After a full day of vigorous testimony (including supportive testimony from CLF) on March 25, Maine’s Marine Resources Committee today unanimously voted that LD 72, a bill that will reopen the St. Croix River to alewives, ought to pass. This is an excellent outcome.

With that strong recommendation, the bill will soon go to the full Legislature for a vote. If passed, LD 72 will reverse the law on the books since 1995 that has closed the fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam  to alewives, preventing them from reaching their spawning grounds. Originally justified by a mistaken belief that alewives competed with smallmouth bass and caused a decline in their population, numerous scientific studies since then debunked that myth. But in the intervening years, the alewife population has shrunken to the point where the species may be listed as threatened. Alewives provide food for numerous species higher in the food chain, provide bait for the spring lobster fishery, provide cover for other migrating species, and much more.

CLF has been blogging on this topic regularly. To read those posts, click here. For a great article on the issue in the Bangor Daily News, click here. 

CLF has been pushing for the unfettered restoration of alewives to the St. Croix in the Courts and in the Legislature. We’re very close to an historic victory that helps the environment and economy of the St. Croix region. Now is the time to push this over the finish line. Please stand with us and contact your legislators and urge them to support this bill.

An important step forward for restoring alewives to the St. Croix river

Fishermen, environmentalists, anglers, representatives from the Passamaquoddy tribal government, federal agencies and the Canadian government have spoken: Alewives should be allowed to return to their native St. Croix river.

At a legislative hearing Monday, speaker after speaker rose in support of a bill, L.D. 72, that would immediately open many fishways at the river’s dams to Alewives.

Our own Sean Mahoney, EVP & Director, CLF ME, testified in support of the bill, arguing, “L.D. 72 is simple, it does the right thing and its benefits – to the watershed, the ecosystem and the many whose livelihoods would be enhanced by a return of the alewives – would be relatively immediate.”

The legislature is currently considering three bills, and Mahoney was joined by the vast majority in supporting L.D. 72, an emergency bill sponsored by Passamaquoddy tribal Rep. Madonnah Soctomah, that would require the Grand Falls Dam fishway to be opened to the “unconstrained passage” of Alewives by May 1^st, before the species’ spring spawning season.

The opening would give the fish immediate access to over 24,000 acres of habitat, compared to a sparse 1,174 open today. In all likelihood, this opening would lead to Canada’s opening the fishway upstream at the Vanceboro dam, allowing access to thousands of additional acres. One researcher estimated that if spawning runs had access to the entire watershed, alewives could number more than 20 million, up from just over 31,000 now.

The alternative Adaptive Management Plan, L.D. 584, calls for a more gradual, staged reintroduction of spawning Alewives to the river. Proposed by Governor Page’s administration, this plan met overwhelming opposition at Monday’s hearing, and was even condemned by one of its own co-authors. It falls far short of restoring alewives throughout the watershed.  It also would run afoul of federal law concerning the operating of dams such as the Vanceboro Dam, as well as the State’s own water quality standards, as noted by Sean in his testimony.

The LePage administration, along with fishing guides from Washington county, were alone in their concerns that reintroduction of Alewives may lead to a decline in smallmouth bass. The National Marine Fisheries Service and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service asserted that smallmouth bass, which were introduced into the St. Croix in 1877, have lived harmoniously with spawning Alewives in hundreds of Maine’s lakes and rivers.  Mahoney’s testimony, which you can read here, provides the legal arguments against L.D. 584.

You can more about our work restoring the alewives to Maine’s rivers here, or check out our latest blog posts about alewives here.

In the late 1980’s, more than 2.6 million alewives were counted at the head of tide on the St. Croix River.  That was, and remains, the largest run of this critical species in Maine and New England.  But politics and willful ignorance of the facts led to enactment of a law that closed off access to the upper St. Croix and reduced the numbers of alewives from 2.6 million to 900 by 2002.  It’s well past time to right this wrong, repeal the shortsighted and politically expedient law and restore alewives to the St. Croix.

The law at issue requires the owner of the Grand Falls Dam to keep the fishway at the structure – which works perfectly well – closed during the Spring return of alewives to their native waters. The law was passed in 1995 at the behest of a small but vocal minority of guides who claimed that the resurgence of alewives in the St. Croix River watershed was the root cause for a decline in the number of smallmouth bass in Spednic Lake.  A law requiring the owner of the Woodland Dam and the Grand Falls Dam to keep the fish passage closed was enacted as emergency legislation.  So instead of returning to the St. Croix and spawning in the millions, alewives literally ran into a concrete wall and their numbers dwindled from the millions to the hundreds.

