Charlestown Land Trust Talks Herring
January 27, 2025
CHARLESTOWN, R.I. — While Rhode Islanders plod through this icy winter, a well-known seasonal visitor is biding its time, waiting for the return of spring and warmer weather.
By February, they wait in the waters off the coast of Washington County, and although they won’t have to battle beach traffic to enjoy their balmy Rhode Island sojourn, they have a much harder upstream trek.
In just a few months, buckeyes, buckies, sawbellies — also known as river herring — will travel up some of Rhode Island’s rivers on their annual spawning journey. And according to Bill McCusker, president of both the Charlestown Land Trust and the Friends of the Saugatucket, it won’t be an easy trip.
McCusker explained the herring’s tenacity and precarity at the kickoff of the land trust’s Winter Speaker Series at the Kettle Pond Visitor Center recently. The series encourages people to get together and learn indoors when the weather isn’t conducive to enjoying the outdoors.
Although herring, salmon, and shad, all species that swim from saltwater to freshwater sources to spawn, used to be found in Rhode Island’s waterways in abundance, McCusker said their numbers have dwindled in the post-industrial era, largely because of obstructions on the state’s rivers.
Before the arrival of European colonists, Indigenous people depended on those fish for food, bait, and fertilizer, he said. With colonization and then industrialization came the advent of the dams, built to power a farm’s gristmill to the large factories that used to populate the area.
“We don’t have any salmon runs anymore around here, and I think, I’m not sure, but I think the Pawcatuck [River] has a small shad run,” McCusker went on, “but basically all we have that could handle all the big changes was the herring.”
For years, McCusker has documented the fish and volunteers to help aid their journey upstream, going so far as to scoop fish over obstacles himself.
“Best option is not to have the dam at all,” he said, but fish ladders have done a lot to make once impenetrable structures accessible to at least some herring.
The land trust is currently looking into installing a fish ladder to create a run through Ninigret Pond, working with the state Department of Environmental Management and The Nature Conservancy of Rhode Island.
“We’ll see where that goes,” McCusker said. “It would be great if we could establish a run through Ninigret Pond for the first time in many, many years.”
For the fish that do make it up the rivers, they spawn (or hatch their eggs), and then they and their progeny eventually travel back to the sea, where they feed and are fed on.
Answering a question about why the herring are important to preserve, McCusker said, “They feed the ocean” — from whales, to sharks, to bass, to tuna — “everything that’s out there, all up and down the coast.”
“If we can’t support and continue to keep these species going,” he added, other creatures “aren’t going to have anything they need.”
The removal of Potter Hill Dam should definitely boost the river herring run on the Pawcatuck River and will also benefit American shad which get stopped there. There are recent concerns regarding “inshore” commercial fisheries targeting sea herring, affecting the river herring populations die to bycatch. Efforts to address that concern is overdue. Keep up the great work Bill McCusker!
I took a “shallow dive” into the literature to find the best fish ladder study. In thefisheriesblog.com , 2021 blog by H. Henry Do Fish Ladders Work refers to his published meta-analysis of 60 studies of 75 sites. Species type is major factor and how evaluation is done. Huge range in efficiency of devices. Brad W
McCusker said, “They feed the ocean” — from whales, to sharks, to bass, to tuna — “everything that’s out there, all up and down the coast.”
The people who need to get this message are the commercial and amateur fishermen. If they don’t get the message and vote for the right people than we can watch the herring continue to disappear.
Advertise. Educate. Post fact sheets down by the docks. Get the word out to the people.
This has to be a grassroots effort. The government isn’t going to help us.