(bright music) - [Jacob] Sometimes we feel like the changes we've made are sort of permanent.

With the growth in human populations, we've radically changed many of the habitats and there are a lot of species that we really value, that we love, that we're passionate about, that have suffered from that.

But we don't have to just accept that.

What's exciting to me about this work is the potential to undo some of the damage we've done in the past, and to bring things back to more of the way they were.

(water rushing) - There's a bunch.

When I grew up in the late '70s, it was a totally different atmosphere around here.

I grew up on the bay in Northern Bay, so I grew up watching the birds and chasing the fish, and just enjoying being a kid on the shore of Penobscot, and I've always been an avid hunter and fisherman, so that really played into it.

That's where a lot of my spare time went.

Just sitting by a brook, trying to catch a fish or shoot a bird or just hanging out, observing nature.

(gentle piano music) - [Gunnar] I grew up on the Bagaduce.

I've been here my whole life.

And years ago they used to ship smelts from the river, right from here where we're looking at now, and they used to put them in barrels and ship them to Boston.

- Didn't they ship ice from Walker's Pond as well?

- Ice from Walker's Pond went all over the place.

They used to ship eels out of the river, mature eels.

They went to Boston and New York.

That's what people did.

And we have a few wood cutters.

We're quite diversified, actually.

- [Kathy] For a little town.

- [Ciona] The Bagaduce River Watershed is a surprisingly rich ecosystem.

It has over a thousand acres of shellfish and intertidal zone.

It has all these ponds and streams that flow into the river, and all the wetlands that surround it, making it just a really rich place from a nature standpoint.

- [Dwayne] As part of New England, it's really a remnant of what the original landscape looked like, and the land use history has allowed for a lot of the natural features to be maintained in a quite altered state.

But in comparison, relatively speaking.

(water rushing) - [Crew] What is an alewife?

Some of the characteristics, lifecycle?

- Yeah, that's a big question.

An alewife is a sea run fish, a cousin to the shad.

Much like a salmon, they spend most of their life in the ocean, in the salt water environment, and they come into the fresh water ponds and rivers in the spring to reproduce.

- [Joshua] So when an adult female spawns in a lake, she's producing about 100,000 eggs, 100,000 eggs.

It's a lot of eggs.

- But unlike the Pacific salmon, they don't die after spawning.

Many of them will survive to spawn a second, and potentially a third, and potentially even a fourth time.

- [Dwayne] The juveniles come out of fresh water, go to the sea to mature, and they come back again.

And that's been going on for millions of years.

- Walking across the backs of fish wasn't a hyperbole.

It was real.

- [Bailey] They always return to the pond that they were born in.

- [Mike] The sun feeds phytoplankton, zooplankton eats phytoplankton.

Alewives eat that zooplankton.

And so, really they're turning sun's energy and turning it into something that's available for larger animals.

- [Nate] What they are in a bigger sense is a keystone species, and the list of animals that will consume these fish goes everything from bacteria all the way up to whales.

And from the fresh water to the marine environment.

- [Bailey] Alewives were a staple, a food staple for many years, many, many years before refrigeration and electricity came into the picture.

So alewives could be salted, smoked, pickled.

There were many ways to preserve these fish so that they could be eaten year-round.

And they're so easy to catch, because when they run, they run in such huge numbers and there's always a spot in a brook where there's a waterfall or a big pool.

There's a place where the fish are gonna stop and rest.

So they're really easy to harvest at these areas.

- [Tony] In this region, our rivers provide a lot of sites of sustenance, and I refer to them as life-giving places because yes, we gather food here, but it's also gathering like our families.

That's where we teach our children, and our children teach us.

It's everything.

It's everything that would constitute that way of life for that year.

Everything down to spirituality.

So places like this is where we would gather, not just for food, but for all those rhythms that make and still do make up our life.

- [Brett] They're native to this whole coast.

So they're, you know, along the eastern seaboard of the United States and into Canada.

They're a fish that would've been kind of everywhere they could get, both in the oceans and in the freshwater habitats a long time ago.