13 years later, armed with two well researched and extensively reviewed scientific studies, one conducted by the Maine Department of Marine Resources and a study supported by Maine IF&W and DMR,  that proved conclusively that alewives not only had coexisted successfully for years with smallmouth bass in numerous lakes but also improved the water quality for those non-native fish, fisherman and other outdoor enthusiasts moved to repeal the law and once again allow alewives access to probably the most productive alewife habitat on the entire East Coast.  But the Legislature failed to right its wrong and allowed fish passage at only the Woodland Dam, meaning that alewives remain blocked from accessing 98% of their native habitat in the St. Croix River watershed.

The number of fish now counted in the River is in the thousands. The tragedy of the St. Croix is not just that the current law flies in the face of science and good wildlife management but also flies in the face of the good work that Maine has done with respect to alewife restoration on so many other rivers – the Presumpscot, the Kennebec, and the Penobscot to name three – and the importance that alewives play as a critical bait and forage fish for both our recreational and commercial species such as striped bass, Atlantic cod and lobsters.

Many of Maine’s rivers have healthy runs of alewives that have actually increased in numbers over the last decade, unlike other States on the Atlantic seaboard where the populations of alewives (and their cousins, blueback herring) have declined so steeply that there is a very good chance that they may be listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act later this year.

And just last week, hundreds of groundfishermen in Maine were given the sobering news that the number of Atlantic cod has also declined sharply, so much so that fishermen in Maine and New England have had the allowable number that they can catch reduced by almost 80%.   So it is beyond comprehension that Maine continues to enforce a law that prevents alewives from accessing the most productive habitat in the State, the St. Croix River.

Certainly that is the opinion of my organization, the Conservation Law Foundation, which last year took the EPA to Court to establish that the Maine law is not consistent with the Clean Water Act and this year is bringing the State to Court to establish that the Maine law runs afoul of the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause.

But the time and expense of this litigation could be avoided if the Legislature does the right thing this year.  A bill introduced this session, L.D. 72, would repeal the current law and require the Commissioners of IF&W and DMR to ensure that the fishways at the Woodland and Grand Falls Dams allow unconstrained passage of alewives.  With Democrats and Republican legislators co-sponsoring the bill presented by Representative Soctomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, now is the time for the Legislature to fix this travesty and allow alewives to flourish once again in the St. Croix River.

This article was originally published in the March 2013 issue of the Maine Sportman. 

The effort to restore Alewives to the St. Croix River is about to go into full gear. In addition to our lawsuit challenging the state law that prevents Alewives from getting above the Grand Falls Dam, we are collaborating with other groups and the Passamaquoddy Indian Nation on a legislative solution as discussed in this recent story in the Maine Sunday Telegram. I’d like to take a second to add a couple of points to this fine story by Colin Woodard on the plight of alewives in the St. Croix River.

First, the so-called adaptive management plan that the LePage administration is promoting in a competing bill at the Legislature is, at this juncture, only supported by the LePage administration – it has never even been considered for adoption by the International Joint Commission, has been disavowed by the federal agencies that have jurisdiction over the River, and is not supported by the Canadian government. The lack of any support for the plan is appropriate because it mirrors the lack of any scientific support for its provisions and its inconsistency with sound fishery management that considers more than just the ups and downs of one sport fish.

Second, in a time of fiscal challenges, the legislation that CLF is supporting, L.D. 72, has no costs associated with it – all it requires is the removal of the board that currently blocks the existing fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam. That is not the case with the adaptive management plan; annual costs for that plan will be at least $50,000 and in some years could be as much as $100,000.

Third, while the Maine Professional Guides Association may be the only groupthat continues to doubt the science that very clearly establishes that alewives and smallmouth bass do not compete for food or habitat, its executive director, Don Kleiner, is not bashful about praising the value of alewives to the smallmouth bass fishery in other forum, such as in this recent newsletter. As Mr. Kleiner noted, ”in the Saint George drainage we are fortunate to have large numbers of sea run alewives that come to lay their eggs in the ponds each spring. As the small alewives begin to move back to sea with the first rains, all of the predator fish begin to feed actively. Yesterday I was down in White Oak Pond with clients and many of the bass that they caught were actually potbellied from all of the feed they have been enjoying.”

