Wild Life Near Home

by Dallas Lore Sharp

They are strong, graceful, athletic fish, quite the ideal fish type, well balanced and bewilderingly bony. The herring's bones are his Samson hair—they make his strength and agility possible; and besides that, they are vast protection against the frying-pan.

When the herring are once possessed of the notion that it is high time to get back to the ancestral pond and there leave their eggs, they are completely mastered by it. They are not to be stopped nor turned aside. Like Mussulmans toward Mecca they struggle on, until an impassable dam intervenes or the pond is reached. They seem to feel neither hunger, fear, nor fatigue, and, like the salmon of Columbia River, often arrive at their spawning-grounds so battered and bruised that they die of their wounds. They become frantic when opposed. In Herring Run I have seen them rush at a dam four feet high, over which tons of water were pouring, and, by sheer force, rise over two feet in the perpendicular fall before being carried back. They would dart from the foam into the great sheet of falling water, strike it like an arrow, rise straight up through it, hang an instant in mid-fall, and be hurled back, and killed often, on the rocks beneath. Had there been volume enough of the falling water to have allowed them a fair swimming chance, I believe that they could have climbed the dam through the perpendicular column.

Under the dam, and a little to one side, a "rest," or pen, has been constructed into which the herring swim and are caught. The water in this pen is backed up by a gate a foot high. The whole volume of the stream pours over this gate and tears down a two-foot sluiceway with velocity enough to whirl along a ten-pound rock that I dropped into the box. The herring run this sluice and jump the gate with perfect ease. Twelve thousand of them have leaped the gate in a single hour; and sixty thousand of them went over it in one day and were scooped from the pen. The fish always keep their heads up-stream, and will crowd into the pen until the shallow water is packed with them. When no more can squeeze in, a wire gate is put into the sluice, the large gates of the dam are closed, and the fish are ladled out with scoop-nets.

The town sold the right to a manufacturing company to build this dam in the Run, together with the sole right to catch the herring, on condition that yearly a certain number of the fish be carted alive to the pond in order to spawn; and with this further condition, that every Weymouth householder be allowed to buy four hundred herring at twenty-five cents per hundred.

A century ago four hundred herring to a household might not have been many herring; but things have changed in a hundred years. To-day no householder, saving the keeper of the town house, avails himself of this generous offer. I believe that a man with four hundred pickled herring about his premises to-day would be mobbed. Pickled herring, scaly, shrunken, wrinkled, discolored, and strung on a stick in the woodshed, undoes every other rank and bilious preserve that I happen to know. One can easily credit the saying, still current in the town, that if a native once eats a Weymouth herring he will never after leave the place.

Usually the fish first to arrive in the spring are males. These precede the females, or come along with them in the early season, while the fish to arrive last are nearly all females. The few that are taken alive to the pond deposit their eggs within a few days, and, after a little stay, descend the Run, leap the dam, and again pass out into the ocean. The eggs are placed along the shallow edges of the pond, among the reeds and sedges. At first they float around in a thin, viscid slime, or jelly, which finally acts as a glue to fasten them to the grass. Here, left without parental care, the eggs hatch and the fry wiggle off and begin at once to shift for themselves.

How hard they fare! In her sacrifice of young fish, nature seems little better than a bloody Aztec. I happened to be at Bay Side, a sturgeon fishery on the Delaware Bay, when a sturgeon was landed whose roe weighed ninety pounds. I took a quarter of an ounce of these eggs, counted them, and reckoned that the entire roe numbered 3,168,000 eggs. Yet, had these eggs been laid, not more than one to a million would have developed to maturity. So it is with the herring. Millions of their eggs are devoured by turtles, frogs, pickerel, and eels. Indeed, young herring are so important a food-supply for fresh-water fish that the damming of streams and the indiscriminate slaughter of the spawners now seriously threatens certain inland fishing interests. Many waters have been re-stocked with herring as a source of food for more valuable fish.

August comes, and the youngsters, now about the length of your finger, grown tired of the fresh water and the close margins of the pond, find their way to the Run, and follow their parents down its rough bed to a larger life in the sea. Here again hungry enemies await them. In untold numbers they fall a prey to sharks, cod, and swordfish. Yet immense schools survive, and thousands will escape even the fearful steam nets of the menhaden-fishermen and see Herring Run again.