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Most of the fish we talk about on this podcast you can find by reading a tide chart. This one you find by reading a hundred years of bad decisions and then undoing them.
A salter is an old Cape Cod word for a native brook trout that drops out of a coastal stream, feeds in the salt marsh, and comes back bigger, brighter, and silver-flanked. They once ran from the Hudson River to Hudson Bay. South of Maine, dams, cranberry bogs, and development turned the spring-fed streams they needed into stagnant, silted swamps, and the fish effectively vanished.
This episode is about how they came back. Peter is joined by Tom Pero — who started a Trout Unlimited chapter in Taunton at 19, became the first editor of Trout magazine, and founded Wild River Press — and Francis Smith, the volunteer most responsible for rebuilding the Quashnet River in Mashpee and Falmouth. Tom's new book, Salter, is the first comprehensive book ever written about these fish, published to mark the restoration's fiftieth anniversary. Peter met both men as a 14-year-old, before he could drive, when his grandmother dropped him off at Francis's work crews.
"Not a river anymore"
To grow cranberries, you pitch a bog from its downstream end up, dam the low end with boards, and flood it backwards. Every winter you spread sand on the ice to knock down the weeds, and when the ice melts the sand drops into the system. Do that for a century and then walk away, and the stream does not simply revert.
What Francis found was a cascade. Sweet gale grew over the channel until it collapsed under its own weight and snow load. The debris jammed, the water backed up and ran over the bog banks, the banks — mud and sand — saturated and fell in, which raised the water further and flooded more. There were sections 80 feet wide and two inches deep. It had flow, but no structure. When state biologist Joe Bergin first surveyed it in the late 1960s, the only brook trout he found were yearling fingerlings hiding in old cranberry ditches. There was nothing in the main channel, because there was no main channel left.
Why they worked upstream from the bottom
The instinct is to start at the top and work down with the current. Francis did the opposite, and it is the single best piece of problem-solving in the episode.
They could not cut brush in the wide swampy sections, because there was nowhere for the water to go. So they went downstream to places with good access, cut a channel there, and worked their way up into the bad stretches. Each new section of channel drained the swamp above it, which exposed where the old channel used to run, which let them cut the next piece. Restoring the channel from below gave the water a place to go before they asked it to move.
The goal was pace. Get a stream that is 80 feet wide and two inches deep back into a defined channel and it picks up speed, and the speed moves the bed load. The sand left the upper reaches, then the middle reaches, and eventually washed out into the estuary — where, as Francis points out, it became excellent quahog habitat.
Wood is a river's firewood
The crews have pinned more than 8,000 feet of large wood into the Quashnet — 517 counted logs, minimum six inches in diameter and six feet long, many of them 12 inches by 12 feet, drilled and pinned with rebar so they stay put. Hundreds more went in as J-vanes, deflectors, and overhead covers and were never counted. They also planted roughly 4,100 trees.
Francis's explanation of why is the line to remember from this episode:
Wood in rivers is nothing more than wood in a wood stove. If you don't feed the wood stove wood, you don't stay warm. If you don't feed a river wood, it doesn't do anything. It's starving to death.
Everything living in the river needs cellulose and carbon to move up the food chain. Converting the valley to cranberries did precisely the opposite — it stripped the carbon out and ran the place as a monoculture. Which is the broader argument underneath the whole episode, and one every striped bass and bluefin angler already understands: you cannot manage a species one fish at a time while the system it lives in is broken.
The numbers
This is the part that makes the story more than a nice anecdote. Trout Unlimited volunteers electroshocked a cumulative 1,000 feet of surveyable stream before the work began and found one wild brook trout per 100 feet.
About 38 years in, Francis asked state biologist Steve Hurley for a proper depletion survey — net off a section so nothing enters or leaves, then pass through three times and remove everything you catch. On the 1,200-foot lower section, the second pass produced more brook trout than the first. Hurley's verdict: this place is loaded. Final count was 40 wild brook trout per thousand feet in the lower section and 27 per thousand in the second, which the biologists rate as a 100% improvement against the benchmark for that river type.
For anyone who hasn't seen it done: electroshocking momentarily stuns fish and doesn't kill them. It's a standard, proven survey method. Peter has worked a couple of recent surveys on the Quashnet and netted an American eel the size of his forearm.
