June 10 - Day of Celebration on the St. Croix - It’s not often you get the chance to celebrate such a clear victory for the environment as the return of the alewife to the St. Croix River watershed. As discussed in prior posts, a Maine law prohibiting alewives from accessing this fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam was repealed this past May and for the first time in two decades, alewives are able to return to their spawning grounds upriver.

June 10 - Veteran Gloucester Journalist Richard Gaines Dead at Age 69 - We at Talking Fish are saddened to hear of the passing of Gloucester Daily Times columnist Richard Gaines yesterday afternoon. Richard worked for 11 years at the Daily Times covering city hall, politics, and the fishing business, and in his 40-year career, he also worked as a political writer for UPI and as editor of the Boston Phoenix. Our thoughts are with his wife, family, colleagues, and the Gloucester community.

June 12 - The Bottom Line: For New England’s Fishing Fleet It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again - Twenty years later, the sense of déjà vu is unshakeable. A new season brings a troubling scenario of depleted fish populations and deficient management. Fourteen of the region’s 20 groundfish—or bottom dwelling—species are currently overexploited. Cod stocks are at the lowest levels ever recorded. New England’s best captains could not find enough cod in the past year to meet more than a third of their allotted quota on Georges Bank. It is, officially, an economic disaster, as the U.S. Department of Commerce declared last fall. In short, here we are, with our storied fishing grounds in even worse shape than they were two decades ago.

June 14 - Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 14 - In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, a Globe editorial says Attorney General Martha Coakley’s lawsuit has “destructive potential”; Gloucester Daily Times journalist Richard Gaines dies; Cape Cod fishermen seek cleaner fuels; the Cape’s first great white shark of the season spotted off Orleans; Ed Markey and Gabriel Gomez answer questions on groundfishand Cape Wind; Connecticut scales back salmon stocking efforts; Maine defeats a bill to let groundfishermen land lobster; the MA State House holds a hearing on seafood mislabeling; Senator Mo Cowan adds amendments to the Farm Bill to help fishermen.

June 6 - The Most Valuable Fishery You’ve Never Heard Of - On May 31, Maine’s elver fishing season came to a close. For the small number of Maine fishermen who can make over $100,000 in two months capturing elvers, the end of the season may come as a bit of a letdown. For the regulators and conservation officers who try to manage the fishery, however, the close probably comes none too soon.

June 7 - Fish Talk in the News – Friday, June 7 - In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, ocean acidification will affect squid; puffins may be in trouble due to depleted herring populations; NOAA cancels furloughs; Maine celebrates the reopening of fishways on the St. Croix; Omega Protein will pay $5.5 million in fines for Clean Water Act violations; the Maine Legislature wants a $3.5 million bond to subsidize groundfish permit purchases; fourteen sea scallop research projects receive $12.5 million in grants.

There has never been a better time to care about the ocean than now. The ocean provides us with so many things – half of the air we breathe, an amazing variety of things to eat, a place of beauty and refuge and sometimes fury. This year the New England coast line was pummeled by tropical storms and Northeasters, reminding us yet again that our glorious ocean is powerful, relentless and unforgiving. Despite our ingenuity and technical know-how, we live in a natural and changing environment and need to better plan and protect our ocean ourselves going forward.

We used to think that the ocean was so big, and life in it so abundant, that nothing we did could harm it or exhaust its resources. But now, because of us, the ocean is changing fast and in dramatic ways. It is getting warmer, more acidic, and ever more crowded – as we consider new uses like tidal and wind energy development in addition to our historic ones like fishing, shipping, sailing and other recreation. The fabric of New England’s ocean ecosystems is changing, too. Previously depleted populations of sharks and seals are on the rise, while other species like Atlantic cod and yellowtail flounder have plummeted. And there’s evidence that the changing ocean chemistry will profoundly affect the entire food chain, from tiny plankton on up.

The time to care is now. With climate change affecting our oceans in ways we are only beginning to understand, now is the time to restore the health of our ocean so that it can be as resilient as possible to the changes that are coming. Ocean conservation has been part of our work at CLF since the mid-1970s when we were a scrappy little organization on Beacon Hill fighting the federal government and the oil industry over oil and gas drilling on Georges Bank – New England’s most important fishing grounds. We won that case, then won it again and again as the oil industry kept knocking on New England’s door. Ocean conservation is part of our history and is embedded in our DNA, and we are still working hard to  protect our ocean and keep it thriving for future generations of New Englanders in many ways:

• Keeping vital habitat protected – special places like Cashes Ledge, a breathtakingly beautiful underwater mountain range 80 miles off the coast of Cape Ann, home to the largest coldwater kelp forest on the North Atlantic seaboard. Cashes Ledge provides rich habitat for many of our most amazing and iconic sea creatures – Atlantic cod and wolffish to bluefin tuna and North Atlantic right whales. Some of these species are on the brink of existence in our waters, and truly need places of refuge to sustain and rebuild their populations. CLF has recently gone to court to keep current protected habitat areas, including Cashes Ledge, closed to destructive trawl and dredge fishing gear.

