Efforts to restore the alewife runs on the St. Croix River, which once supported one of the largest runs of alewives in the northeastern U.S. and Atlantic Canada and has the greatest production potential of any watershed probably in North America, took a step forward with an award of funding to replace the fishway at the Woodland dam. Earlier this month the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation awarded $5 million to the Maine Department of Marine Resources (DMR) for the new fish passage. The state will be providing $1.6 million in matching funds for the estimated $6.6 million project, which is part of a partnership with Woodland Pulp, the Passamaquoddy Tribe, the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and numerous other U.S. and Canadian partners.
      Sean Ledwin of the DMR says that the funding will go towards building a large, state-of-the-art fish lift at the Woodland dam starting as early as the summer of 2024. The Milltown dam is scheduled to be removed on the Canadian side in 2023 and the U.S. side in 2024, and this project is intended to be synergistic with that effort. With the Milltown dam's removal, the Woodland dam will be the first obstruction to alewife passage on the St. Croix River.
      Of the funding announcement, Ralph Dana of the Sipayik Environmental Department comments, "Funding for a fish lift at Woodland dam is great news, and its construction, in contrast to the existing fishway, will be a significant improvement for upstream passage of alewife. Although there are many challenges to come, this represents what kind of positive impact we can have if we collaborate and strive for a common goal of river restoration."
      Brian Altvater of Sipayik, chair of the Schoodic Riverkeepers, which has been working for years to restore the alewife run on the river, says, "The fish lift is certainly an improvement over what they currently have, but it's not my ultimate goal. Short of removing all the dams, a natural fish passage is the best option. But it's certainly a step up from the fishway that has been falling apart for years." The current fishway, with a sloping concrete channel and wooden baffles, was installed in the mid-1960s. In contrast, natural fishways have a set of gradual rapids, with boulders and eddies, allowing the fish to swim upstream.
     

Alewife runs expected to jump
      Ledwin says, "The combination of dam removal at Milltown and a new fishway at Woodland is expected to result in a dramatic increase in runs of sea run fish such as alewives, shad, blueback herring and eels into the St. Croix in the coming years."
      He adds, "With these scheduled improvements at Milltown and Woodland and planned improvements to the Grand Falls fishway, the numbers of returning alewives could be in excess of 20 million annually, which could nearly double the returns of alewives to the entire State of Maine. It is hard to predict the exact numbers that would return, but we would certainly expect at minimum many millions of alewives to return annually after these improvements."
      Estimates on how many alewives the St. Croix watershed could support vary, with Altvater saying that the river's carrying capacity is in the range of 65 to 80 million fish a year.
      A restoration plan for the Skutik River that was developed by the Peskotomuhkati Nation at Skutik seeks to restore all of the sea run fish primarily through improvements to upstream and downstream passage. It aims to achieve the "maximum ecological production capacity" of the watershed so that the Skutik River "can once again be a significant 'food factory' sending trillions of juvenile herring to Passamaquoddy Bay and supplementing the food supply there sufficiently to increase the fisheries."
      According to the restoration plan, the river is able to support 27 to 58 million alewives with dams in place and no fishing and perhaps up to 114 million without dams or harvesting. That would be more than both the Penobscot and Kennebec rivers combined. The restoration plan also seeks to restore Atlantic salmon to the watershed.
      The report points to ecological, economic and social and cultural benefits of restoration. Alewives are a keystone species that provide food for a wide variety of fish and wildlife, from other fish to eagles and whales. Economic benefits include recreational fisheries for shad, striped bass, smelt or even possibly salmon some day. Alewives are valuable bait for the lobster industry, and a 2011 analysis estimated that a bait fishery for alewives on the St. Croix could generate $1.8 million a year in direct benefits and $1.2 to $4 million in indirect benefits due to a lower cost for bait.
      Dams are a major reason for the demise of sea run fish in the river, as they significantly limit access to inland spawning and rearing habitats. That lack of access to habitat is the greatest impediment to a healthy and self sustaining ecosystem, the report states.