BREMEN — Cars and trucks don’t even have to slow down as they cruise over Muscongus Brook atop a new concrete bridge built this year.
But the flow of highway traffic was the least of a local man’s concerns. David Wilkins was worried about fish passage underneath state Route 32. For ten years, he sought to persuade the Department of Transportation to replace two partly crushed steel culverts with a real bridge that allows alewives to swim upstream to spawn.
Fisherman, boat-builder, sailor and wildlife biologist, Wilkins is a passionate advocate for the alewife, that variety of river herring that for millennia returned by the millions to Maine rivers and streams, feeding larger fish, birds, animals and people.
At least they did until dams, culverts, roads and pollution blocked the spring migration up many rivers and streams. At Muscongus Brook, an old stone bridge that permitted fish passage was replaced in the mid 1970s by two 40-foot culverts and fill.
Those culverts effectively stopped the alewife run for nearly 40 years. Historically, the alewife run was a boon to Native Americans and later, to lobstermen seeking fresh bait. Alewives also are critical in the food chain, as part of the diet for bass, tuna, cod, haddock, halibut, rainbow trout and other wildlife, including eagles, osprey and otter.
Wilkins, active in his town’s conservation commission and member of a fisheries trust fund, decided the alewives needed a boost.
“I guess I was motivated to act when I asked myself, ‘If not me, who?’ Who do I ask to restore these fish? My personality gave me the answer,” Wilkins said.
He built a wooden fish ladder, allowing some alewives to make it to the culvert’s mouth. But the “ladder” needed twice daily checking, and if the current was too strong, it didn’t work.
Even if alewives made it to the culvert, they then faced a 40-foot swim against a torrent. Sometimes the little fish were so tired they would be pushed all the way back downstream even after making it beyond the culvert.
Nearby Webber Pond was stocked with alewives several times, and the young made it downstream to the sea in the summertime, going from fresh to a saltwater environment. But in springtime, instinctively returning from whence they came, the mature alewives still faced the almost-insurmountable hurdle of the culverts.
The only effective, long-term solution, Wilkins realized, was to remove the culverts and restore natural fish passage with a bridge.
The wheels of bureaucracy turn slowly, and it was a decade before the bridge was finally built, with its natural ledge bottom and ample width for alewives. Shawn Smith, the state project manager for the site, said “things lined up perfectly” for Muscongus Brook thanks to a grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Wilkins, it turns out, is the one who, with help he solicited, obtained the NOAA grant to help defray the $275,000 construction costs. After a decade of advocacy, actual construction of the pre-cast concrete slab bridge, including excavation and removal of culverts, took only a couple of weeks to complete.
For Wilkins, the entire effort was often a labor of love. He simply enjoys being in nature, discovering the relationships that sustain the environment.
“Restoring river herring is wildlife feeding on the grandest of scales,” he said. “Just the thought of an endangered right whale or tuna eating some of my alewives gives an emotional charge that I cannot describe. Knowing that the loons on Webber Pond have lowered their mercury content by switching to a diet of alewives and can now reproduce is a great reason alone” to put all that time and effort into a small bridge on a small brook, he said.
“The small fish are really the most important part of aquatic ecosystems, other than water,” Wilkins said. “Taking them away is like someone slowly taking oxygen out of our atmosphere. It just feels good to leave the place better than you found it.”
Wilkins is currently living in Westport, Massachusetts. He grew up in Gloucester, stepson of a fisherman. He and his family plan on returning to his beloved Bremen home beside Webber Pond, seasonally teeming with alewives.