Every day in May and June, you can find Wayne Baker sitting by the banks of the Oromocto River in Fredericton Junction counting fish.
Not every fish. Just his favourite. In his hometown, he’s known as “the Gaspereau Man.”
“I’ve been fishing gaspereau here for over 70 years now, believe it or not,” Baker said. “And I’ve eaten a pile of them.”
The gaspereau population is smaller than it was when he was young, but follow the waters of the Oromocto out to the St. John River, and you’ll find a change that Baker believes is having a huge impact on the small fish.
Gaspereau is the collective term for two very similar fish species known as alewives and blueback herring. Gaspereau are what Baker and the Oromocto Watershed Association term a “keystone species,” bringing nutrients inland from the ocean and feeding local populations of plants and wildlife.
As they travel north to spawn, gaspereau are consumed by eagles, otters, bears and other species.
The gaspereau caught by commercial fishermen is mostly destined to become lobster bait. The fish itself contains a lot of small bones, making gaspereau much less attractive for recreational fishing than species such as trout or bass.
Unless you’re Baker, who loves to brine them, coat them in maple syrup, then smoke them in his smoke shack.
“You put that on a cracker with a little bit of cheese whiz, some sweet mix pickles,” Baker said. “Beautiful.”
For years, he’s counted how many gaspereau make it upriver to get an idea for the watershed group about how the population is doing.
“I’ll sit there and count, see how many go up in a while, if there’s thirty a minute, or a hundred a minute, or 15 a minute, I write it down and keep just sort of keep track and I can tell if it’s a good run, light run, heavy run.”
Between 1995 to 2019, millions of gaspereau ended their journey up the St. John River at N.B. Power’s Mactaquac Dam, west of Fredericton.
The federal Fisheries Department limited how much gaspereau it transported above the dam to a million fish each year. It aimed to trap 800,000 alewives and around 200,000 blueback herring and truck them upriver.
Gaspereau that weren’t first in line to get over the dam via the trap-and-truck system established by N.B. Power were considered “surplus” by Fisheries, which auctioned them to the highest bidder.
CBC News requested those contracts with the highest bidders from Public Services and Procurement Canada. The department was only able to find one, from 2018. It listed the winning bid of $107,719 but did not include how much fish or identify the bidder.
But in 2020, the department quietly ceased its surplus contracts and began transporting as many gaspereau as possible over the dam.
The first year after that change, 2.4 million gaspereau got past the dam to spawn. In 2023, that number grew to three million and last year it was more than 4.1 million.
“I think that’s great,” Baker said.
A few years ago, gaspereau trapped at the foot of the Mactaquac Dam were considered “surplus” and sold to the highest bidder. But that’s no longer the case.
CBC News made requests for an interview with someone at Fisheries about why the changes were made, or if they’ll be permanent, but over two weeks no one was made available.
An email to CBC News echoed the department’s website, saying the change was to take “into account plans by New Brunswick Power to improve fish passage infrastructure at Mactaquac Dam.”
According to N.B Power spokesperson Elizabeth Fraser, the current trap-and-truck system “will be taken out of service for up to four years to allow for its replacement with a modernized trap-and-truck system. During this time, NB Power will implement temporary measures to maintain fish passage.”
That temporary plan is currently unknown because the federal decision to close the Mactaquac Biodiversity Facility, at the foot of the dam, has thrown a wrench into the previous plan to divert fish there for transport upriver.
Baker expects that trucking as many gaspereau above the dam will continue to be a boost to the population, but he wishes a fish ladder were included in dam refurbishment plans.
“When they built Mactaquac Dam they were supposed to build a fishway,” he said. “Once they got the dam built, they said they’d run out of money; they couldn’t build the fishway. And they still haven’t got the fishway. Truck them up, that’s good. But a fishway would be so much better.”
Mathieu Cormier has been fishing gaspereau for 26 years. His nets span a third of the Oromocto River and every few days, he and his crew harvest thousands of gaspereau that he loads onto tractor-trailers with a crane bucket.
He said removing the cap on how many gaspereau make it over the dam is a positive, if it doesn’t affect the population downriver, where he fishes.
He also wants a fish ladder at the dam. He says more gaspereau getting above the dam is great, but that also means more will be killed as they come through the dam’s turbines in a few weeks when they head back out to the ocean.
“It’s not just gaspereau,” Cormier said. “It’s any kind of fish, like lamprey eels, or bass or salmon or whatever. They got to go through the turbine; you got to go through somewhere. So I’m pretty sure it kills quite a bit.”
Cormier’s nets on the Oromocto River in French Lake span one-third of the river during the week and are lifted on weekends, which is a regulation. They capture hundreds of thousands of gaspereau each season.
Cormier says the fishing has been pretty good the last few seasons, but it has been better.
According to the most recent seasonal statistics from the federal government, 25 commercial gaspereau harvesters reported landing 90 metric tonnes in Saint John Harbour and another 1,618 in the St. John River, which has the largest fishery in the Maritimes.
Cormier and about 70 per cent of his catch is used for lobster bait. The rest is processed at his plant in Cap-Pelé before leaving the country.
“We put it in 100 per cent brine for 21 days and then we take the salt out of it and then we put it in 30 LB pails and then ship to Haiti for food. Thirty per cent would go for food.”
Although Cormier and Baker don’t see eye-to-eye on some fishing matters, both men said they want what’s best for the species.
That’s also the thinking of Patty Savoy, who works with Oromocto First Nation to provide gaspereau to the Maliseet Nation Conservation Council for research.
She calls the decision to move as many gaspereau above the dam as possible ‘fantastic.’
“That is a very big change. A very big change.”
Fishing about 40 gaspereau out of the river takes less than five minutes, and the samples collected will go to council researchers to tell the age, health and viability of the species.
Gaspereau are important to First Nations now and for the future, she said.
“We use it on a lot of basis,” Savoy said. “I know a lot of people who use it for lobster fishing, and eel fishing, traditional and ceremonial uses and stuff like that.
“The thing about the species is you really don’t know how important it is until it’s gone.”
