Sanctuary magazine

Turners Falls Turnaround by Karl Meyer

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Could the once vast shad and herring runs on the Connecticut River be dwindling because of a failed salmon restoration program?

"It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries..."
Henry Thoreau, on shad blocked by a dam

I first watched a riot of migrating American shad nervously school in the fishway windows at the Holyoke Dam over a quarter century ago. Back then, every spring the Connecticut River was brimming with life: agitated blueback herring, slithering sea lamprey, fidgeting American shad. It so inspired me, I have scarce missed a season since, visiting three and four times annually from mid-May to June.

But sadly, that great migration is coming undone. Each spring brings fewer fish, from a half-million shad tallied there in 1984, and 720,000 witnessed in 1992; to just 153,000 arriving in spring 2008. At Holyoke, 630,000 blueback herring were counted in 1985; that figure plunged to 89 in 2008.

An 1872 Supreme Court ruling against the owners of Holyoke Dam mandated construction of fish passage at the dam. The ruling was recognition of shad runs as a rightful resource of hungry upstream citizens. It meant hope for the suite of fish that had used the Connecticut's spawning highway to and from the sea for millennia, including three species of fish that receive special protections and oversight today: shad, blueback herring, and the endangered shortnose sturgeon.

Today, shad runs at Holyoke are half what they were in the 1990s, and the herring are all but gone. The most recent five-year (1999 to 2003) average for shad has dropped 42 percent from 267,000 fish to 155,000. Thirty-six miles upstream at the Turners Falls Dam, passage of shad has plummeted over 80 percent since 1999, when energy deregulation came to the hydro-facilities there. Fish passage at the dam now hovers near 1 percent. Nevertheless, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission listed the Connecticut's shad population as "stable" in 2007.

What happened to those crowded runs of twenty-five years ago?

To understand, you have to look at the forty-two-year-old bureaucracy that emphasized reestablishment of an extinct salmon run on the Connecticut. It began in 1967 on the heels of the 1965 Anadromous Fish Conservation Act, when the US Bureau of Sports Fisheries and Wildlife, the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, and fish commissioners of Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont had assumed responsibility for the restoration and preservation of migratory fish. That mission recognized the Connecticut River Atlantic Salmon Commission (CRASC) as the agency of record. CRASC has a Shad Studies Subcommittee and a Fish Passage Subcommittee.

Driven by sport-fishing interests, that agency focused on restoring the Connecticut's only missing species—a leaping but extinct strain of cold-loving salmon—to the warming Connecticut River. Though shad and herring naturally range from Labrador and Nova Scotia south to Florida, they received poor stepchild status. Market research for 1967 had projected a yearly harvest of 9,600 salmon—bringing $120 per fish to the regional economy from high-end anglers. Two-foot-long shad were a bargain at $3 each, with a projected harvest of 150,000 annually. After forty-two seasons, only 82 salmon returned past Holyoke in 2008.

Despite millions spent on research, hatcheries, genetics, and a Byzantine stocking program involving over 100 public schools and thousands of kids, more American shad were lifted at Holyoke in 1955 than all the salmon that have returned there in the program's history. In fact, the Connecticut's salmon strain was extinct by 1809. The Atlantic salmon that occurred in the river was a pioneering species, a relatively recent transplant that came about as a result of climate change. Salmon biology and archeological data demonstrate the species' arrival as a result of the changing Atlantic currents during a brief, northern hemisphere climate aberration, the Little Ice Age of 1400 to 1800.

In 1992, Catherine Carlson pointed this out in a dissertation in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts (UMass). Carlson was doing masters archeology work at the University of Maine when she was surprised by the absence of salmon bones in digs at coastal, estuarine, and inland-river fishing sites. Her work impressed Dena Dincauze, who was head of UMass Amherst's Anthropology Department. Dincauze recruited Carlson to continue that research at UMass.

Carlson's thesis, The Atlantic Salmon in New England history and prehistory: social and environmental implications, showed that the salmon's importance in colonial New England had been largely overstated by sport fish-minded interpreters. My own research at Antioch New England University in 1995 bore that out after extensive examination of the Sylvester Judd (17891860) Manuscript at the Forbes Library in Northampton. Judd is a primary source for colonial history, natural history, and genealogy of Connecticut River towns from northern Connecticut to Turners Falls. His records and interviews with men who had fished opposite Holyoke in the 1750s and 1760s led him to conclude salmon "were always few in number compared to the shad."

Carlson surveyed seventy-five digs across the Northeast in which fish bones had been identified at least down to their genus. A 5,000-year record revealed regular use of shad and river herring as a food source at many locations. But only one single salmon bone from Maine was positively identified. At one Turners Falls site, 590 fish bone fragments were uncovered. All of them were shad or river herring.

Carlson outlined the Little Ice Age here—showing that the salmon's migration this far south was driven by the brief climate oscillation. Dams and pollution were minor factors in its Connecticut River demise; salmon still sur-vived farther north on Maine's long-dammed Penobscot.

