After fish passage was fully restored on the Bagaduce River four years ago, one of the towns along it held its first commercial alewife harvest in more than a half-century this past spring.
But alewives have still struggled to make it upstream at one site along the river, and town officials in Penobscot hope that the recent reconstruction of a fishway — which they celebrated this month — could make it easier.
Alewives returning from the ocean to spawn will now be able to move easily upstream through 14 newly constructed weirs — stone arrangements that hold back water to create small pools — at Pierce Pond.
Once a common sight in Maine’s tidal rivers, the fish are a source of food and lobster bait, as well as income for towns and meals for wildlife.
Many of Maine’s rivers and tributaries were dammed in past centuries to provide power for industry, such as the mills that once operated on Pierce and Wight’s ponds in Penobscot. The blockades, along with other factors including pollution, overfishing and too-narrow drainage culverts beneath roads, led to a sharp decline in the traditional runs.
But through the last decade, towns across the state, including Penobscot, have started trying to undo the consequences of those past uses. The Pierce Pond fish weir project was the latest such step in the Bagaduce River watershed, which in 2021 became the first in Maine to be fully restored for fish passage. Organizers hope its example will continue to bring more focus to similar efforts in other nearby watersheds.
In addition to the new fishway, Penobscot has plans in the next two years to do additional work on a road crossing and tidal marsh.
When local groups started trying to make this work happen a decade ago, there wasn’t a model yet for how to do it, and it was a hard sell to outside funders.
Ciona Ulbrich, who directs partnership projects at the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, had been working on conservation projects for land trusts in the watershed for two decades at that point, she said. But she hadn’t thought of the intersection between land and water until she met Bailey Bowden, a longtime advocate for alewife passage and then the head of a three-town alewife committee.
“[He] was able to make clear to me how and why land trusts should also be thinking about these stream restoration projects, if you’re trying to think about the health of ecology in a watershed,” she said.
Now, about two dozen organizations are involved in the work, which has brought in millions in outside funding.
By 2018, they had stabilized an old dam on Pierce Pond, removed another on Wight’s Pond and installed a fishway there.
Those were followed by projects in nearby Brooksville and Sedgwick, which eventually restored full fish passage to the entire river four years ago.
But at Pierce Pond, it was still difficult for fish to get up the ladder — nearly impassable at times. The new weir will allow them to move easily and, Ulbrich hopes, increase reproduction when they aren’t expending energy moving up.
Now that the weir expansion is complete, two more projects are planned there: the Maine Department of Transportation will replace a tidal barrier — one that had also gone underwater in strong winter storms early in 2024 — followed by restoration of a marsh around the head of the barrier.
Additional educational signs will be added at the pond and the groups continue to work with local schools to connect the next generation to the fish and create future stewards.
Penobscot held its first commercial harvest on Wight’s Pond in 51 years this spring after the state approved 10 years of data on fish numbers. This season, water bodies in Arrowsic, Pembroke, and Penobscot County also became newly eligible for a harvest, according to the Department of Marine Resources.
Alewives and soft shell clams are the two Maine fisheries that individual towns co-manage with the state.
The Penobscot harvest was small, likely due to high water levels and state restrictions on harvest days, according to Bowden. But overall, the number of alewives entering Wight’s Pond has roughly tripled in the last decade, and at Pierce Pond has gone up 2.5 times since 2015.
Statewide, landings have averaged 3 million pounds worth more than $1 million, compared to a 1994 low point of 150,000 pounds, National Fisherman reported this spring.
Focusing on a commercial harvest is the way to make sure such projects are successful long-term, at least in Hancock and Washington counties, according to Bowden.
Smaller runs and tributaries closer to ponds in the region require making openings in beaver dams — at least 200 hours of work a year, which is expensive for towns without a resulting revenue stream and difficult to sustain through volunteer labor in less populated areas.
In nearby Surry, experimental devices were installed last summer to help fish pass through dams, according to the Ellsworth American.
The fish reaching Maine in a given season reflect the conditions going back four years — the fish head back out to the ocean and return in four-year cycles.
The Bagaduce is now an example for other towns with questions about fish passage projects, such as whether removing a dam would mean losing a pond, according to Ulbrich.
“The town was supportive from early on, which was important because when there was an example to look at, other town governments were willing to think about it too,” she said.