And they were that plentiful, and that abundant that just, you know, we couldn't get away from them.

- [Dwayne] The alewives, of course, are super important and increasingly important source of bait for the lobster fishery.

Maine, of course known for its lobster fishery.

It's the single most valuable fishery in the state.

And of course, the price of lobster's going up partly as response because of the bait prices and the fuel prices.

And we're going further and further afield looking for bait, and using unusual things like pig hides and so on for bait.

When meanwhile, we're sitting on the potential to produce our own bait.

(gentle music) - [Casey] So we're at the Orland Alewife Weir.

It's the lowest dam in Orland that we have, that runs into the salt water.

And we're trying to catch some bait for lobsters and halibut.

Jake's down on the net now.

See how he's kind of controlling it?

And then when the fish build up on the outside, they'll start coming up, and you can slowly open it up and they'll rush in.

And then as the tide goes out, the fish get stuck in the pen, we'll close the gates up.

And then at low water we go down and we shovel them on a concrete pad into the conveyor system, and the conveyor system will go up and dump into the truck.

And from the truck, we dump into the back of lobster fishermen from York to Eastport.

They come here for fish.

- [Jake] Well, compared to herring or red fish or rock fish or whatever the fishermen use, this is way cheaper bait for them.

And they say it's one of the best baits.

A lot of them, you know, got freezers.

They freeze them so they can use them throughout the summer and fall.

- [Casey] There's only so many fish you can catch in a day.

We don't wanna catch them all, but we want to catch enough to be able to make a living.

(truck rumbles) - [Kathy] 30 years ago there was plenty of herring.

It was easy to get lobster bait.

It's not easy anymore.

There's nothing easy, and there's nothing cheap.

So people are going with alewives.

- [Gunnar] The pogies luckily have saved the lobster fishing the last couple, three years, where the herring quotas been cut back so much, but now they're gonna have quotas and more regulations on the licenses and stuff for pogy seining.

So here we go again.

You know, fresh alewives is pretty good bait and the halibut fishermen like it as well.

- [Joshua] So it's amazing to think of any culture in the world that would have such an incredible bounty, sort of the golden goose, and then to kill the golden goose.

And that's exactly what we've done throughout the world.

(gentle somber music) - [Brett] We societally chose industrialization, consolidation, over fish.

Some of it was done because people didn't know any better.

Some of it was done because people really knew exactly what they were doing.

- [Tony] In that colonial era, they saw that Wabanaki power came from their abilities to access these sites of sustenance because colonists wanted to rename these species resources, to be used.

Later when people were displaced from these riverways, that became supportive of the development of, you know, the early saw mills and dams and development that occurred to the rivers, because these became places where they were resources, they could be extracted for different markets and things like that.

- [Joshua] We went from harvesting some of the water in the river to saying, "Well, what if we took all the river in the water and held it to produce power for industry?"

And that's exactly what happened in the United States.

- [Nate] We started to recognize that, you know, these stocks were collapsing across the board, and we know from stock assessments, based on historical accounts that we've managed to reduce this keystone species, I'm gonna keep saying it, keystone species.

96%.

- [Mike] The history of alewife in the Bagaduce is really analogous to what they've gone through in the whole state of Maine, and arguably the Atlantic Coast, where there were really thriving populations of alewives in, like I said, every place that could have had alewives.

And we as humans, through either dams or perched culverts that wouldn't allow fish past, had stopped about 75 to 80% of the fish from coming back.

- When I first started to figure out or investigate how to restore the commercial fishery in the town of Penobscot, I was asking questions directly to DMR, and the information may not have been the greatest that I was receiving, and I started to look elsewhere for help and I had no idea where to turn.

So eventually, I got pointed to Dwayne Shaw at the Downey Salmon Federation.

Dwayne told me about a meeting that was gonna happen.

I think it was in Cherry Field in 2015, and that ended up being a Downey Fisheries partnership meeting, which at the time I had no idea that they existed, who they were, or anything about it.

So I walk into this room and there's 50, 60 people that are all interested in alewives, that I did not even have a clue they existed.