Mr. Kleiner’s inconsistency mirrors the State’s inconsistency in its management of alewives on the St. Croix River as opposed to its management of that fishery in every other river in Maine. It’s time for the Legislature to correct itself and remove this inconsistency from the State’s otherwise laudable efforts to restore alewives to Maine’s watersheds.

Counting Alewives at the Milltown Dam fishway on the St. Croix river in New Brunswick, Canada, Photo courtesy of the Portland Press Herald

Fish ladders and elevators “aren’t working like they’re supposed to, and fish aren’t making it to where they need to go.” So began a recent article in Science magazine. In many cases this assertion is spot on – but in others, fish passages have been remarkably successful. Maine has examples of both.

To find a faulty fish passage,  one need look only at the dam on the Androscoggin River between the towns of Brunswick and Topsham, Maine. The fish ladder at that dam quite simply does not work and the number of fish that successfully navigate its labyrinth is paltry. If anadramous fish like salmon, shad or river herring are ever to return to the reaches of the Androscoggin, significant changes will need to be made to that fish ladder. Better yet would be, where possible, the removal of dams through collaborative efforts like those that led to the success of the Penobscot River Restoration Trust’s efforts or the removal of the dam in Winterport several years ago.

On the other hand, fish ladders remain an important management tool in areas where dam removal cannot be achieved. Indeed, there are a few fish ladders that have been very successful at passing fish, especially when they are allowed to work. For example, in Maine fish ladders at the first three dams on the St. Croix River worked remarkably well – in just 5 short years of operation in the 1980’s, the number of alewives successfully surmounting the 3 dams via fish ladders went from 20,000 to more than 2.5 million. And in 1995, when, for reasons that had nothing to do with science or logic, a state law was passed closing two of the fish ladders, the number of alewives plummeted to less than 1000. Today, even after one of the fishways was allowed to be opened in 2008, alewives are still barred from 98% of the waters that they use to spawn. That’s why CLF will continue to fight to repeal that law, either through the Courts or with our allies in the Legislature.

That said, the data provided in the Science article is depressing. At three major rivers on the East Coast that less than 150 years ago had been teeming with anadromous fish – the Merrimack, the Connecticut and the Susquehanna – virtually no fish –  706, 86, and 7 respectively – passed through the fish ladders at those dams. The author’s call to remove those dams would no doubt increase those numbers significantly and should be pursued to the extent feasible. Alternatively, the fish passage at those and other dams should be evaluated as to effectiveness and those that fail as miserably as those on the Merrimack, Connecticut and Susquehanna, as well as the Androscoggin, should be repaired, modified or replaced with fish passage that does work, like that on the St. Croix.

Image Copyright USFWS

An engineer, a politician, and a fish walk into a dam. The engineer says, “We could have built it bigger.” The politician says, “We should have built it cheaper.” Fish don’t talk, but if they did, they probably would have asked for a ladder.

Dams were built in the 18^th century to power mills, and in the 1940s to provide cheap electricity and irrigation opportunities – when they were considered great achievements of engineering that would benefit generations to come. Across the nation, dams have been utilized for energy production, flood control, irrigation, and water storage. But, if they are not appropriately planned, sited, and maintained  dams can have devastating impacts on fish populations.

In the early 1900s rainbow smelt supported a robust recreational and commercial fishery in the Northeast, but today NOAA Fisheries Service has listed them as a species of concern in this region. One of the problems in the Northeast has been the loss of suitable spawning habitat due to development like dams, which can prevent fish from moving upstream. But now there may be light at the end of the tunnel for rainbow smelt in southern Maine.

At the end of July, the Great Works Regional Land Trust (GWRLT) announced the removal of Shorey’s Brook dam and the restoration of the Shorey’s Brook on Raymond and Simone Savage Wildlife Preserve in Eliot and South Berwick, Maine.  Fish surveys are already showing rainbow smelt as far upriver as the former location of the dam and further upstream will be suitable for spawning habitat. If other dam restoration projects across the U.S. can be taken as indicators, rainbow smelt may soon be taking advantage of upstream habitats.

Larger scaled restoration efforts are also progressing in Maine. Earlier this summer, Talking Fish reported the demolition of the Great Works Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine – a restoration effort that will open thousands of miles of upstream habitat to Atlantic salmon and other fish for the first time in almost two hundred years. And, here at CLF we have been working to restore native alewives – an important prey species in both marine and fresh waters for many fish, mammals, and birds – to the St. Croix River in Maine. Read more about that work here.

