BRADLEY, Maine — Ten miles downriver in Bangor, the Penobscot River meanders, wide and proud, showing little evidence of the epic change that’s taking place below the surface.
But up on Blackman Stream, on the grounds of the Maine Forest and Logging Museum, the river’s resurgence is much more obvious. Just look at the delicate staircase of low waterfalls that traces its way upstream. Watch for the splashes. Listen for the slapping of tails.
Then watch as a steady stream of sea-run alewives slither up over that man-made fish ladder on their way to spawning grounds that had been inaccessible for more than 150 years, until 2010.
“We completed the fishway [and] started stocking alewives in 2010, knowing that — or hoping that — four years later, we’d have a run of alewives [returning from the sea],” Richard Dill, a fisheries biologist for the Maine Department of Marine Resources, said.
Four years. That was the magic number — alewives usually take that long before making their first return swim to their natal pond.
For four years, Dill waited, worked and wondered how that initial stocking of 6,000 alewives fared after spawning in Chemo Pond.
A year ago, he found out.
“Last year we came out [on the first year that biologists expected a substantial run of fish], and we returned 187,000 alewives to Chemo Pond,” said Dill, who monitors a fish-counting station downstream, near Blackman Stream’s confluence with the Penobscot. “[This year, the fifth since the original stocking effort] so far we’ve passed about 100,000 alewives to Chemo Pond. So it’s been successful, so far.”
So successful, in fact, that Jill Packard, executive director of the museum at Leonard’s Mills, is busily preparing for the inaugural Bradley Alewife Festival, which will be held on the grounds from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday, May 30.
Visitors can watch the fish work their way upstream, take part in various activities, listen to speakers and sample alewives prepared in a brand new 1840s-style smokehouse.
For nearly 200 years, alewives and other sea-run fish didn’t have access to upstream habitat like that in Blackman Stream. Dams blocked their passage, and pollution was a problem. After two dams were removed as part of the Penobscot River Restoration Project, other efforts — such as the construction of the fishway at Blackman Stream — became possible.
“I think [the return of alewives] is really a testament to the commitment of the Department of Marine Resources, the Atlantic Salmon Federation and the museum to really see something that could demonstrate progress and prosperity,” Packard said.
“[The return of so many fish] is such a big concept to try to describe,” Packard said. “I think it really ties back into that concept of sustainability and why living in Maine can be sustainable. I think it’s about understanding our resources and understanding how the resources we have tie into society, our economy and our environment.”
Although alewives are smallish fish, they’re vitally important to rivers, ponds and the ocean, Dill said.
“Alewives are a keystone species. They can be the building block of an ecosystem,” Dill said. “While the Penobscot has maintained a pretty good fishery, in terms of smallmouth bass and other types of fisheries, really the potential of the Penobscot has been limited without alewives.”
Alewives swim upstream to their natal pond — in this case Chemo Pond — and spawn, then return to the Gulf of Maine. Juvenile fish will begin their migration to the ocean in mid-July, and by November, nearly all of them will have left the freshwater pond.
Dill said alewives play many roles in a healthy river.
“With restoring alewives, there’s this huge influx of nutrients coming back from the ocean, connecting the lakes and the rivers back to the ocean,” Dill explained. “So we see this huge shift of energy back to the freshwater ecosystem. Everything’s going to feed on those alewives, from the time they’re juvenile, small fish, all the way until they’re adults, returning.”
In addition, the presence of hundreds of thousands of alewives in a river like the Penobscot offers protection for other fish that are migrating.
“Right now, we’re at the peak of the Atlantic salmon smolt run,” Dill said. “It just happens to coincide with when the alewives and the blueback herring are returning back to the river.”
With more fish in the water, predators like birds and larger fish have more food on the table to sample. Without hundreds of thousands of alewives migrating, Dill said it’s virtually certain that those smolts would be targeted much more heavily by predators.
“It provides a lot of cover, a lot of benefit, for Atlantic salmon smolts,” he said.
Dill said this year’s run is a little higher than last year’s, and he said additional fish passage and stocking projects will pay dividends in coming years.
“We constructed a fishway at Davis Pond [in Eddington] in 2014. As soon as that was finished, we started stocking alewives up there. That’s another 700 acres of habitat,” Dill said. “And also, we’re working on fish passage at Parks Pond. Once [that] is implemented, the entire [Blackman Stream] watershed will be reconnected to the Penobscot and the Gulf of Maine. [Then we will] have the potential of 400,000 alewives coming back to this watershed.”
And despite the fact that Dill figured the alewives would behave the way they have, he’s still impressed by magnitude of the returns.
“It is amazing,” he said. “Three years ago we were out here and saw maybe a few hundred alewives and this year we’re up in the hundreds of thousands. So it’s really gratifying to see that return.”