So that opened up a whole new world of resources for me to tap into.

And what I think really surprised me the most is these people wanted to know what I knew, more than I wanted to know how they could help me.

(gentle music) - [Ciona] The thinking about fish passage and connectivity in this watershed did really begin with me having a meeting with Bailey Bowden.

- [Bailey] We talked about what my big dream was in Penobscot, in the river as a whole.

- [Ciona] The vision of restoring connectivity throughout the watershed sounded amazing.

Daunting, but possibly achievable, and that's a great starting point.

I knew that I didn't have the expertise to do them alone.

- [Jacob] River restoration projects start any number of different places and ways.

The key to the success of the whole thing is really about getting everybody involved.

- Restoration efforts like this involve so many people, multiple landowners at each site, usually.

You have water rights holders, often from the days of the mills.

You have people who live around the ponds and recreate on them, and wanna make sure their pond stays the way it is.

You also engage with engineering firms who have to do the scientific work for you of making this place work, and work with the community to hear the needs and the priorities of the community.

You have town governments who have to be behind this and understand the need, and work with you often on these, and you need to find a lot of funders, whether that is private people, but also government agencies.

And maybe lastly, you need to not only build a set of partners of nonprofits to be able to handle the different aspects of the projects over time.

But you also need all the permitting agencies.

There were, you know, over 20 permits that were needed for this set of projects from different agencies, and every one of them has to understand and be in support of the projects.

- We decided to start in Penobscot, and see where that went and what we could do from there.

(gentle music) - [Harold] Over at Pierce's Pond, it was just a beaver dam that was holding the water back into the pond.

It was leeching water through it everywhere.

You would wonder how the alewives ever got through.

Over at Wight's Pond, there was always a dam there, and Mill Wardwell, who was the alewife warden, I guess we called him at the time, for years and years, would put in a fishway in the spring and he would help the alewives get over and he would keep the beaver dams open so that the fish could get up the brook.

The town never back then had finances to do any kind of big fishways or anything like that.

And I think if the town had to go that all alone, it may not have happened.

- [Matthew] I initially got emails from Bailey Bowden.

He wanted to do some projects down here, mainly over in Penobscot on Wight Pond and Pierce Pond.

Bailey was kind of expecting that he just maybe needed a few thousand dollars, lumber, rocks, sandbags, that type of thing, to do some simple improvements to the fishway.

At the time, Noah was working on the larger Penobscot River restoration project, which required the removal of large hydropower dams.

And so they were literally, you know, tens of millions of dollars.

That was sort of the scale that we were working on.

So Bailey was trying to invite us into something that wasn't at the time a great fit for our program.

Finally what changed is Noah started a program called the Habitat Blueprint, and as part of that, we established habitat focus areas, and the Penobscot River Watershed became one of the first 10 habitat focus areas for the entire country.

Once that happened, we had a little bit more flexibility with our work plans, that we could finally work on projects.

I had to convince the Bagaduce communities to think a little bigger, and they had to convince Noah to think a little bit smaller.

And in the end, we met in the middle.

And once we had the Habitat Blueprint in place, that's when the funding could start rolling, and we gave the first grants to the town of Penobscot for projects at Wight Pond and Pierce Pond.

(gentle guitar music) - [Bailey] When we started the process of doing fish passage restoration at the two ponds in Penobscot, it drew a lot of interest from the surrounding communities.

So that's when I came up with the idea that we need to have a three town committee to help support each other.

So, we're all collaborating to get these passage projects done, and to restore a sustainable alewife run.

- [Kathy] Yeah, right, because you're gonna do sequential.

- [Mike] I mean, you could bail out a pickup load there pretty quick.

- Do you need help dealing with volunteers again at Pierce's?

- [Bailey] Do you wanna do the manual count?

- [Mike] So the first memory I have of Bailey, Kathy, Gunnar, Paul Veno, or from a meeting that was in like, my first couple weeks of the job, that our previous executive director had set up.

They were striving to get their fish back, and in some cases to be able to harvest them commercially.

I would say my goal and MCCCF's goal in this was really twofold.