Two inventions worth stealing
The overhead cover — known locally as the Quashnet Hilton. Posts driven into the stream every three feet, one-inch plank laid perpendicular across them, decked over, logs on the leading and trailing edges, backfilled with muck and seeded. Once the seed grows in you can barely tell it's there. Francis's hard-won corrections: build it one foot wide, not wide like the 104-foot monster they put in first — brook trout only use a foot of it, which is all an undercut bank gives them anyway — and set the plank six inches lower, right at mean stage height, with big rocks along the periphery to stop wash-over and let vegetation root in.
The spawning gravel box. Dump gravel on a spring and the river moves it downstream, away from the spring. So Francis built an open-topped, open-bottomed box with a narrow board across the base, forced it into the streambed directly above an upwelling spring with its top edge four inches below the bottom, and filled it with gravel. The gravel stays. Boxes installed more than twenty years ago are still spawning brook trout today.
Why Cape streams run backwards
These little streams are what geomorphologists call spring sapping. The headwaters bubble up out of porous Cape soil, and the farther downstream they flow the colder they get, because springs keep entering along the way. That is the reverse of almost every trout stream in the country, which starts cold and warms as it goes.
The temperatures matter more than anything else in the system. Over 70°F is deadly. The upwelling spring flow on the Quashnet runs 54°F in summer, which keeps it a trout stream, and 45°F in winter, which keeps it from freezing and eliminates the anchor ice that destroys redds and macroinvertebrate communities. Francis has measured it for decades and it has never varied.
The mechanism is peat. Groundwater on that part of the Cape moves southeast at about one foot per day, hits a peat layer underground, and gets deflected upward into the streams — which is also, as Francis notes dryly, how fast pollution travels.
Fix one thing
The Quashnet became a template. The biologists Francis worked with took fish from it to reestablish populations in other Cape rivers. Over 400 people have logged volunteer hours, many earning 100-hour patches. Statewide and up the coast, more than $100 million has gone into pulling obsolete dams and returning abandoned cranberry bogs to wetland. The Quashnet's first dam came out in 1976 — decades before the Klamath or the Penobscot.
Tom's example is his own hometown. When the dams came off the Mill River in Taunton about twenty years ago, there were no river herring at all. Within three years, roughly 30,000 herring came in from Narragansett Bay, up the Taunton River, and up the Mill. Then their young went back downstream by the millions to feed striped bass and osprey in Mount Hope Bay.
If you fix one thing, that one thing becomes logarithmic. It moves on to cause ten things to happen. And when those ten things happen, it moves on to cause a hundred things. — Francis Smith
No hatcheries. As Francis puts it, we don't need anything fake — we want nature to do what it does best. For anyone making a living in fishing, the logic is the same as the one the guides' association runs on: you can't have a sustainable business without a sustainable fishery.
Red Brook and Hal Lyman
The episode's best story. Hal Lyman edited Saltwater Sportsman with Frank Woolner and owned property on Red Brook, just off the Cape. In 1989 the Trustees' resource director called Francis and told him to phone Lyman, who wanted to give his land to Trout Unlimited. Francis called. Lyman picked up and said: I've been waiting for your phone call. I've heard a lot about you — you're really good at fixing rivers. By Francis's account the gift was roughly 640 acres, worth $18.9 million at the time. It went into public trust; MassWildlife holds several hundred acres there today, and the Southeastern Massachusetts chapter of Trout Unlimited has run a major restoration project on the brook since.
Peter had met Lyman once, years earlier, passing him on the way out of that same river at dawn. Lyman, who had clearly been fishing most of the night, wished him a good day — which Peter is still fairly sure was a shot.
Last day on Earth
Francis takes a tarpon toad to the bow of the boat and waits for a hundred-pounder. Tom gets a magic carpet: a single-handed rod and a brown-and-orange bomber over a crystal-clear pool on the Gaspé Peninsula, an 18-pound Atlantic salmon rolling on it — and then, before he can set the hook, he's on a river in British Columbia with a two-hander, a dry orange fly swung down to the tailout, and an 18-pound chrome steelhead coming up to grab it.
Get the book
Salter: The improbable return of the magical sea-run brook trout to the little rivers of Cape Cod by Thomas R. Pero. 257 pages, hardcover, 8.5 x 11 landscape, hundreds of photographs and historical maps including the original 1825 Cape Cod Canal surveys. $75 standard, $250 limited edition, direct from Wild River Press.
If you want to get involved, the Sea Run Brook Trout Coalition and your local Trout Unlimited chapter are where the work happens. It is, as Francis would tell you, a lot of physical work.
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