Some things about the Hudson River have changed. For example, on Aug. 10 at Little Stony Point, the tides washed up at my feet two distinct bags of branded, copyrighted, legal marijuana.
Some things have remained the same. That same morning, I watched several people drag a seining net across the cove, which people have been doing at that spot for at least 5,000 years.
The technology hasn’t changed much, with two exceptions. The Native Americans used palm-sized pieces of sandstone instead of metal for the weights at the bottom of the net. At the end of the day, they’d leave the weights on the shore so the net would be easier to carry home.
“Who wants to carry a bunch of rocks in their pockets, right?” asked Tom Lake, a naturalist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation. “Although I don’t think they had pockets.”
Lake said you can still find old sandstone weights, their edges circled with notches, along the river.
The other recent innovation is a bag in the middle which billows as the net is dragged across the river bottom. “Fish are pretty smart,” Lake said. “They know they can swim faster than we can pull the net.” But when the bag expands, the fish are fooled into thinking it’s an opening and swim into it.
Bags were added about 100 years ago. “It’s worked for a long time,” said Lake. “Every time we release the fish, we worry that they will tell the others, ‘Don’t turn right when the net turns, keep swimming straight.’ So far they haven’t.”
There was one final difference. The Native Americans were fishing for a meal. “We’re fishing for discovery,” Lake said.
We weren’t the only ones dragging a net that morning. At eight spots on the river, from the Brooklyn Bridge to where the Mohawk and Hudson rivers meet north of Albany, educators, naturalists and citizen scientists were taking part in the 13th Annual Great Hudson River Fish Count.
“It’s a way to engage folks with the fish that live in their river,” said Sarah Mount, a science educator for the Hudson River National Estuarine Research Reserve who, like Lake, has taken part in every fish count over the past 13 years (as has Lake’s 14-year-old grandson, Thomas, who was on the beach with us at Little Stony Point with two dozen other volunteers and half a dozen dogs).
The number and type of fish caught varies each year. On Aug. 10, the water was 81 degrees, and the salt front — the line where salty ocean water meets fresh water from the Adirondacks — had retreated to Yonkers because of heavy rains. Normally at this time of year, the salt line is between Little Stony Point and Beacon.
Even the tides play a role as to what we might find in the nets. “We’re between a new and a full moon, so the tides are kind of wimpy right now,” said Lake, who correctly predicted that most of what we’d find in the nets would be tiny herring. Born in freshwater, they swim to the ocean when they get bigger and return to the Hudson four years later to spawn.
With its tides, winds and muddy bottom, the river’s turbid nature makes it a perfect place for baby fish to avoid predators, as well as a terrible place to snorkel. “If these fish were out by Coney Island, they’d have a life expectancy of about 90 seconds,” said Lake.
About 240 kinds of fish live in the Hudson, half of which swim by Little Stony Point at some point in the year. Most of what the seining nets brought in were blueback herrings or alewives, two members of the herring family that look almost identical except the interior stomach lining of a blueback herring is black, while an alewives’ is pink.
Properly identifying what we had caught called for, as Lake put it, “mildly invasive surgery.” With that, he passed a wriggling fish over his shoulder to Thomas, who bit its head off, spit out the head and passed the body back to his grandfather.
“Black!” said Lake, holding up the decapitated fish. (Lake later said he uses that trick when he’s leading field trips for fourth graders and their attention wanders.)
Other identification techniques were less drastic. Spottail shiners, 3-inch-long minnows with a black spot near their tails, were named in 1824 by Gov. DeWitt Clinton, who “made time to think about science and the natural world,” said Lake.
When boats went by, the rolling waves brought white perch into the nets, who were drawn by the food stirred up from the disturbed river bottoms. A few baby striped bass turned up, as well as two “year-of-young” striped bass that stay in the river for a year before heading to the ocean, improving their chances of survival.
For the fish that don’t stick around for a year, prospects are grim. Lake estimated that only 10 percent make it back. The odds were lower for the ones pulled from the nets, because many herrings can’t handle the stress and go belly up when placed back in the river. “Nothing goes to waste,” said Lake, referring to the blue crabs and eels that will feed on the deceased that aren’t eaten by the dogs.
The catfish sometimes caught in the nets are another story. “I could put a catfish in my pocket, walk into the village, have dinner, walk back here and put it back in the river and it would be fine,” said Lake.
For Mount, the science educator, the best part of the day is watching people’s faces light up when they catch a fish for the first time. “It’s one thing when you stand on the banks of the river and look out and know, intellectually, that there are fish,” she said. “But to see how many fish you can catch with a small scoop of a net, you realize that there’s a whole world under there.”
Lake will be back at Little Stony Point with a seining net at 3 p.m. on Sept. 14. as part of the Hudson River Valley Ramble.
Wonderful story and tradition of teaching the young about “the river that runs both ways.” I would love to see a story about blue crabs, which I was told get so large in the Hudson, they are sometimes sold to crab restaurants in Maryland.