One; to help them do that, and to support them collaboratively monitoring and managing their fisheries in order to get those fisheries back, and those fish back.

And then two; by really embedding myself and ourselves with these towns in this work, getting a better understanding of the issues that they've gotta work through to be able to collaboratively manage these fisheries.

And then to be able to improve that system.

And that's where some of our state and federal policy work comes in.

For a town to be able to actually manage a commercial fishery, they need to collect the data to be able to prove that it's a sustainably harvestable fishery.

- [Sarah] I am counting alewives that are making their way from the Bagaduce River up into Walker Pond here in Brooksville.

And we count them so that we can get an estimate of how many fish are returning to the pond, to get a sense of how robust the fish run is.

We count them four times a day here and use those half hour counts to kind of extrapolate what the day's run was.

Alewives are a co-managed fishery, and they can be managed at the town levels, but only if people in the town want to do that.

So, it's critical that people are working together on these collaborative efforts.

- [Nate] As, you know, species managers at the state level, that community involvement in understanding the health of the resource is critical to how we do our jobs.

Without that, we're almost deaf to what the resource is doing, without somebody paying attention, somebody counting, you know, somebody getting scale samples, you know?

Mailing the scale samples in so we can read them.

We need all that.

We don't have a mandate, we have a mission statement, and there's a big difference.

You know, if I had a mandate, I wouldn't talk to normal people, you know?

I'd just make it happen.

But we have a mission statement, and in a way it's a better thing.

And the reason why that's true is unless you get the people, that's us, to buy into the restoration as a whole, and to essentially protect the resource into the future, it'll just happen again.

You'll lose the resource again.

- The first two projects of the watershed effort at Pierce Pond and Wight's Pond were big learning journeys for me and for others to sort of figure out how this worked, and allowed me to tackle a more complicated project over at the outlet of Walker Pond at what's called the Little Mill Pond in Brooksville.

That project was more complicated, not only because the actual land ownership around the fishway was complicated, but it also involved some living history that people cared about a lot, and wanted to keep intact as part of the project, in the form of remains of a dam and of a mill that burned in the 1960s.

- [Brett] The definition of history varies, right?

What is the history of your town?

What is history of your river is dependent on what year you want history to start and end.

The line you have to walk is how do you keep, how do you bring everyone together who for the positives value that industrial history, and the history that remembers their grandfather doing a thing, or their grandmother doing a thing with that river in the way they see it today, with the fact that that's just a blip in the reality of that system's time on this planet.

- [John] It was kind of tough for the alewives to get into Walker Pond.

And so they came to the town, really to tell us what their plans were, and they were able to secure the sale of that particular property, so that they could make a good fishway, rather than what we had, and to improve the ability of the alewives to get up through into the lake and back down.

Gee, this really sounded great to us.

(gentle music) - [Mike] One really cool thing about these projects that are happening on the Bagaduce River is that the towns that were involved said, "If we're gonna have fish in our Bagaduce ponds come back, we want them to come from other Bagaduce ponds."

And so, instead of coming from some place in Augusta where the state usually gets their fish, we use local volunteers, people from the communities to collect fish from Walker Pond, to put those into Parker Pond and Frost Pond.

- [Sarah] So, we seed those fish into those ponds, they breed and leave, and then the babies that are born in those ponds are then like, imprinted on those ponds.

So when they come back three or four years from now, they'll come back to those ponds.

So it's kind of like seeding a new fish run into that portion of the watershed.

(water rushing) (gentle bright music) - [Ben] When you talk to somebody about fish migration, everybody understands pretty intuitively that a dam is a problem for that, right?

It's a little bit harder for the people to understand that when they're driving, you know, on their daily commute to work, they might pass over 15 or 20 pipes that are conveying water from one side of the road to the other and those are just as much a problem for allowing fish to migrate as the big dams are.

So TNC has been involved in the Bagaduce for a number of years now.

Definitely heavily involved in providing some of the funding for it, helping to write grants and do letters of support, and then some of the more technical aspects to it with the design work.