• Working for an end to overfishing – all the habitat protection in the world won’t help a species recover if the fishing pressure is too high. CLF has been fighting for sustainable New England fisheries for decades, and we still aren’t there. Cod numbers are currently at a very small fraction of what a healthy population would be. We have asked for a moratorium on directed cod fishing until their numbers recover – in opposition to the current political push to increase catch limits. Can you imagine New England without cod? Neither can we – which is why we have gone to federal court against fisheries managers to stop them from increasing catch limits on cod and other imperiled groundfish until the populations are better recovered.

• Supporting our nation’s first regional ocean plan – New England is leading the nation in ocean planning. With the increasing pressures on our rapidly changing water, we need to better coordinate all of our uses to minimize conflict and make decisions based on the whole ecosystem, as opposed to individual uses. CLF has been involved in ocean planning from the start, advising and supporting our states on the Massachusetts Ocean Management Plan and Rhode Island Special Area Management Plan. And now we are actively supporting  development of the nation’s first regional ocean plan by the Northeast Regional Planning Body – made up of state, federal, and tribal representatives and convened pursuant to the National Ocean Policy.

• Celebrating our beautiful ocean – Our New England Ocean Odyssey campaign is all about showcasing the amazing, breathtaking, important, and often strange things that lie beneath our waves. We have one of the most productive, diverse ocean ecosystems on the planet right off our shores, and we hope that by bringing you the gorgeous photography of Brian Skerry and others, and engaging stories, you will be inspired to help us protect it.

• Restoring historic river herring runs – After 18 years, ocean-going alewives (also known as river herring) can return to their ancestral spawning habitat on the St. Croix River in northern Maine and eventually make the St. Croix the largest river herring run in New England once again.  CLF fought for this right on two fronts.  First, we successfully filed suit against the EPA last year to enforce water quality standards, successfully arguing that a 1995 law excluding alewives from parts of the St. Croix river conflicted with the river’s Class A water quality designation under the Clean Water Act. Second, CLF worked with other environmental organizations and the Passamaquoddy Nation to support emergency legislation in Maine to repeal the alewife exclusion law. The alewife, is a “keystone species” that provides food for many animals, birds and larger fish species native to Maine’s marine and fresh waters, and restoring it to its native river habitat is a wonderful reason to celebrate.

We will continue to fight these battles for a healthy ocean so we have more to celebrate next World Oceans Day, and the one after that, and beyond. Please stay with us on our voyage and be part of a better ocean future in New England.

Originally posted on New England Ocean Odyssey.

The bill passed today will restore alewives, a key forage fish, to the St. Croix River, pictured here. Photo: CanadaGood @ flickr

We at CLF applaud today’s vote by the Maine state legislature to restore Alewives to their native habitat in the St. Croix River.

Today, the legislature voted to pass a bill that will reopen the fish ladder at the Grand Falls Dam, allowing the key forage fish to reach 98% of the St. Croix. This vote caps a two-year effort by CLF advocates to restore a fishery that numbered close to 3 million until a state law closed the fish ladder and the number of alewives dwindled to less than 10,000. Last year CLF successfully filed suit against the EPA to enforce the Clean Water Act’s provision related to the state law and then filed suit against the State to invalidate that law.

This bill corrects a practice of fisheries mismanagement that has been allowed to stand for almost two decades. It properly places good science and the interest of many over the self interests of a few. While litigation is the principal tool of our trade, it is wonderful to see the Legislature right this wrong and we hope to be able to dismiss our case against the State soon.

Introduced in March 2013, the bill found strong support among a number of the groups invested and concerned with the restoration of the St. Croix River and its native fish. These groups include Maine fishermen, environmentalists, anglers, federal agencies, and the Passamaquoddy.

The alternative bill proposed by the LePage administration was a half-measure that would have still kept alewives from reaching most of their native habitat.

This vote ensures alewives will now return to the St. Croix River. It is exactly the result that our legal advocacy was aiming for, and we applaud it as an important step forward.

CLF has been blogging on this topic regularly. To read those posts, click here.

April 3 – For Cod’s Sake - In this video, CLF’s Peter Shelley explains the dramatic decline of cod stocks in New England and the action that must be taken to prevent the loss of this region’s most iconic fishery. Atlantic cod populations are at an all-time historic low. The cod fishery, which for generations has supported a way of life in New England’s coastal communities, may be in complete collapse. Click through to see the video.

April 5 - Help Count River Herring (Because They Count, Too) - Somewhere out there on our coast, out where rivers hit salt water, thousands of small fish are gathering, getting ready for an epic voyage inland. The annual run of river herring is about to start. Hundreds of people are getting ready, too. They’re the volunteers who will gather at bridges, fish ladders and riverbanks to count the passing herring—an important exercise in citizen science that can help to conserve these imperiled fish.

April 5 – Fish Talk in the News – Friday, April 5 - In this week’s Fish Talk in the News, two Senators push for fisheries disaster aid; NEFMC will discuss raising the catch limit for white hake; a bill to open the St. Croix to alewives gains traction; Gov. LePage threatens reprisals against Passamaquoddy Tribe over elver fishery; acoustic monitoring may help locate spawning cod aggregations; Senator Jack Reed pushes for Rhode Island membership on Mid-Atlantic Council.

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.

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. 

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.

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.