EDENTON, N.C.
State field technicians Cynthia Kros-wek and Jenny Lippincott dragged a seine net to shore, flopped the catch onto the sand and carefully began picking through mats of aquatic grasses and hundreds of tiny bait fish.
It was quickly evident that there were no young herring last week when the two were doing their work.
They have landed only one herring since June, deploying seine nets every week at 11 sites along the Chowan River and Albemarle Sound.
Samples like these in the 1970s and early 1980s yielded 30 to 40 herring at each site, said Adam Kenyon, a biologist with the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries who leads the weekly seine net sampling efforts.
"The last couple of years have been really low," Kenyon said.
Kenyon and the technicians are part of new efforts to study and help restore the river herring fishery in the region.
Last year, the General Assembly appropriated $252,200 for herring research, including three new positions, a truck, a boat, water-testing equipment and $48,576 for annual operations, according to a news release from the North Carolina Division of Marine Fisheries. Legislation added another $146,312 this year.
Overfishing, habitat loss and natural predators have caused river herring populations to drop off rapidly in the past 20 years. Small, slender fish, herring spend most of their lives in saltwater before swimming to inland freshwater bodies in the spring to spawn.
For hundreds of years, American Indians, and later local watermen, harvested the fish by the millions as massive schools pushed up local rivers, particularly the Chowan River. As late as the 1970s, annual harvests averaged around 10 million pounds.
After harvests fell significantly in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seasons and catch limits for herring began in 1995, a year after the harvest fell below 1 million pounds for the first time. The Chowan River pound-net harvest quota of 200,000 pounds has not been reached since 2001. Chowan River watermen caught 75,000 pounds of herring in pound nets in 2004.
The state declared a moratorium on herring harvesting beginning in 2007.
But there are small signs of recovery, said Herbert Byrum, a waterman who is helping the state collect data during the herring spawning run in the spring.
"We saw a few more herring this year than we have in the last few years," Byrum said. "It wasn't a landslide or anything, but I think it will recover. It's a matter of time."
A study under way on zooplankton in the local waterways shows that the herring food source is still healthy.
Byrum hopes higher water salinity from the dry summer may have driven young herring farther up into fresh creeks, he said. Juveniles need three years to mature before coming back to spawn.
"Maybe we'll know more in three years," he said.
Jeff Hampton, (252) 338-0159, jeff.hampton@pilotonline.com
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Folks
please excuse david's ignorance..he will soon be retaking Geography class and hopes to pass this time. The herring are in the rivers, this has nothing to do with his perennial concern, killing off open access to our beaches. (P.S. Heard of rock fish? They are eating up the crabs and the herring as well. Let the fishermen make a living, reduce that underfished stock, and problem solved.)
Humm. . .
Sounds familiar if you are a shorebird or sea turtle. Perhaps letting more uneducated rednecks drive all over the beach at will, pollute with cigarette butts, beer bottles and fishing line, will help the situation? It seems the current custodians in North Carolina (hicks) are not doing a sufficient job of keeping the wildlife wreckers in-check. When will it become apparent people are the "virus" and block most access at beaches? I like how False Cape is managed as far as dis-allowing motor boats and fishing in many areas.