The pressures on our fisheries are enormous, with overfishing, bycatch, pollution, ocean acidification, and habitat destruction all playing a part. We need a better way to plan in the face of all these different stressors. Partnering among local, regional, state, and federal stakeholders in the Northeast alone has culminated in 299 projects to improve and restore fish habitat in rivers, marshes, and estuaries.

New England’s need for habitat conservation and restoration is great, and other regions have similar challenges. Restoring damaged ecosystems to ecological and economic productivity is a fundamental component of the National Ocean Policy, and one more reason why the National Ocean Policy is right for New England.

Photo by Robert F. Bukaty, courtesy of Portland Press Herald Archives

As mentioned in prior posts here and here, CLF’s lawsuit to reopen the St. Croix River to alewives resulted in this letter from EPA agreeing that the Maine Alewife Law violated water quality standards for the St. Croix.

Yesterday, the Maine Attorney General responded to that letter here and the response is disappointing to say the least.  The first half of the letter is not even related to the Alewife Law but rather a gratuitous attempt to bolster the State’s efforts to restrict the jurisdiction of the Passamaquoddy Tribe and other Maine tribes.  The second half of the letter does not contest the findings in EPA’s letter that the Alewife Law constitutes a change in the St Croix’s water quality standard but rather attempts to justify that change as a fishery management exercise unrelated to the Clean Water Act.

As I noted in a interview yesterday on MPBN, you can put lipstick on a pig but it is still a pig.  Nor is the State’s “commitment” to the so-called adaptive management plan for the St Croix currently under consideration by the International Joint Commission of any real value.  As noted in this article by Colin Woodard, the adaptive management plan may be better than nothing but just barely.

What this means for the St Croix is really nothing more than status quo – passage at the Grand Falls dam will remain closed to alewives as long as the State is willing to let bad science and a small minority of self-interested fishing guides call the shots.  This is even more unpalatable given the current crisis that our lobster fishery is in. A resurgent alewife population (close to 3 million before the State closed fish passage) could only help that industry that can use alewives as bait fish. A robust alewife population would also help the Maine groundfish and whale watching industries, for whom alewives are a key source of food.  For these reasons, as well as the health of the St Croix ecosystem as a whole, CLF remains committed to restoring alewives to their native habitat in the St. Croix.  Stay tuned for next steps.

Pressure is building to reopen the St. Croix River to the alewife, a critical forage fish.

Earlier this week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a letter adopting the recommendations made in our lawsuit seeking  to restore alewives, a key forage and bait fish, to the St. Croix River.

As noted last month, CLF initiated a lawsuit against the EPA due to its failure to review and reject the Maine law that requires an existing fish passage facility at the Grand Falls dam to be closed. You can find the blog post here, explaining why we sued EPA.

As I said in the press statement, “EPA’s letter is a gratifying sign that we’re finally making substantive progress in restoring this important fish to the St. Croix River watershed. As EPA now agrees, this law is scientifically and legally unsupportable. We hope that further litigation is unnecessary to ensure that the state follows the directive of EPA in allowing alewives to return to their native waters.”

Since CLF filed its complaint, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, joined by other Maine Tribes, has formally requested Maine’s Governor Le Page to repeal the state law and, in the alternative, asked the International Joint Commission to invalidate the law. See a copy of the letter here. CLF is working with the Tribes to achieve the goal of restoring alewives to their native waters in the St. Croix watershed

This story was the subject of a front page article by Colin Woodard in the Maine Sunday Telegram. You can find that article here.

June 20 – Conservationists and fishermen agree to agree – By Peter Baker. (Peter Baker directs the Northeast Fisheries Program for the Pew Environment Group.) News stories in New England about fishing often pit conservationists and fishermen against each other over how many fish should be caught, or play up every instance in which a private citizen bemoans government intervention. But today there is a much more compelling story, on which fishermen and conservationists agree.

June 22 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 22 – This week’s stories include: new regulations for the industrial Atlantic herring fleet to protect river herring and shad, Native American tribal support for the opening of the St. Croix River to alewives, a bill to fight illegal fishing, a study to map the seafloor of Long Island Sound, an objective look at New England fisheries and fishing communities, and an article about how London is working to achieve their commitment to serve only sustainable seafood at the 2012 Olympic Games.