Her findings were not welcomed at CRASC.

The agency's twenty-five-year-old effort—annually hatchery raising millions of salmon fry from eggs, fat-tening up smolts, and stocking tributaries with them—was producing just a few hundred fish each season, and often far fewer. "Some of them [at CRASC] were quite hostile to me," says Carlson, who had noted taxpayer costs of $80 million by 1989, and that "One Fish and Wildlife study...predicted costs between $120 million and $450 million [would] be spent between 1989 and 2008 to make the restoration effort successful."

Carlson's findings couldn't be rejected out of hand, particularly since Boyd Kynard, fisheries biologist at the Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center in Turners Falls, was on her committee. An associate UMass professor, Kynard had a reputation as an expert in migratory fish behavior and fish passage. Today, he consults with governments on fish passage and rare sturgeon species on major rivers in China, Europe, and Brazil. His credentials couldn't be impugned.

Carlson's work remains largely unchallenged today. In 2002, her "absent-salmon" conclusions received note in John McPhee's shad tribute, The Founding Fish.

Perhaps most confounding is that CRASC has known for thirty years that some of the biggest restoration problems are located at the fishways and hydroelectric facilities at the Turners Falls dam, which they designed. In the late seventies, state fish commissioners and federal officials insisted that Northeast Utilities install fish ladders there based on Pacific salmon runs on the massive Columbia River—this, despite evidence those ladders might not work for shad and herring. Two ponderously long ladders and a narrow gatehouse exit were installed at Turners Falls in 1980. Millions were spent. The few arriving salmon passed easily, but just 10 percent or less of arriving shad succeeded.

Kept quiet, that single-species blunder effectively locked meaningful shad runs out of Vermont and New Hampshire habitats for at least the next twenty years.

By prior agreement, the power company's completion of those prescribed, multi-million-dollar fishways prevented any revisit of the fish passage issue for the next two decades of the site's forty-year Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license, which expires in 2018. Those licenses regulate conditions at mainstem facilities. FERC is charged with enforcing protections for federal trust fish. FERC can reopen licenses to address changes in operations that affect rivers, and they can halt operations if conditions are injuring federal trust fish. Fish information comes from CRASC, which recently characterized the Connecticut's shad population as "relatively stable."

Incredibly, a five-year CRASC-partnered study begun in 1999 by the Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center found that half of the shad passing Holyoke "attempt but fail" to make it past Turners Falls. According to the study, "Passage of American shad through the fishway complex at Turners Falls is poor (less than 1 percent in some years) and may be having a substantial limiting effect on the Connecticut River population as a whole." This profound development—shad plummeting there from over 10,000 fish annually to around 2,000—was never brought before the public. That drop took place on the heels of energy deregulation at the hydrofacilities owned by Northeast Utilities throughout the study. Some 70,000 shad were likely turned away at Turners Falls last spring.

What accounted for this new drop documented by the study? Had conditions changed at the dam? Or was the problem upstream where conditions were changing even more quickly than usual, resulting from newly deregulated electricity "spotmarket" generation at the Northfield Mountain Pumped Storage Project?

Northfield, just five miles upstream, is the sister operation to the Turners Falls dam and canal. It generates upward of 1,000 megawatts of electricity by pumping water out of the Connecticut's bed and into a 5.5 billion-gallon mountaintop reservoir and sending it back through turbines in downstream surges according to demand and spikes in the market price. Turbines for the 300-acre reservoir can reverse from sucking up water to sending millions of gallons downstream in minutes.

Waterlevel fluctuations in that Turners Falls pool average 3.5 feet daily, but can deviate from 9 to 10 feet in the course of weekly operations. Those pumping-and-flushing effects through Turners Falls are felt by migrating shad and the river's only breeding population of endangered shortnose sturgeon.

Whatever the cause of the new Turners crash, urgency isn't apparent at CRASC's public meetings. There are repeated delays for fixes at the fishways. A few truckloads of shad are dumped upstream each season to maintain a limping biological pulse so the next generation of shad can attempt passage there. But the partnership—the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Conte Anadromous Fish Research Center, the NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, and representatives from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Vermont—watched this latest disaster unfold and never brought it forward, as their mandate to protect federal trust species required.

In fact, they chose to "throttle back" shad monitoring at Turners Falls in 2005, and later stated in an April 3, 2008, discussion of failed herring returns: "There is less concern about the shad population since it has been relatively stable, though at a lower level than historic peaks."

CRASC didn't press FERC to intervene. FERC, which could reopen the site's operating license for review, shut down operations, or force a return to conditions that recently squeezed 10,000 shad through Turners, didn't provide enforcement.

Apparently, real help here for the river's eroding shad population will have to wait until 2018, and it may require relinquishment of the myth of Connecticut River salmon.

Karl Meyer is author of Wild Animals of North America, winner of a 2008 Teachers' Choice Award for Children's Books. His latest, Dog Heroes, is just out from Storey. He can be reached at: karlm@crocker.com.