The Founding Fish

by John McPhee

  In Calafat and Vidin in May, 1999, there was not much going for the compact. The Romanian border military at Calafat told Kynard and company not to proceed, and made them sign a paper stating, in effect, their awareness that NATO was attacking more than fish. They pushed on. Kynard listened to the water, hearing nothing. As the boat drew closer to the Serbian border, absolutely all other activity disappeared. More kilometres, more silence. They kept going, and stopping to listen. “The river was deserted. There were no boats—zero. It was a war zone.” They kept going, and stopping to listen, until they heard bombs.

  Emplaced in bedrock between Romania and Serbia, at river kilometre 985, is a dam called Iron Gate II. Nothing swims past it. Having failed to catch up with his forty-four sturgeons, Kynard decided that they might have gone on to spawn at the dam. He speculates, “Maybe all sturgeon-spawning in the Danube is in Serbia, because they spawn over rocky bottoms, from gravel upward. Basically, the war stopped me from finding out.”

  THREE

  AMENDING NATURE

  On the Pamunkey River, in earliest Virginia, a cockarouse was any Pamunkey who could wade into the river and cinch a noose over a sturgeon’s tail, and then hang on, even if the sturgeon hauled him under water, and ultimately bring the fish to the riverbank. Atlantic sturgeon in the Pamunkey River were eight feet long. They came up in spring with the run of shad.

  The tribe numbered a thousand then. Sixty live on the Pamunkey reservation now—twelve hundred acres in an oxbow bend of the river, in the tidewater plain not far from Richmond. They slow-cook shad in two sheets of foil, six hours at two hundred and fifty degrees, dissolving the smaller bones. They scramble shad roe in their scrambling eggs—a whole set of roe with two eggs. Season it with salt and pepper only. Mix it well, and fry it. You leave Rose Garden on Route 113 and go southwest five or six miles through a network of small roads with names like Powhatan Trail and Pocahontas Trail. You pass near Powhatan’s grave. It is not known if Powhatan ever was a cockarouse or how he liked his shad. His brother Opechancanoe was the leader of the Pamunkey tribe, while Powhatan ruled over many peoples as a kind of tyrant king. Powhatan was described as a tall, well-proportioned man with a sour look, and he presided over the Powhatan Confederacy—among whose thirty-odd tribes the Pamunkeys were the largest and most powerful. At night, he posted four tall guards at the corners of his house, with orders to call out to each other—one to the next one, round and round—while he slept. And while his daughter Pocahontas slept. English colonials named the river York, but the Pamunkeys rejected the idea and have gone on rejecting it for several centuries—the Pamunkey becomes the York only in its last thirty miles. (The Powhatan River, a little south, became the James.) In 1614, Pocahontas was baptized Rebecca in order to marry the colonist John Rolfe. He took Rebecca home to England. She met King James and Queen Anne. Rebecca died in Gravesend at the age of twenty-two.

  Her name Pocahontas lives on among women of her tribe, whose houses range from suburban brick colonials with two-car garages to wooden places that seem run-down, rural, and old. They are spread among fields of cotton, running to the river’s edge. The Pamunkeys’ seventeenth-century treaty with the colonial government of Virginia stated that the tribe was to “enjoy their wonted conveniences of oystering, fishing and gathering tuccahoe, curtenemons, wildoats, rushes, puckone, or anything else for their natural support, not useful to the English …” Evidently not useful to the English was the American shad. By the nineteenth century, the spring migration had become a commercial asset for the natives as well as a subsistence resource. Shad became so significant in the tribal economy that—in 1918—the Pamunkeys set up a shad hatchery “to put fish back into the river.” This was foresight on a Nostradamian scale. For something like seven decades while runs declined in East Coast rivers for various reasons, including stream pollution and ocean intercept fisheries (commercial boats offshore), shad continued to flourish in the Pamunkey River. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Maryland closed its waters of the Chesapeake Bay to shad fishing, and soon the Potomac and all rivers farther down in Virginia were closed as well, with the exception of tribal subsistence fishing in the Pamunkey. Alarmed by the declines in neighboring rivers, the Pamunkeys tore down the original hatchery and built a much larger one.