One of the first projects I got when I came on, they gave me a map of all of the road stream crossings, culverts in the state that TNC has surveyed over the past 10 years, and one of the top 10 projects in terms of replacing for fish passage was right in the Bagaduce, called Snows Brook.

- In this particular case it was a culvert that needed to be replaced.

That culvert was clearly undersized, and it was being crushed.

- [Scott] The rule of thumb that I've come up with is about for every square mile, there is one road crossing in Maine that is blocking streams.

So in the Penobscot Watershed with a 8,000 square mile drainage area, there are easily well over 8,000 crossings that need to be fixed.

So today, we're at Snows Brook.

This is a Maine Department of Transportation crossing.

So we just got done taking the fish out of the construction area, and the technique we used was an electro fishing, a backpack shocker.

And basically what that does is puts the charge in the water and it stuns the fish for just a moment, and then we capture them, and we moved all the fish upstream.

Yeah, this is a pretty typical stream for Midcoast Maine.

We caught white suckers, black nose days, brook trout.

We did catch some juvenile alewife that were coming down.

There's also a lot of American eel.

So the reason why we electro fish here is we're actually in designated critical habitat for Atlantic salmon.

So we wanna make sure that we don't have any salmon in the project area.

- [Ben] The Bagaduce river is an interesting one, because the Bagaduce itself isn't really indicated as a great place for Atlantic salmon.

Certainly back historically, there might have been some there, but when we get alewife back there, they go out to the Penobscot Bay from the Bagaduce when they start out migrating, and that's the same time when you have out migrating salmon smokes, little baby salmon that are about six to eight inches start coming down the river.

And so you get this effect called prey buffering, which means that when you have seals and cormorants and eagles that are all eating fish as they come down there, there's so many more alewives than there are salmon in there.

So that they will eat a lot more of those alewives and protect those salmon from getting munched by all of those different species and fish.

So we're doing this for sea run fish species, specifically for alewives in these areas, but there are benefits to endangered Atlantic salmon.

(gentle music) (water rushing) - [Crew] What would you say is the most difficult part about bringing alewife back?

And it can be broad or it can be pretty specific.

- I'll be quite specific.

Beavers.

- Beavers, yeah.

That was what I was gonna say as well.

- [Mike] Even after restoration work is done on the Bagaduce River, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done, and that will need to be done into the future.

For example, there's beavers that exist throughout the system, and in each of the ponds and streams that we have, there's probably about 100 hours of community service that happens each year, in each stream, and in each pond.

Just in keeping the streams open to fish passage, due to beaver dams.

Each year we need to get permits from the Department of Marine Resources and Inland Fish and Wildlife, to be able to notch beaver dams in the spring to get adults into the ponds, and then in the falls to get juveniles back out into the ocean.

- [Gunnar] Yeah, it's not glamorous duty is it?

- [Kathy] It is not glamorous, but it's for the greater good.

(gentle whimsical music) (water rushing) (volunteer grunts) - [John] Sometimes, I've gone down there and there's thousands of alewives just sitting there waiting to get through.

Sometimes I'm clearing a little spot, and I'm pulling dead alewives out of the beaver dam.

All this stuff has been pulled out by me and Mike and Gunnar, and here's the dam here completely blocked off.

100% no fish getting in or out.

Some people think that, "Oh, the beavers leave a little hole for the fish to go through."

No, they don't.

There's no little hole.

They ain't stupid, these beavers, that's for sure.

Little smarter than me.

All right, that's about a foot by two feet.

You kind of know that they go out.

But it's kind of fun once in a while to see them and say, "Okay, they are really going out.

I'm not doing this, you know, just to play in the mud."

- [Gunnar] I can remember in Parker's Pond when I was a kid, you could see schools of mature alewives swarming one particular shore when they was getting ready to group up and spawn, I presume.

And it was huge in the morning.

We used to spend nights out there and you could see the alewives just going back and forth on one shore.

So you knew you had them again for another year.

It was crazy.

There's isn't all that many people that can testify to that anymore, 'cause it's been so long since they've been here.

But there's still a few left.

