Bay Journal, With the Patapsco’s Bloede Dam gone, fish heading upstream
This spring, William Harbold and his team of biologists with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources made a pair of thrilling discoveries in the Patapsco River southwest of Baltimore.
In late March, they retrieved an alewife, a thin silvery fish with a gray-green back and big eyes, near a railroad bridge at Ilchester Road in Howard County. Then in mid-May, they found a nearly identical-looking blueback herring near the old mill town of Ellicott City.
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| Biologist Mary Genovese holds a blueback herring found more than two miles upstream from the former site of Bloede Dam in Maryland’s Patapsco River. |
Those little fish, collectively known as river herring, may not seem much to get excited about. But they were the first physical specimens of their species to be found that far up the Patapsco in more than a century. From 1907 until three years ago, Bloede Dam had straddled the river 10 miles upstream from Baltimore, preventing migratory fish from getting farther upriver to spawn. American eels also were blocked.
“So that,” Harbold said, “was pretty cool.”
So, this is good news. I support the efforts to remove dams from the smaller rivers, which block the breeding migrations of a lot of different fish. I'm still thinking about the Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna. To remove that dam, they would have to remove millions of tons of accumulated sediments to restore the river. Well, they may have to anyway. Put up a nuke.
Previous posts on the removal of Bloede Dam.
Dam Removal on Patapsco River Being Planned
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