  It is a plain gray building on pilings—a long dock behind it, reaching into the quiet current of a meander bend. This was an October day, off-season—I was stopping by on my way to Norfolk—and no one was there. Ivy Bradley soon arrived in his pickup—a tall, whitish-haired, strong-looking man who had lived on the reservation all his life and was among the managers of the hatchery. Retired, he had long commuted to Richmond, where he installed sprinkler systems in large new buildings. He said that when the shad come up the river he and the others go out in johnboats with drift nets six hundred feet long.

  The river is about a quarter of a mile wide, thirty to forty feet deep. They have six boats, fifteen nets, all working at once. They fish a mile of the river, going both ways with the ebb and the flow. The salt line is far downriver but the fresh waters around the reservation are pushed up and pulled down by the ocean tides. Shad are milling when they spawn, in early to late evening, so that is when the boats are out and the nets are in the river—over the spawning beds of Lester Manor Reach, of Docks Island Reach, of Rockahock Reach, of Lay Landing Reach. In a very good session, Ivy Bradley said, the nets will trap eighty female spawners. “When the tide stops, and the net is vertical, that’s when the most fish are caught.”

  They strip the fish right there in the boats, pinching the body behind the head and sliding their fingers toward the anus as if they are squeezing pastry from tubes. In this way, they draw roe and milt, and they admix the two in a plastic bucket. The milt is so white it looks like crème anglaise. The roe is often likened to applesauce. They bring the buckets to the hatchery and let them stand for an hour. The mixture swells, as the barely visible eggs become diaphanous amber pearls. Three litres—a hundred thousand eggs—go into hatching jars on the sides of tanks. Four days later, sac fry appear and fall into the tanks, where they absorb their sacs and are then fed microscopic shrimp. On any given day in spring, the hatchery is nurturing two and a half million shad, he said—in all, about seven million in the eight-week season. Their survival rate indoors is at least twenty times what it would be in the river. They live in the tanks seventeen days, and are now and again “dyed” or “marked” with tetracycline, which is absorbed in calcium structures, notably the hard calcareous bodies known as otoliths, in the shads’ inner ears. Otoliths have daily growth rings, so you can write on them a kind of bar code with tetracycline, and if you know how to read the otolith you can tell, among other things, where a shad comes from and the day on which it was born. At the age of three weeks, Bradley told me, the fry are released through the bottoms of the tanks and descend through pipes to the Pamunkey River.

  I asked him if he ate shad roe. “Salted real good,” he said. “And wrapped in bacon. And wrapped in wax paper. Deep fried.”

  The first time I had seen sexual secretions expressed from the bodies of captured shad was years before at Smithfield Beach, on the Pennsylvania side of the Delaware River, just above Tocks Island. This was below the Kittatinny ridge and near the improbable gap where the river has severed the spine of the deformed Appalachians—a scene that inspired some of the finest work of the so-called Hudson River School. But shad spawn at night, the johnboats were lighted by twelve-volt batteries, and all was dark above the trees. Under the eye of Richard St. Pierre, of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a team of biologists hung gill nets in the river, all parallel to the current—eleven six-foot-high nets, each two hundred feet long. Placed at several distances from shore and held up by floats, they resembled lanes for racing shells. Because spawning shad go back and forth crosscurrent while other fish are travelling upstream and down, these axial underwater fences select the shad. From time to time, we went out in the johnboats to pick the nets, where the
lanes zigged and zagged from the pressure of fish. They were dumped into tubs of clear water, which was quickly reddened by their damaged gills. The Delaware teems with fish of countless species. In four hours, we collected one catfish, one sucker, and sixty American shad.

  Ashore, under floodlights, the roe shad were squeezed over bowls, which rapidly accumulated the pulsing jets of eggs. After the eggs stopped coming, the fish were tossed into a large waste receptacle. In the paired ovaries of a big female shad—her roe sacs—there might be three hundred thousand eggs. Rare specimens have carried twice that, and the average is a quarter of a million. There at Smithfield Beach, if a fish was “green” and nothing came forth when she was stripped, she went into the receptacle. A fish whose eggs have not ripened is known as a green roe, a green fish, a hard shad. Eggs ripen outward from the innermost part of the roe sac. The ripe eggs pass through a tube along the sac that leads to the anus. The roe shad spawns when she is ready. Spawning takes place in different places across a sequence of nights, while the sacs progressively ripen and deplete. So even a “good ripe fish”—being stripped by human hands—would yield little more than forty thousand eggs, and the rest, with the mother, went into the can. The plan, St. Pierre said, was “to shoot for a million eggs”—in the season, ten million eggs in ten nights of stripping. The aim of this annual endeavor was—courtesy of the Delaware—to revive the run in the Susquehanna River.

