To say I was surprised to see that a herring run in Harwich, Massachusetts would be reopened to harvesting these little anadromous fish would be an understatement, the word I would use is “shocked”. Of course, I did fall victim to the headline, and when I read the meat of the story, it dulled the shock factor, to some degree. As it turns out, the reopening of this fishery is extremely limited and heavily regulated. With 150 permits up for grabs, only 30 of which were available to non-residents, and the harvest itself limited to just three hours on seven total days throughout the spring of 2026.
While the impacts of this sudden reopening of the harvest in the Harwich’s Johnson Flume herring run will be small when compared to the free-for-all that anyone that’s fished New England waters for more than 20 years has certainly witnessed, the bigger question is, “why now?” The herring fishery was abruptly closed in 2006 citing poor numbers and poor spawning results. In the two decades since, nothing has really changed. There are a few runs that boast stronger runs and those rivers basically prop up the entire species. When you add in the fact that the Rhode Island cormorant numbers ballooned from zero in 1980 to 11,000 in 2000 and my personal observations at various runs around the region indicate that this number has increased exponentially in the 26 years since then, which, at the very least, isn’t helping.
Commercial fisheries targeting other schooling fish like sea herring and mackerel off the south coast of New England, continue to fish under a bycatch allowance that amounts to nearly 5 million individual river or blueback herring before the fishery is closed. Beyond that, commercial fishers seining waters east of the Cape and Nantucket and up through the Gulf of Maine are pulling incidental catches of river herring with no cap on what they can take. I want to be clear, these fish are being taken by accident, because – on the screen – it’s nearly impossible to tell what species are in a marked school, but a catch cap was never set up for this area and therefore the numbers are not known.
Then we come to the run in question, Johnson Flume. In the face of a steady decline over the last 12 years, this harvest is being opened up. In 2014 the counts showed 1.4 million herring passed through the run, by 2019 that number had dropped to 1.2 million and as of 2023 that number had been cut to less than half at 529,000 fish. Managers estimate that, under the current regulation, 17,000 herring will be removed from the run. This is a meager 3.2% of what passed through the run in 2023, but with the numbers of returning fish dropping by a staggering 56% from 2019 to 2023, after dropping by about 15% from 2014 to 2019. So even if we use that 15%, to estimate the decline from 2023 to 2026, that would bring just under 450,000 herring back to the flume in 2026, take 17,000 off of that and we’re at 433,000 fish theoretically making it through the run to spawn. Which would accelerate the decline over the 12 years between 2014 and 2026 to a whopping 69%!
Which brings us back to the question of why. What are we missing out on by continuing the harvest moratorium on river herring? Some might say that we’re being forced to give up our traditions, for centuries (actually millennia) coastal civilizations have harvested herring for fertilizer, food, roe and, of course, bait. But these practices, along with human-driven habitat depletion, pollution and the aforementioned commercial bycatch, have really taken a toll on river herring over the past 20-plus years. If this reopening is a pilot program, ‘dipping the proverbial toe’ with the hope of a wider reopening, I think that is a mistake.
Our traditions center around the herring being there when the weather begins to change in March and April, and in the 20 years since the moratorium took effect, we have forged new traditions of seeing their annual arrival as a marker of the season and using it as a teaching moment for our children. As we rely more on technology we are losing these things, we check the weather app instead of sticking our heads out the door, we “like” Facebook photos of the first daffodil blooms instead of seeing them for ourselves. As fishermen, we have adapted. The live herring guys have had their eyes opened to the amazing world of plugging, and a huge percentage of us will never look back.
The 2006 moratorium was enacted because herring numbers were in decline and in the face of their numbers still declining, it seems irresponsible to start making moves toward reopening, even if they are heavily regulated moves designed for minimal impact on one focused area. We’ve been fine over these last 20 years without harvesting herring… and nothing has changed.
What do you think?
