May 4, 2013 — Despite alewives being the focus of sometimes contentious efforts to improve their access to Down East Maine freshwater spawning habitats, these migratory fish remain something of a mystery to many, while at the same time remaining a favorite food for wide variety of Maine wildlife.
Alewives as a meal for Mainers themselves? Not so much. At least not anymore. Once a dinner-table staple in Maine, alewives are now more likely to be chopped up for lobster bait.
In addition to osprey and bald eagles, which have perfected dive-bombing fishing techniques in feasting upon the annual spring run of “river herring,” alewives are prey for a long list of critters. Alewife predators include not only raptors, but other fish, among them bass, bluefish, tuna, cod, haddock, halibut, eel, trout, landlocked salmon, pickerel, pike and perch. Other predators include great blue heron, gulls, terns, cormorants, seals, whales, otter, mink, fox, raccoon, skunk, weasel, fisher and turtles. Maybe even bears.
An 1852 history of Kennebec County recounts that in Gardiner and Pittston “alewives were so plentiful at the time the country was settled that bears, and later swine, fed on them in the water. They were crowded ashore by the thousands.”
Before the 20th century advent of refrigeration, which allowed a wide variety of fish species as options for dinner entrees, alewives were popular because they kept well when smoked or packed in salt. They were also plentiful, as each May and June hundreds of thousands of the 10-inch silver fish migrated from the sea into virtually all of Maine’s freshwater rivers and streams to spawn. Alewives were also cheap, as in free for the taking.
For thousands of years Native Americans and, centuries later, Maine’s early European settlers relied heavily on alewives for subsistence. So did the poor, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service history of alewife migration. When one Maine river town built a dam that blocked the fish from their spawning habitat, settlers upstream were outraged.
Read the full story at the Bangor Daily News