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Saving the shad, and a way of life

May 2, 2004 1:09 am

NDER a shimmering blue sky, Henry Langston eased his john- boat into position on a rippling expanse of the Pamunkey River.

Langston, a Pamunkey Indian, pulled lengths of gill net from a blue plastic drum, untangling each section before setting it below large orange corks in the brown, swirling water.

It was late afternoon and windy, and there was no time to waste.

"I knew I shouldn't have come out here today," Langston shouted to Warren Cook, assistant chief of the tribe in a nearby boat.

A smile creased Langston's weathered face. At 75, and after having worked as a baker before returning to live on the 1,200-acre reservation in King William County in 1972, he loves what he's doing.

He is one of a half-dozen native fishermen who supply brood fish each spring to the reservation's American shad hatchery about an hour and a half southeast of Fredericksburg. The men are paid $150 a day to catch the sleek, silver-scaled fish. Their eggs and sperm are extracted to produce millions of baby shad, which are released back into the river each spring.

The tribe has counted on the now-scarce fish for centuries. Now, the Pamunkeys are working to bring them back.

State-run hatcheries similar to the Pamunkeys' supply shad fry for Virginia rivers such as the Rappahannock in an effort to help the species recover.

Langston has caught shad on the Pamunkey River for more than 60 years. As a boy, he'd go out with his grandfather to help. Later, as a young man, he got a boat and motor and fished with his uncle Silas.

"We'd split the catch, 50-50," said Langston, who retired in 1986 from Nabisco Bakery in Richmond.

Most afternoons during shad season, which runs from mid-March to mid-May, Langston puts in his aluminum boat at the Pamunkey landing and heads to one of a couple favored spots on the river.

He dons ski goggles to keep the wind and spray out of his eyes during the short run out. It takes him about 10 minutes to set his 600-foot-long gill net in a "U" pattern. The net floats with the current, entangling fish of a certain size by their gills.

Langston usually sets out two nets, lets them drift for about an hour, then checks them. It's physically demanding work that requires constant maneuvering with a small auxiliary motor he has on board. At one point, the wind blew the boat over the net, wrapping it around the prop.

"This year, we started the last part of March," he said. "It really depends on the weather" when the fish arrive, and when they leave. Cool, wet weather postpones their arrival; warm, dry weather makes the fishing season shorter.

"Sometimes you get a week or two in May, but we're getting toward the end," Langston said.

Pulling in the first net, Langston soon had a wriggling, fat 4-pound female or "roe" shad, then another, and another, followed by a large, thrashing striped bass. He removed the fish from the net and tossed them in the bottom of the boat.

The smaller male "buck" shad proved to be scarce on this trip.

Nearby, several other Pamunkey fishermen drifted their nets down the mile long section of river. The muddy water is up to 30 feet deep in places and the falling tide moves at a fast clip.

Two hours later, just before sunset, Langston had about 30 shad, a dozen fat rockfish, and a round, oar-shaped garfish piled in the boat.

He motored over to the shore to do his most important job of the trip: extract eggs and sperm from the fish and mix them in small plastic buckets.

Langston grabbed a roe shad, gently squeezing her belly until the glassy eggs flowed into the bucket. He repeated the procedure with two more females, then, in a similar manner, extracted milky sperm from one of the buck shad.

He added a little water and stirred the mixture with his hand. Within an hour or so, the fertilized eggs swelled to about three times their size, ready for the next step in their journey--the hatchery.

Small fry

Pamunkey Fish Hatchery sits atop a pier on the water. Established in 1918, it's among the oldest in Virginia.

Between 1986 and 1997, 184 million shad fry were produced here and released in the Pamunkey, James, Susquehanna and Potomac rivers, and several rivers in Maryland. Now, all the 3 million or so fry produced each season go back into the Pamunkey.

In 1998, the hatchery was renovated with a $90,000 grant from the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, and matching funds from the Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission. VMRC has helped fund the tribe's hatchery for over 20 years.

Fishermen bring the fertilized eggs to Cook, the Pamunkey assistant chief, and Ivy Bradley, the hatchery manager, who is also a fisherman.

Cook and Bradley stir the fertilized eggs with their fingers. Years of experience have taught them when they are ready to go into large green jars fitted with plastic pipes that circulate river water through them.

Each jar can hold about 2.5 liters of developing embryos--about 80,000 of them.

Depending upon the water temperature, it takes four to five days for the eggs to hatch.

Ivy shines a flashlight into one of the jars. "Can you see them?" Newly hatched shad look more like translucent microbes than fish.

Soon after they hatch, the fry swim to the top of the jar, where they flow into one of a dozen 250-gallon tanks. There they'll spend another six to eight days growing and feeding on brine shrimp.

The day before the shad fry are released, oxytetracycline is added to the water. The chemical is harmless to the tiny fish, but it permanently stains their ear bones so scientists later can determine which fish came from the hatchery.

Finally, they are flushed through a pipe running under the hatchery into the river, renewing an age-old cycle.

In the early days of the hatchery, "There were no machines, except to pump water from the river into the holding tanks," said Cook, who is 66. Over the years, many of the tribe's men have been fishermen. Now, only a few remain.

Some are retirees, such as Langston, who fish to supplement their incomes. Others fish before or after their day jobs.

Cook fries up some shad for himself several times a week during the season. Pamunkey fishermen are allowed to keep and consume the protected fish under their state treaty.

The fish, Cook says, have supplied sustenance, income and food for the tribe for thousands of years.

He doesn't see that changing anytime soon.

This year was a good omen, he says: "We had maybe the biggest shad I've ever seen."

The Pamunkey, which has been stocked by the nearby hatchery since 1918, has one of the largest runs of American shad of any Virginia river. Though there are other factors, much of that abundance is credited to the hatchery, and the American Indians' culture of stewardship, which demands that what is taken from nature must be returned.

"They deserve a lot of credit," said Tom Gunter, shad restoration coordinator for the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries.

The Pamunkey hatchery is one of four producing shad in Virginia. Others are operated by the game department, the Mattaponi Tribe in King William, and the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery operated the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Charles City County.

Shad, a larger cousin of herring and alewife, are anadromous fish, which live in the ocean but return to fresh water to spawn in the spring. They were a major part of the state's economy and food source in Colonial times. Untold millions were harvested in Chesapeake Bay rivers until dams and pollution began taking their toll.

By the early 1990s, numbers of American shad had fallen so low that they were no longer considered a viable commercial fishery and few recreational anglers were catching them.

In 1994, harvesting shad was banned in inland waters and restoration efforts began in earnest, particularly on the James River. On the James, several dams were removed and a fish passage was built at Bosher's Dam in 1999. Restocking the James has been so successful that the game department installed a "Shad Cam" at Bosher's where online viewers can watch the fish during the spring run at: dgif.state.va.us/fishing/shad/index.html.

To reach RUSTY DENNEN: 540/374-5431 rdennen@freelancestar.com