(bright music) - [Joe] Back several years ago now, I was approached by the Maine Coast Heritage Trust along with the Nature Conservancy about these Bagaduce projects.

We're here at the outlet of Parker Pond, an old mill dam, which is pretty much commonplace, at least amongst the other projects that I've worked on, like Wight's Pond and Pierce Pond.

This old mill dam is a leaky structure.

It's the best they could do at the time, but it's not certainly up to any kind of modern standard.

And what we really want to do is make sure that the water that's coming through the system is going up and into the fishway, as opposed to going through the dam.

We're building here a rock ramp that's really a true inclined ramp, as opposed to some of the other ones, which are a step pool, meaning you create steps from the rocks and they step from pool to pool like a staircase.

This one is an inclined ramp, really a roughened channel, and the footprint of it really is much more expansive.

So this one here is gonna be unique, compared to the others.

One of the things about, you know, having some of that history here is a lot of the same people are involved with each of these projects.

Frankly, the technical aspects of this, things, you know, we study in textbooks, they're really not that complicated.

One of the real arts to these projects is making sure that what we do for an improvement really ties in well with what the community wants and meets those needs.

(bright guitar music) - [Bailey] Seeing the first fish come through, I don't think rewarding even covers, you know, how I felt.

- [Ciona] The collaboration of people and entities has been in some ways an unlikely one, and that is a wonderful story in itself.

- [Sarah] Getting the land, getting access to this, being able to fundraise for rebuilding the fishway, the scientific expertise, the fisheries management component, the boots on the ground, people volunteering from various communities, various towns.

Collaboration is absolutely required for this to happen.

- [Brett] The Bagaduce has been a nice inspiration because you have that example to say, "Look, in five years a system of this size is fully repairable, so this one should take two years, and this one might take 10 years, but they're not taking never years."

You know?

These are doable things.

- [Dwayne] The case study of the Bagaduce, the case study of the East Machias and the Orange River and Whiting are all examples of delivering on the promise that, you know, we can do this, and that it has to be done, not that it should be done, and that we're gonna make it happen.

- [Tony] This isn't just about river connectivity, you know?

It's about sustaining broader lifeways.

- [Ciona] The fact that these five projects have been completed means it's a time to celebrate, and I hope also tells a story that will inspire others to do this.

This is doable.

- [Joshua] It's exciting to see places like the Bagaduce come back to life, because it's gonna mean not only a bounty for the sea run fish and the marine world downstream, but it's gonna impact the forest communities, the forest animals, the bird communities, and also the people around this.

And that brings me a lot more hope and excitement.

They might be healthier, happier people because of this work restoring the connections of rivers, and our connections to rivers.

- [Nate] When you lose a species altogether, it only takes less than a generation, and it's almost entirely forgotten.

One of the most critical aspects of community involvement in river herring restoration would be advocacy, education, outreach.

That part of a community's involvement in a restoration program and post restoration program, and protecting the resources of the future.

That's absolutely crucial.

- [Schyler] So me and my class today were helping fish to go up the stream right behind me.

- A lot of us were going down to the bottom of the stream, helping the fish that were a bit slower.

- [Child] I got it.

Pass it up.

- Pass it up the line.

- [Birtie] There's like this really hard part that they have to get through.

It's like a really strong current, and then we got them onto the top where the current's less strong, so that they can swim to the pond where they were born to like, lay eggs.

- [Matthew] The alewives are like everyday meal for bears, eagles, ospreys, birds, sometimes even other fish.

- They're food for everything.

- [Bailey] That has probably become the most rewarding part, and probably now I see it as the most important part of this whole project, is the educational aspect.

- [Gunnar] The kids, I mean that's the future of this whole operation, no matter what.

I mean, hopefully they'll take an interest, and when they get bigger, give people a hand with keeping stuff clear and taking over.

- [Bailey] They're part of the heritage fishery now, and that's what I'm hoping is, you know, that will continue.

These kids, as they grow up, will still continue to come back to these brooks and see the alewife and appreciate what's going on.

(gentle guitar music)