"No Shad" -- A Fuller Story

More than three years ago I wrote a post that I called No Shad, which you can read here. Today a reader in Connecticut named Joe Zalentz left a comment to that post, and it was apt enough for me to cut and paste, and to use here, so it's easier to find. Here's what Joe wrote:

I have a shad museum in Higganum,Ct.This year there was a slight increase of shad in the Ct. River which gives us hope for the future. There were enough fish netted to provide sales at the supermarkets and for shad bakes. The shad sold are usually deboned by skilled deboners because most people are turned off by the many bones. The fish is delicious as well as the roe(the female fish eggs. Check out the Haddam Shad Museum on your search engine.

Plenty of Shad in the Connecticut

The news from the Hudson lately has been bad -- the state has further restricted shad fishing and at least one shad festival didn't even serve shad this year.

So what do we make of this: the shad run in the Connecticut River is excellent in 2008. Almost 63,000 have been counted at the Holyoke Dam, in Massachusetts. This page, from the Fish and Wildlife Service, summarizes the number of anadromous fish counted in the Connecticut. Some dams have fish ladders or other passageways to help fish get upstream; at Holyoke, apparently, they ride a sort of elevator:

Holyoke lifted 7,871 Shad on Friday, 11,619 Shad of Saturday and 11,901 Shad yesterday.

None of this means everything is right with the world, of course. Look, for example, at the number of alewives and blueback herring that have been counted.

To me, what it shows is that the one thing we can be sure of is that when we think we know what's going on in the natural world, there's a good chance we're wrong.

No Shad

Back in the 1980s, the Soundkeeper sued Norwalk to get the city to upgrade its then-abominable sewage treatment plant. John Cronin, who was then the Hudson Riverkeeper, went to Norwalk to help announce the suit and, to drive his point home about how bad water quality was, said that at the upcoming Norwalk Oyster Festival, they wouldn't even be serving oysters from Norwalk.

I remembered that a decade later when someone told me that there were so few shad left in the Hudson that Cronin was on his way down to the Delaware River to buy shad to serve at Riverkeeper's annual Hudson River shad-fest.

And now another decade or so has past and the Riverkeeper's shad-fest has come to this: shad will be completely missing from the menu:

For the past few years, Riverkeeper, the Hudson River conservation group, has been easing the fish off the menu of the festival it stages in Garrison, N.Y. This year’s event, on May 18, will be completely shad-free.

The issue is simple conservation. Shad swim from the ocean to the upper reaches of rivers each spring to spawn. In the Hudson River, the number of shad has been dwindling because of overfishing and decades of environmental sins.

This year, some biologists predict the run might be the smallest in memory, prompting the state Department of Conservation to enact emergency restrictions on commercial and recreational shad fishing. The shad is the only Hudson River fish that can be sold commercially.

In a show of support for Riverkeeper’s decision, shad was taken off the menu at the Hudson River Maritime Festival May 10, too. Their motto: Please don’t eat the shad. Save the shad.

Sad.

If you want to read something else that is sad, in retrospect, read William Warner's Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay. Sad because the incredible bounty he wrote about 40 years ago has been so severely compromised, in the same way that the Hudson has been compromised by the loss of shad and Long Island Sound compromised by the loss of lobsters. I read Warner's book while I was working on mine, just as I read Bob Boyle's The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History. Warner died yesterday at age 88.

Where are the Shad?

I haven't seen shad or shad roe in the fish case of our supermarket yet, which is a bit odd -- in years past, it has come in earlier than the local run, in late January and February instead of March and April, which means the fish are being caught in the so-called intercept fishery in the ocean or in rivers much further south (come to think of it, I seem to recall hearing that the intercept fishery has been banned, or severely curtailed, for fear that it was preventing shad from reaching their spawning streams).

In any case, there are so few shad left in the Hudson that New York State is further restricting the number of days that the handful of commercial fishermen who are left can catch them. Sad.

Beefsteak, Shad, and Joseph Mitchell

It’s a good morning when two stories in the news call to mind great pieces written by Joseph Mitchell, even if one of them is the sort of sad tale that underscores how basically clueless we are when it comes to trying to understand and manage some ecosystems.

I’ll get to that next. First though is “Gluttonous Rite Survives Without Silverware,” in the Times, a long, fun account of a dining tradition – if “dining” is not too delicate a word – called a beefsteak. You have to read it to believe it but even better, you have to get Mitchell’s book, Up in the Old Hotel, and read his piece from the 1930s, called “All You Can Hold For Five Bucks” (it’s also available as a download if you go to this site, then click on “For More Beefsteak Information Click Here,” but you really ought to buy it or get it from the library, because everything in it is good). But the Times story isn’t about a revival; it’s about a survival through the decades in northern New Jersey, even as the New York beefsteak faded in the mid-twentieth century. Totally gross, but amusing.

Less so however for this story, in the Journal News, about how New York State is considering closing the commercial shad season in the Hudson. Striped bass, zebra mussles, PCBs, General Electric, intercept fisheries – all of them have a role in the decline of the shad fishery, or at least people think they do. Truth is, nobody knows, and the state is left to draw the conclusion that the only thing to do is tell people like Bob Gabrielson and the nine or so others who still fish commercially in the Hudson that they’ll have to cut back even more. Mitchell also wrote about the Hudson’s shad fishermen, in The Rivermen, page 574 in Up in the Old Hotel.

I went to Gabrielson’s house a decade ago to buy shad roe (read about it here) and although I probably never would have done so again – Pound Ridge to Nyack for roe is a long drive – it was nice to know I could have if I wanted to.