Early Herring

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Date: December 26, 2002 at 17:57:02
From: ken, [pool-64-223-38-62.prov.east.verizon.net]
Subject: Early Herring

Re: Herring

Spring 2001 Archive

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Re: Herring

From: Ken
Date: 14 Apr 2001
Time: 09:33:25
Remote Name: 24.4.252.47

Comments

Hi Dave, it all depends on when you look. If you look in April then that is when you will see them. The old time lobstermen would begin to find herring in late Feb. and that is how I found out about them coming in at that time. The first ones are very large females and they are followed in March by more large females then the smaller males begin to arrive. I think that they come in waves spread out over a three to four month period so that they are not all wiped out if a natural catastrophy occurs such as a drought or something that can prevent them from spawning. There are times in any herring brook when you can not find a single herring and then a few hours later the brook is teeming with them. Just because you look at a brook at 2 oclock on a Sunday afternoon and don't find any herring is not an accurate measure of when they are returning. Many of the restored runs do not have a broad gene pool and the herring they have used to restore the run may not reflect the early fish that were there in the original run. I believe that over time these runs will again have early fish through natural selection but who knows for sure. Here in R.I. my friend Mark Archambault has been watching herring in Gilbert Stuart for over a month now and he has seen them just as long in other places as well. The only way to find out these things is to go and see them for yourself otherwise you will be dependent on hearsay or on observations made in runs that are being restored and monitored by state officials who are only physicaly aware of their particular project or projects first hand. Go and look; most herring come up the rivers at night on the flood tide, it is not as convienient to look for them then as it is on Sunday afternoon but, it is more informative.

Last changed: July 04, 2001

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