The annual alewife run up the St. Croix River has already passed last year's total. The official count at the Milltown Dam reached 607,053 as of June 27, according to the St. Croix International Waterway Commission's eighth weekly anadromous fishery report for 2020, well above last year's total of 486,500 by the time the run ended in early July.
     "I was hoping for a million this year," says Ed Bassett of the Passamaquoddy Tribe's Environmental Department at Sipayik. "It's got a long way to go, but it's growing and that's a positive thing."
     However, Forest City fishing guide Dale Wheaton contends that river herring - sea run alewives also called gaspereau and closely related blue back herring - do not belong in the St. Croix and that they threaten freshwater species. "We're scared to death because the alewives have absolutely devastated many of the freshwater lakes," Wheaton says, blaming these fish for a drastic drop in smallmouth bass in Spednic Lake after NB Power opened an improved fishway at the Milltown Dam in 1981. "They cleaned out the smallmouth bass, the rainbow smelts, the white perch, the landlocked salmon, everything," he says.
     Wheaton contends that alewives could not get past Salmon Falls before investors blasted rock to build the Milltown Dam in 1881 to power the new cotton mill. "Alewives in prehistoric times could not get up the river," he argues.
     Bassett, however, points to archaeological and historical evidence including an 1851 report on New Brunswick fisheries by Moses Perley, who cites older people who remembered incredible runs of sea run salmon, shad and alewives coming up the river. "The two great branches of the St. Croix, with their numerous tributaries, and the large lakes at the head of each branch present every variety of river, lake and stream adapted to the breeding and feeding of fish. When this is considered, it is not at all surprising, that such great and almost incredible bodies of salmon, shad and gaspereau, as are described by every old resident, should have passed through the narrow gorges of the lower St. Croix in their annual migrations from the sea," Perley wrote.
     Perley's informants told him that these fisheries "instantly fell off" after construction of the Union Dam in tide water not far below Salmon Falls, with no fishway, in 1825. By 1851 Perley reported sawdust, bark and sawmill edgings plugged fishways at other dams.
     The Union Dam is gone but, a generation after Perley, investors built the Milltown Dam at Salmon Falls, and sport fishing interests upriver began stocking smallmouth bass, which were not, in fact, native to these waters.
     NB Power acquired the Milltown Dam after the cotton mill closed in 1957 and built a better fishway in 1981. The alewife count at Milltown grew from 169,000 in 1981 to 2,625,000 in 1987. Sport fishing interests blaming alewives for dropping numbers of smallmouth bass in Spednic Lake convinced the Maine government to block passage at the Vanceboro Dam in 1987, Grand Falls in 1991 and Woodland in 1995. The count at Milltown dropped to 900 in 2001. Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans began trucking alewives above the Woodland Dam the following year. NB Power applied last year to decommission the Milltown Dam.
     The International Joint Commission's St. Croix Watershed Board published a discussion paper in 2005 contending that alewives are, in fact, native to these waters and, further, that they do not threaten smallmouth bass. Maine opened the Woodland Dam to fish passage in 2008 and all other fishways on the main stem of the river forming the international border in 2013.
     Last year the U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered Woodland Pulp LLC to open the West Grand Lake Dam, allowing alewives into West Grand Lake and the upper west branch of the St. Croix.
     Bassett says that the fishways in place now could handle 100,000 alewives a day if they worked optimally, three million fish over a 30 day run, but he believes the St. Croix could support far more alewives than that. He calls alewives a "keystone species" as feed for other salt and freshwater fish. Sea-run Atlantic salmon are gone from the St. Croix River, while shad are returning in small numbers. He sees a growing alewife run as a sign of hope, while Wheaton sees a threat.
     Smallmouth bass fishing is good this year in Spednic Lake, Wheaton reports. "Terrific, it's wonderful and frankly, despite the numbers, I have not seen an alewife this high in the system," he says, but he fears for the future. "It's tragic, and many of us thoroughly believe it is the end of many communities in our area who rely upon sport fishing to survive," Wheaton says.
     "We don't want to have adversarial relationships," Bassett says. "I think we can all work together and find good, healthy solutions to restore the environment that would help all fisheries."