  The buck shad are always ripe, like buck rabbits and buck fruit flies, not to mention other species close to home. One buck shad could fertilize the river, or so it seems, as his white stream goes over the eggs in the bowl. Stir with index finger. Each egg has a microscopic aperture. One sperm enters, and the aperture seals. As the eggs swelled up golden, and clear as glass beads, St. Pierre said, “Applesauce turns to pearls. If they’re white, they’re dead, and if they’re red they’re no good.” For an hour, the bowls were immersed in floating tubs designed to bathe the eggs gently in flow from the river.

  I asked him to what extent the spring migration is affected by people who take shad from the river. At the time, in the Delaware, commercial fishing was taking fifty thousand shad, sport fishermen were keeping about sixteen thousand shad (and damaging a very large unknown number), and biologists were removing fifteen hundred.

  “If fifty per cent of the run make it to spawning, you’re o.k.,” he said.

  “Do they spawn in tributaries?”

  “Large ones, yes. If it looks like a mountain trout stream, no. If it’s broad and sluggish, yes. Generally, shad are main-stem spawners. Everything about them is temperature-controlled-when they move, when they stop, when they spawn, where they go, when they strike and don’t strike.”

  They like to spawn over gravels and sands, in four to eight feet of water moving less than a foot a second. As they spawn, the males, at the surface, are splashing. They spread their cloud of milt around the emerging eggs. When fertilized and swollen, the eggs are slightly denser than water. Slowly, they sink. On the bottom, they roll along, bounce along, for several days—the time depending, as ever, on temperature—before sac fry emerge, and soon become larval shad.

  Salmon, after homing to their natal rivers, do not copulate just anywhere, as shad seem to by comparison. Salmon go back to the exact spot where they were born, and move rocks around in order to protect their eggs in fortresses called redds. While shad hatch in a few days, salmon eggs, buried under gravel, stay in the redd all winter and hatch the following spring. Larval salmon stay in the redd. Moreover, young salmon stay around their birthplace for two years before taking off for the sea—plenty of time for detailed imprinting. Shad come down from the Gulf of Maine, and find the right river, but they do not form close identification with one place in the river. If a salmon was born in a hatchery, as a returning adult it will climb a fish ladder trying to get back into the hatchery.

  Shad larvae, in their millions, darken the river and look like one-inch eels. Minnows eat them. Shiners eat them. Ninety per cent of fish in the river eat shad, and ninety per cent of what’s in other fishes’ stomachs will be larval shad. “After thirty to forty days, they go through metamorphosis and look like fish-shaped animals,” St. Pierre said. Fish-shaped animals look even more delicious than one-inch eels.

  I asked St. Pierre what sort of diseases he had encountered in studying the species.

  He said, “We have never found a disease in a wild shad. But remember, we’re trained to look for trout diseases. We’ve never found a trout disease in a shad.”

  His degree in fisheries science was from the University of Virginia, and he went into the science as a direct result of the fishing and scuba diving he did as a kid in Florida. Trim, six feet, he had closely cut hair, an intent narrow face, a soft low voice and contemplative manner. He had arrived early at Smithfield Beach and had fished with a hook and line until seven. When he works in other rivers, he takes his six-pound test and ultra-light. Below Troy and Albany, the mile-wide Hudson can look hopeless for fishing from the bank, but it failed to intimidate St. Pierre. “They don’t know what they’ve got,” he said. Across the river from Catskill, he fished one evening from a ferry dock, where, despite the great breadth of water, sufficient current ran close to the eastern shore. Using a big dart for a long cast, he caught a nine-pound, nineounce roe shad. It was twenty-eight inches long and twenty-eight inches in maximum circumference. It was somewhat heavier than the New York record shad. But St. Pierre is “not into that sort of thing” and did not report it.

