Massachusetts NFC Helps Count Fish in the Shawsheen River

Massachusetts NFC Chair Bob Dalton (left), helps remove custom viewing plates from the Shawsheen River just downstream of a recently removed dam in Andover, Massachusetts.

Anadromous river herring (also referred to as alewife), shad, and lamprey (a unique and ancient form of jawless fish), along with catadromous American Eel (a species that lives in freshwater but spawns in the Sargasso Sea), are now returning to the Shawsheen River in Massachusetts due to the removal of dams and other improvements in water quality.

Alewife (Joseph Tomelleri)

In order to monitor these populations, volunteers manually count fish as the move up and down the river. Due to the off-color water and dark streambed, volunteers designed “viewing plates” to make the fish more visible as they pass through the counting stations. Manufactured from discarded road signs, the plates are sunk and secured to Bridges and other structures using cables.

There’s far more to native fish than trout, and there’s far more to Native Fish Coalition than trout. Our recent expansion into Massachusetts helped open the door to more non-salmonid work. In fact, a similar project NFC is involved in Downeast Maine that uses PIT tagging and automatic readers, looks to prove, or disprove, inter-stream movement of sea-run fish of multiple species in a multi-stream bay system.