Experts cast opinions about alewives

Last winter, for the first time in nearly a decade, my son, Jeff, and I didn’t anchor an ice shack on Hermon Pond. Actually, we decided to pull up stakes, so to speak, during the winter of 2001-02, when the decline in fishing that we noticed a year earlier continued.

Located a few miles west of Bangor, Hermon Pond has long been a productive fishery for pickerel, white perch, yellow perch, smallmouth bass, and, in recent years, black crappie and largemouth bass. Judging from what I’ve seen and heard, the pickerel fishery remains productive, but the other aforementioned species aren’t tripping flags and running reels as often as they did back along.

Yellow perch, for instance, were a nuisance when using small baits in ice fishing for crappies: No sooner would a minnow or shiner be tethered near bottom when a yellow perch would hit and run with it. But on our last trip to the pond, Jeff and I caught, unbelievably, only two yellow perch, one small crappie, and a few pickerel. The slow fishing prompted yet another of my sage outdoors observations: “Something’s changed.”

Seriously, I’m not alone in saying the fishing at Hermon Pond has declined in the past few years. Accordingly, several frozen-water fishermen have told me about the slow days they had at the pond last winter. Wayne Philbrick of Hampden said the fishing was so slow he began wishing for wind flags. Likewise, Steve Gove, a friend of Jeff’s, said he took his young nephew to the Hermon Fish Factory because he was sure the kid would see some flags fly. Unfortunately, he didn’t.

Further testimony to the disturbingly slow fishing is the steady reduction in the number of ice shacks. Five years ago a dozen shacks dotted the pond. Last winter I counted three. Accordingly, slow fishing was one of the reasons that the Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife moved its Hooked on Fishing Day from Hermon Pond to Pickerel Pond, located off the Stud Mill Road in T32 MD.

Equally disturbing is the increasing number of casts it now takes to roust a smallmouth bass from its spawning bed. Because I’m addicted to bass fishing, and because Hermon Pond is handy to home, I’ve worn out a few fly lines casting popping bugs over the pond’s smallmouth spawning grounds. And usually the bass weren’t bashful about giving my rod severe cases of the bends. Catching and releasing six or eight good-size smallmouths in a couple of hours wasn’t anything to get excited about; lately, though, I’ve fished longer and caught fewer.

So, the obvious question is: What’s happening at Hermon Pond? Well, since columnists are expected to offer opinions, and I’ve never been bashful about offering mine, I’ll answer that question by saying I think the decline in fishing is attributable to alewives. Since the removal of two dams on Souadabscook Stream in Hampden five years ago, anadromous alewives have had unobstructed access to Hermon Pond, where the fish spawn.

The way I see it, the annual arrival of tens of thousands of alewives in a lake or pond of any size – Hermon Pond is about a mile long, give or take, and at its widest, about half a mile – can’t help but have a marked impact on existing fisheries. Alewives, adults and juveniles, feed on small zooplankton (animal life), as do the fry of most fish.

Within a week or so, the Souadabscook will be silvered with alewives, which belong to the herring family. The tidal pool below Route 1A in Hampden will boil with them, literally, as will Hermon Pond on their arrival there. While bass fishing in June, I’ve watched swarms of spawning alewives swirling and thrashing along the pond’s shorelines. And in late summer I’ve watched sheets of juvenile alewives – thousands of fingerlings 3- to 4-inches long – spilling from the Souadabscook to embark on their maiden sea voyages. Now I ask you, how can that many fish not have an impact on a lake’s or a pond’s fisheries?

As you may have guessed, I’m not casting my opinions without some backing on my reel: A few years ago, while we were ice fishing for crappies at Hermon Pond, Fred Kircheis told me the Great Lakes were outstanding yellow perch fisheries until alewives showed up in those inland seas. Consequently, the perch fisheries were decimated. Fred, of course, is the fisheries biologist who did an outstanding job of managing the Flood’s Pond Arctic char population, and who recently retired as executive director of Maine’s Atlantic Salmon Commission.