  Soon after midnight at Smithfield Beach, the last of more than a million eggs went into a plastic bag and were ready for shipment. There were five bags, each with five litres of eggs, and a college kid in a station wagon took off with them for Thompsontown, on the Juniata River. There are nine shad hatcheries in the United States, and Pennsylvania’s is in Thompsontown, where people would be waiting when the eggs arrived at four in the morning. Incubated at sixty degrees, they would hatch in six days. Two-thirds of the young shad would be stocked in the Juniata, a major tributary of the Susquehanna, and the remaining third would go to Conowingo, the first dam above the Chesapeake Bay. If you are trying to restore American shad in a depleted river system, there is no better way to do it. In the nineteen-eighties, an attempt was made to plant adult shad from the Hudson River in the uppermost Susquehanna, near Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania, and Owego, New York. In two days, the fish were out of the Susquehanna, swimming two hundred miles and tumbling down the spillways of four dams. “We’ve seen fish move a hundred miles a day in the Susquehanna in the wrong direction,” St. Pierre acknowledges. “If you put an adult shad in a strange river, the fish knows it’s in the wrong place and takes off. It just boogies.”

  St. Pierre has sent eggs to Thompsontown from places a great deal more distant than Smithfield Beach. For example, the Columbia River. To help meet the voracious requirements of the Susquehanna shad rehabilitation program, he has FedExed eggs from the West Coast to Pennsylvania. Something like five million shad come up the Columbia in spring, the largest shad run anywhere. They go a hundred and forty-six miles upstream before they encounter one of the world’s largest concrete structures. They stop to think it over. They have been likened to a crowd waiting for an escalator, which, literally, a lot of them are. The ladders at Bonneville Dam can accommodate more than a hundred thousand shad a day, and one or two million go on to spawn upstream. The majority spawns below Bonneville, and shad fishermen are all but shoulder to shoulder among the big boulders on the tailrace side, casting heavy darts on eight-pound test into the ten-mile current. Every so often a fly fisherman appears and stands off downstream, where the backcasting of his dense ten-weight sinking line won’t attract a lawyer.

  The American shad does not derive from these American waters. The species originated in the rivers of eastern North America, and first appeared in the West in 1871, two years after completion of the transcontinental railroad, when Seth Green, of the New York Fish Commission, came over the Sierra Nevada by t
rain with four milk cans full of baby shad from the Hudson River. Seth Green could cast a dry fly a hundred feet. An aquacultural pioneer, he was in his fifth season of hatching shad. He had worried the fish across the continent, trying to keep their environment healthy. In Chicago, he tried the drinking water and found it too oily. Chicago water, though, had Omaha water beat to death. In Omaha, Seth Green filled a bucket with water and poured it into another bucket, then poured it back, and poured again—bucket to bucket—until he had oxygenated and purified the water. On he went, five years before Little Bighorn, through the homeland of Cheyenne and Sioux, where a heat wave was hostile to the shad. The train carried ice cut in winter. Gently, gingerly, his fingers turning red, Seth Green flicked ice water into the milk cans, keeping temperatures down around eighty degrees. Two thousand shad died, but ten thousand made it to Sacramento, and by stagecoach up the Sacramento River a hundred and fifty miles to Tehama, where Green let them go.

  He liked their chances in all environmental respects but one. There was something alarming about thousands of millions of cubic yards of the Sierra Nevada being flushed off the mountains by giant nozzles working gold. The ocean was brown at the Golden Gate. Enough material was going into the Yuba River to fill the Erie Canal. Washed-down rock, gravel, sand, and mud choked the American River. The American and the Yuba were tributaries of the Sacramento River. The mining detritus had raised the Sacramento seven feet. Seth Green planted the fry in the Sacramento. He reported to the New York commission: “I can only say that if they do not have shad in the Pacific Ocean there will be but one cause, the roily water, caused by washing the mountains down for gold. However, I think the fish will get through all right.” Shad deal well with turbidity. The shad would make it. They’d be back in four years. A reward was posted—fifty dollars!—for the first adult shad caught in California. According to Volume I of the “Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission” (1881), Baltimore Harry caught the first shad.