108 BULLETIN OF THE BUREAU OF FISHERIES 



of alewives unless they were baiTed by impassable falls near the mouth. In the 

 words of an eyewatness, "experience hath taught them at New Plymouth that in 

 April there is a fish much like a herring that comes up into the small brooks to spawn, 

 and when the water is not knee deep they will presse up through your hands, yea, 

 thow you beat at them with cudgels, and in such abundance as is incredible." " 



During the past two centuries, however, its numbei-s have declined and its 

 range has been restricted, both by actual extirpation from certain streams by over- 

 fishing, by the pollution of the river waters by manufacturing wastes, and by the 

 erection of dams that it can not pass. However, the alewife is still a familiar fish 

 all along our coast, ^ and yields an abundant catch in many of om- streams. Ale- 

 wives are taken commonly about Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, and they are locally 

 abundant in the Bay of Fundy, e. g., in Minas Channel in the Annapolis Basin as 

 well as at other localities farther up the bay, with large runs in the St. John River ; 

 and passing along the coast of Maine we find them entering both the large river 

 systems and their tributaries and innumerable small streams, the one requirement 

 being that these shall lead to ponds. At Boothbay Harbor, for instance, a con- 

 siderable stock of alewives annually runs up to spawn in Campbell's Pond, a small 

 body of water dammed off from the harbor and reached by a short fishway only 15 

 feet long. Perhaps this is our shortest alewife stream. 



Alewives also breed in many ponds lying back of barrier beaches, which they 

 enter through artificial cuts opened on purpose. To show how catholic the alewife 

 is in its choice of rivers we may point out that in 1896, when the fishery was the 

 subject of inquuy by the Bureau of Fisheries,^ catches large enough to be worth 

 special notice were reported from the mouths of the St. Croix, Dennys, Machias, 

 Medomak, Penobscot, St. George, Pemaquid, Damariscotta, and Kennebec Rivers, 

 from Casco Bay, and from sundry other shore localities in Maine, from the Pis- 

 cataqua River system in New Hampshire, the mouth of the Merrimac, and from 

 Cape Cod Bay in Massachusetts north of Cape Cod, but few alewives now ascend 

 the Merrimac, so polluted is it and obstructed by dams, though fishways recently 

 constructed now allow some to ascend beyond Lowell, Mass. In 1921 Belding 

 found them still running in only about 12 streams on the Gulf of Maine coast of 

 Massachusetts (and very few in these) out of 27 streams that formerly supported 

 considerable alewife fisheries. The fact that in 1896, 5,832,900 were caught along 

 the coast and river mouths of Maine, 526,500 in New Hampshire, 2,677,972 as the 

 combined catch of the Merrimac River and of Cape Cod Bay, suggesting a total of 

 not less than 3,000,000 for Massachusetts north of Cape Cod,^ i. e., at least 9,300,- 

 000 (in actuality probably considerably more than 10,000,090) alewives of market- 

 able size from the western and northern shores of the Gulf, will illustrate the 

 numerical strength of this fish. This does not include the yield of tlie Bay of Fundy 



« Capt. Charles Whitborne. in "The True Travels of Capt. John Smith," etc., 1616, vol. 2, p. 250. 

 ' Belding (1921) has given a very instructive report on the alewife in Massachusetts. 

 » Smith, H. M. Report, U. S. Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries, 1898 (1899), pp. 31-43. 



• The total alewife catch for Massachusetts was about 10,000.000 flsh, but most of these were from the streams emptying on 

 Ibo other side of Cape Cod. 



