THE BEAUTIFUL RETURN OF SHAD

This spring, we seem to be focused a lot on resurrections, reawakenings, rebirths.... It is a spring thing to do. Shad, a fish we know mostly in springtime, has had another kind of resurrection, after near collapse of its species as a result of damming, pollution, dredging, draining, siphoning, and other bad ideas. Recognizing that the threatened extinction of this important fish would be disastrous, massive efforts were deployed to try to save them, like cleaning up the rivers and wetlands and building ladders so shad could get over the dams to get upstream to spawn. Really, fish shouldn’t have to climb ladders to survive. But after these interventions, along with others like intensive hatchery programs, shad populations are  back on the rise in many rivers. And that’s a very good thing.

It would have been a tough loss. They are astonishing fish. They evolved with the ability to hear ultrasound, very likely as a means of avoiding sonic hunters, like dolphin. They are canaries in a coal mine for us, letting us know about the health of our rivers. Their bodies are deep, with iridescent glints of purple, green, yellow, and orange sequin-scales. Related to herrings, they have tiny wire-thin bones, which makes a shad dinner a bit of a booby trap.

Despite environmental stresses, they are healthier than many river fish. They avoid river pollutants, spending most of their lives at sea, then swimming tirelessly over and around obstacles (like rocks and ladders), through opposing currents, upstream, like salmon, to spawn. Springtime is spawn time and millions of eggs are released and fertilized in each group. Adults die shortly after spawning.

Against-all-odds pathos, together with the rich, silky eating experience it offers, gives shad reasons to inspire passion, perhaps more so than many other individual species of fish. Some surprising stories of shad-passion dot history. As retold by John McPhee, in his book, The Founding Fish (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), one man’s love for shad hastened the end of the civil war. And shad played a role in Lincoln’s murder.