Mike Smith, regional biologist of Fisheries Region F in Enfield, shared my concerns about alewives in Hermon Pond by expressing his displeasure with the landlocked alewife populations in East Grand Lake and Spednik Lake. Both lakes are, of course, productive landlocked salmon fisheries. Trouble is, the alewives, which somehow showed up in East Grand in 1995, compete with smelt as plankton feeders. And it’s no secret that smelt are essential to salmon fisheries. Smith explained that, biologically, alewives are better equipped for feeding on plankton than are smelt and other small fish. He explained that alewives often “filter feed” by swimming with their mouths open to filter plankton.

Historically, alewives entered many Maine rivers and streams to spawn in headwater lakes and ponds. Until dams were built, the fish reached East Grand and Spednik lakes via the St. Croix River. But as Mike Smith mentioned, early on there were no landlocked salmon or smelt in either lake. Actually, only four Maine lakes had native populations of landlocked salmon: Green, Sebec, Sebago and West Grand. Likewise, smelt were native to only a few waters. So it was that practically all of the salmon fisheries that attracted anglers to Maine from far and wide resulted from stocked fish. Smallmouth bass are not native to Maine. The scrappy bronzebacks, once disparaged as “trash fish” hereabouts, were brought into the state in the late 1800s.

I would be remiss not to mention that Spednik Lake is a storied smallmouth bass fishery. Small wonder, then, that guides thereabouts set their drags against a 1995 federal proposal to allow alewives passage through fishways in St. Croix River dams, thereby again providing the fish access to Spednik. Let’s just say there is conjecture regarding the origin of the landlocked alewives now inhabiting East Grand and Spednik lakes. Particularly since the fish were discovered shortly after the St. Croix proposal was withdrawn because of political and other pressures.

Anyone interested in landing a limit of information about alewives in East Grand and Spednik would do well to talk with Lance Wheaton, a veteran guide whose main lodge is located in Forest City. Suffice it to say, his hooks are well-honed on the subject. “What you’re seeing at Hermon now,” he told me recently, “we’ve been seeing here for years.”

When I told biologist Ron Brokaw I was concerned about the affects of alewives on the Hermon Pond fishery, the “head guide” of Fisheries Region C in Jonesboro said, “You may be onto something. Alewives can cause a lot of problems.” Having dealt with the fish gaining access to several lakes under his management, including Phillips Lake in Dedham, Brokaw speaks from experience. Personally, I can attest to the depletion of Phillips Lake’s smelt population after the arrival of alewives, which, in turn, led to the decline of the lake’s landlocked salmon fishery. That’s my story, anyway, and I’m sticking to it.

Rick Jordan, a staff biologist at Region C, didn’t leave any slack in his comments about alewives: “Whenever they’ve gotten into our fisheries the fish didn’t do as well.” In spite of alewives being classified as plankton feeders, Jordan suspects that the fish also eat the fry of other species. He referred to a documented case in which a biologist found more than 300 yellow perch fry in the stomach of an alewife taken from one of the Great Lakes.

There are, of course, two sides to every nickel: During a recent gabfest at the Eddington Salmon Club, Lew Arsenault told me pickerel were cooperative on his trips to Hermon Pond last winter. Additionally, while exchanging fish stories with Vic Peavey at the Penobscot Salmon Club’s recent annual Spring Breakfast, he mentioned that a friend of his caught a mess of crappies at Hermon last winter.

The pickerel report isn’t surprising. The toothy prowlers spawn immediately after ice out, which allows pickerel fry about four weeks of growth before the arrival of alewives in Hermon Pond. Those thousands of fish from away, however, spawn at the same time as Hermon’s resident perch, bass and crappie. Think about it.

So there you have it. If nothing else, the Hermon Pond alewife situation is something to think about while waiting for the fishing grounds to shed their shabby winter coats. Locally, Phillips Lake, Green Lake, Brewer Lake, and Branch and Beech Hill ponds are now dressed for summer.

The record shows that I supported the removal of the dams on Souadabscook Stream, and for good reason. Historically, the Souadabscook attracted a variety of anadromous fish including Atlantic salmon, striped bass, smelt, sea-run brook trout, and alewives. With a little fisherman’s luck and the good Lord willing, the salmon, smelt, and trout will return to the now free-flowing stream. Obviously, the alewives already have. En masse.

Tom Hennessey’s columns and artwork can be accessed on the BDN internet page at www.bangornews.com. E-mail address: thennessey@bangordailynews.net. Web site: www.tomhennessey.com.