do this.

The Dammed Saugatuck

I wonder if anyone is keeping track of all the fish ladders and dam removal projects taking place in the Long Island Sound watershed to help restore the spawning runs of alewives and blueback herring? Bob Miller, of the Danbury News Times, writes here of the Saugatuck River watershed and an interesting collaboration between The Nature Conservancy and the local towns.

The river, which starts near Danbury and flows to the Sound, has 110 dams. It also has a new fish counter on a ladder on one of the lower dams. It counted 22 fish the first day it was in operation.