Learning To Be Big

There is a waterway on Cape Cod, actually a number of them by the same name, this one in Wellfleet, called the Herring River. Several towns on the Cape have named streams after the once ubiquitous river herring (now protected and prohibited from use as bait by recreational anglers and from harvests by commercial operators) that enters their tidal streams every spring to spawn. Like many other game fish, striped bass follow and ambush the herring on their spawning run. Herring are to the bass like Snickers bars are to trick-or-treating kids on Halloween.

The tidal Herring River in Wellfleet flows under Chequesset Neck road into Wellfleet Harbor, a beautiful corner of Cape Cod Bay. The river is physically separated from the bay by a dike equipped with self-adjusting tidal gates, creating a tailwater situation on each side as the tide floods and ebbs.

The river side of the dike, because of its warmer water and flow of nutrients and plankton, has become a tidal nursery for juvenile forage fish, particularly menhaden, an oily filter-feeding fish, known locally as “pogies” or in some areas “bunker,” greatly sought after by game fish such as striped bass and toothy bluefish. The Herring River, in nature’s whimsy, is also a summer nursery for “snappers,” juvenile versions of “slammers,” the jumbo adult bluefish that perpetually pursue schools of roaming adult pogies.

It was a clear, bright day in October, Columbus Day actually, when I stood on the river side of the dike observing the interplay between the huge schools of two-inch pogies and the roving schools of voracious snappers.

The pogies when at rest aligned themselves facing into the fast current feeding on the rich plankton crop drifting past. Virtually every single-celled planktonic organism, animal, plant and crossovers, contains a droplet of oil within its membrane or cell wall to help regulate its depth in the water column; the same oil that gives pogy flesh its oily texture. This type of feeding behavior is a rehearsal for later life when, as twelve-inch fish, pogy schools filter millions of plankton on an almost continuous basis. And like the rehearsal by the pogies, the snappers of Herring River prepare for later life as ten-pound-plus marauding predators, by cruising beneath the tiny pogies, individually charging toward the surface attacking a individual pogies from the rear and devouring it, either completely or leaving behind a shocked, bleeding head. The flash of silvery bluefish scales told the story each time a young pogy lost its future prospects.

The pogies somehow, in their own way, recognized the protective benefits of living and feeding in schools, and at the same time, accepted the reality of being converted to omega-rich bluefish flesh at almost any time in their lives.

This snapper -pogy interaction takes place every fall in virtually every bay and estuary on Cape Cod. There is a certain peace that comes while observing the process from atop the Wellfleet dike. In a time of great despair for some people, it’s possible to stand there and imagine the sequence playing out on the Cape for the last hundred centuries, since the last melting glaciers deposited their sandy burdens creating the Cape. It also produces a sense of reassurance, reflecting on how that same predator-prey relationship might continue forever, or at least until the last factory ship grinds up the last pogy for cat food or fish oil capsules.

My book The Double-Crested Cormorant: Symbol of Ecological Conflict is now available in a trade hardcover version at Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble.com, and the University of Michigan Press, which also offers an E-book edition. Also, check your local booksellers for availability.

For insights into the book log on to my Author Page at Amazon at www.amazon.com/author/dennis-wild.