The dams came down. 20 million herring came back.

Maine counted 20 million river herring running up its rivers in 2025, a species that was illegal to harvest as recently as 2012. The recovery followed decades of dam removals, including two on the Penobscot River that opened miles of spawning water. Alewives had been declining since the 18th century, and by 1994 annual inland catches had dropped from a 3 million pound average to just 150,000 pounds. An undamming effort began in 1999 and finished in 2016. When the run is strong, a quiet brook turns into a torrent of silver as the fish push upstream to spawn. For years, alewife festivals were somber, and some locals would scoop stranded fish into buckets and carry them past the smaller dams by hand. "We've gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems," said Rustin Taylor of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine, "and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe." The Passamaquoddy name for the fish translates to "the fish that feeds all."