Editorial of May 2, 2024

Running in Otsego

April, an increasingly difficult month, has left us, and now we really can see the coming of spring and summer. The forsythia is blooming everywhere—a better sight than it once was, when the winters were so cold it hadn’t a chance of budding. Ramps, also called wild leeks or wild garlic, are filling the upper fields and sunny clearings all around, and appearing at the farmers’ markets; cherry blossoms are brightening our streets and gardens; wild turkeys and baby deer are rambling about, some causing those proverbial and expensive disfigurements in the fenders and grills of our winter-weary cars and pick-ups; the birds are returning from their winter roosts, and the shadbush, deciduous shrubs and trees that are harbingers of the spawning shad, which run up the rivers and tributary streams of the East Coast, have turned out their white blossoms.

In our lakes and streams, the white suckers have begun their annual spring run. The first fish to run each year, and the most numerous, these bottom-feeding fish have fleshy lips at the underside of their heads that scoop up algae, small invertebrates, and plants from the bottom of lakes and rivers. They can grow to five pounds and can be 20 inches long. They live in all kinds of fresh water—muddy, clear, warm, cold, running and standing. Females can produce over 10,000 eggs, which enables them to maintain large populations despite their being prey to the many larger fish in the lake, and their presence early in the spring spawning months ensures the future health of their habitat: their mass migrations contribute essential nutrients to their environment. Their flesh is soft and inedible for much of the year, serving fishermen well as bait, but when spawning their bodies are firm enough to spear, fillet, and pickle. They are an ancient fish; fossils have been found that are 1.8 million years old.

Herring, too, have run here, though they do not now. It has been written that in 1789 the Cooperstown settlers were close to starvation, having been reduced to eating wild leeks (ramps), milk, and syrup made of maple sugar and water. As the settlement became convinced of a sure starvation in the wilderness, their leader, Judge William Cooper, heard that there was a strange fish in Otsego Lake which had never been seen before. The lake and river were suddenly full of herring, and no one knew from whence they had come. They rigged nets, salted the many fish they caught, and ate herring for the remainder of the spring and into the summer. In his “Guide to the Wilderness,” Cooper speaks of this as one of the most extraordinary occurrences in his lifetime.

The largest herring in North America, the Alosa sapidissima, or American shad, is an anadromous fish, a saltwater fish that matures at sea, the male for five years and the female for six, reproduces in freshwater tributaries where they were hatched and then returns to the ocean, often repeating this cycle for several years. American shad are native to the Atlantic coast from Newfoundland to Florida, and they were introduced successfully to the West Coast in 1871. This fish, deemed the fish that fed the American nation’s founders, also once ruled the waters of the Susquehanna River and its tributaries. Their sheer abundance and a single female’s ability to lay up to 600,000 eggs in a spawning season made for bountiful harvests each spring during their runs—they can travel more than 1,000 miles upriver –and they were one of the region’s most valued commodities for commerce and daily living through the 1830s. They, too, have been seen in Otsego Lake: “When Cooperstown was first settled the fish afforded the inhabitants were of great value,” wrote S.T. Livermore in 1862, “Shad then came up to the lake in the spring and returned to the ocean in the fall. Salt water herring also came up in such abundance that they could be caught in great numbers in a basket…”

Tragically, the shad’s, and the herring’s, natural migratory cycle was broken by human activities, primarily the construction of dams, both large and small, which prohibit the fish to return to their hatching pools, and pollution. A multi-million-dollar program, one of the largest restoration efforts of is kind, to return American shad to their historic range, including fish passage facilities in the big dams of the lower Susquehanna, fish ladders, the removal of dams, debris and culverts—called daylighting –is well underway. Overfishing and pollution are being addressed as well. This is a good start. The suckers will always run here; perhaps one day the shad will run again here, just when our shadbushes blossom.