The Shad Run
Our daughter, Catherine, recently bought me a book that she thought I might enjoy. It is called The Founding Fish by John McPhee. I read a good part of it on our recent trip to Sacramento, California where we went to honor a grandson, Joshua, who graduated from high school and Jacob who graduated with ceremony from the eighth grade.
The Founding Fish is primarily about the shad fish and it provided the stimulus to write this and an accompanying article. It is the source of most of the information for this first article.
The shad’s scientific name is Alosa sapidissima that literally means “most savory”. It has a forked tail, a centered dorsal fin, a white belly, dark greenish-blue sides and large deciduous silvery scales about the size of a dime. The chemical make-up of the scales can be correlated with the chemistry of the specific river water in which they spent their early lives.
Shad only eat zooplankton their entire lives and zooplankton eat photosynthetic organisms, so shad move to the most productive waters for feeding. They have special gill rakes for screening out the small organisms from the water.
The shad spawn in fresh water streams early in the season, usually in April, May or June. The females lay several hundred eggs, and they are fertilized at the spawning site. The sperm are produced in such quantities that they may color the water. The larvae stage begins in 2-3 days, and the yolk sac will be slowly absorbed. The young fingerlings remain in the fresh water stream for most of that season, and enter the ocean in the fall when they are 3-4 inches long and are now called recruits. These shad provide a primary source of food for many other fish, and so they are an important part of the base level of the food chain in water
After 4-5 years in the ocean, the shad return generally to the same river of their early life. They may travel 2,000 miles each year in the ocean in order to reach the rich zooplankton areas. On the eastern seaboard they can be found from northern Florida to the Labrador Sea.
On the spawning run up the streams, the females generally weigh 5-6 pounds, the males only 2-3 pounds. In the southern warmer waters, the shad spawn and then die. In the northern, cooler streams, they will return to the ocean and may live for a few years, returning each spawning season. A record eleven pounds, one ounce shad was caught from the Delaware River. The fish may lose 40% of their weight while going upstream. The flavor of the spawned out fish is generally unfavorable.
The shad are very streamlined for swimming. The mature fish may be 24 inches long so they are rather slender. They are thought of as the most athletic fish, the Olympic winners. The young shad recruits remain in the mouths of their rivers for some time, gathering strength and size. From the recruit stage to the spawning grounds, they typically have traveled some 12,000 miles. On the East Coast, the shad congregate in July and August in the Gulf of Maine and in the Bay of Fundy. In October, November, and December, they are found in the Atlantic from Cape Cod to Cape Hatteras. They move in response to a temperature gradient and availability of zooplankton.
In Pre Colonial times and up into the Colonial times when the first dams were built, shad would run up the major rivers for hundreds of miles. At spawning times, the rivers teemed with millions of fish. Sturgeon, some eight feet long, would move inland with the shad run. Salmon would move in great numbers at a somewhat later time. Seines, pitch forks, arrows, clubs, etc. would remove hundreds of fish at one site in the river in a day’s time. The fish were preserved in several ways. The colonials used heavy brine in barrels.
George Washington was a shad fisherman and dealer. He also “dunged” his farm with shad. He knew about the season for the shad run. It was the spring shad run on the Schuylkill that saved his army from starvation at Valley Forge.
Originally a thousand Indians of the Pamunkey tribe lived on the Pamunkey River in Virginia. Now there are only 65 left to catch shad during the spring run. They slow-cook the shad in two sheets of foil for six hours at 250 degrees. This dissolves all of the smaller bones. They scramble shad roe with hen eggs. They season both the fish and eggs with salt and pepper only.
In 1871 Seth Green of the New York Fish Commission gathered four milk cans full of baby shad from the Hudson River. After a harrowing trip by train and stagecoach, he arrived in Sacramento, went up the Sacramento River 150 miles to the town of Tehama where he let the baby shad go. Of the 12,000 fish that he started with, 10,000 survived.
A fifty dollar reward was posted for the first shad caught in California waters. Baltimore Harry caught the first shad and claimed the reward. Differing from the usual situation on the East Coast, the Seth Green shad, originally from the Sacramento River scattered up and down the Pacific coastal waters and moved up many other streams for spawning. They went up most of the major rivers from San Diego north to the rivers in Siberia. Fifty years later, six million pounds of shad were caught annually from California Waters. Now, 40,000 are caught annually in the Sacramento River within 500 yards of the Sacramento Zoo, an area known as the Minnow Hole.
Next week, I will conclude this shad story with techniques used for catching the fish, the effects of damming the streams and, finally, the prospects of “freeing the rivers”.
– Percy