The Return of the Alewives -- Maybe

Which came first, the alewife or the hamlet of North Sea? While we try to figure that one out, let us stop and appreciate that they are both extant today and just as powerful as ever.

While the alewives that ply Peconic Bay to get to the Peconic River still have a hard time with that river’s dams and other obstacles, the North Sea alewives begin to mass in North Sea for the annual trip up the little river that connects the harbor with Big Fresh Pond. By the time you are reading this article, a good many thousands will have already made the half-mile trip and will be spawning in Big Fresh.

Thus it is every year, perhaps as far back as the arrival of the first settlers from the Old World in the 1600s.

The little foot-long fish has a scientific name almost as long as it is, Alosa pseudoharengus, or “false herring.” Howard Reisman, a bona-fide ichthyologist, the only one on the East End, who taught at Southampton College for 35 years until it closed, lives not more than a quarter of a mile away from the most successful alewife conveyor stream on Long Island and has been following the alewives that go up and down it since 1968.

He told me about one study made by a graduate student at C.W. Post College in 2006, with an underwater camera that photographed 75,000 adult alewives swimming upstream toward the mating pond, Big Fresh. They swim upstream in batches, but when they are through breeding they swim back downstream all at once, then into North Sea Harbor.

According to Professor Reisman, later in the summer, as many as a million young fish swim down the stream, into the harbor and then out into the Peconics.

Big Fresh Pond has accommodated these early spring movements since God knows when, at least for hundreds of years. The Shinnecock have followed these movements as long as they’ve been around. Most years, one will see a few Shinnecock at the passage under Noyac Road as the fish enter the stream leading the alewives in on their way to Big Fresh.

The origin of the stream is a phragmites-clogged mess, but the alewives don’t seem to mind — they navigate the mess without a fuss. Then they proceed under North Sea Road via an underpass maintained by the Southampton Town Trustees. After that last hurdle, they are on their way to reproduction in Big Fresh.

Herring are strainers — they catch their food, the plankton, in their gill rakers en masse. Something else alive, a separate organism, a metamorphic stage of a freshwater mussel, often is attached to those gills. While the alewife is reproducing itself, it also is responsible for helping the freshwater mussel, otherwise landlocked, to reproduce as well. Apparently, the shellfish species has been living in Big Fresh for a very long time, perhaps just as long as the alewife species.

A group of scientists has been trying to successfully populate the Peconic River with alewives for several years running, and while they have managed to get them through a network of dams south of the Riverhead traffic circle, having them spawn throughout the river, the goal of the project, has avoided them, because of the system of dams that the migrating fish encounter after passing Riverhead.

I drove over to Riverhead last Thursday, March 16, to check out the passage under Peconic Avenue just north of the Riverhead circle. It seemed awfully complex, not a nice and easy passage such as the ones under Noyac Road and North Sea Road.

As of this writing, that great movement into North Sea Harbor and up the river hasn’t started. There are a few other early spring congregations at a few other South Fork sites. While studying the Sagg Pond stream flowing north under east-west oriented Sagg Road in the 1970s, Russel l. Hoeflich, then a biology student at Southampton College, discovered a small number of alewives making it up almost a mile to spawn in a tiny pond in the woods a little south of Montauk Highway. The fate of that pond and the stream leading into it is unknown at this late date.

A small number of alewives would gather in the pond waters off Cedar Point County Park in East Hampton, just east of Alewive Brook Road in East Hampton’s Northwest region, and from there swim westerly under the road into Scoy Pond, situated in the Grace Estate. However, the stream to the pond has become so filled in with woody vegetation and phragmites that it is impossible for an alewive to navigate it. The pond hasn’t received a live alewive for at least 20 years.

We always assume that the alewives will be back to Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, but until they repeat their performance one can never say with certainty that they will be. They are not yet back, and the predators (black-crowned night herons, ospreys, etc.), have yet to set up their watches.

If they are not back by the time this article goes to press, we may have a problem on our hands.