One Family's Relentless Pursuit Of The Bony, Oily, Elusive Shad

New York Times

26-04-2025

The sun was sinking behind the western bank of the Delaware River, bathing Lewis Island in golden light. From a lifetime of experience, Steve Meserve knew that shad were huddled on the Lambertville, N.J., side of the river, resting in the shadows before resuming their long journey upriver to spawn.
'Let's go,' Mr. Meserve said.
With a long rope, three members of his crew towed an old rowboat about a quarter mile upriver. Mr. Meserve climbed in, took the handmade oars and guided the boat into the middle of the river, feeding 200 yards of net into the water from the stern. He then curled the boat back toward shore until the net, called a seine, made a C shape.
On the island's southern tip, about a dozen spectators and potential shad customers were waiting to see what the river would yield. Mr. Meserve rowed the boat around the island, tugging the net behind him. Then, hand over hand, the crew hauled it in. As the seine reached the shore, the muddy, green-brown water was still for a moment and then erupted in splashes and flashes of silver, revealing a nice haul of about two dozen wriggling shad.
'It's a magical moment,' said Shawn Douglas, who has been a member of the crew for four years. 'Every haul is like Christmas morning. You never know what you're going to get.'
'It can be 50 fish,' Mr. Meserve said, 'or nothing at all.'
Mr. Meserve runs the last licensed haul seine fishery on the Delaware, using the same technique practiced by his grandfather, Fred Lewis, and his great-grandfather, Bill Lewis, over more than a century. Lewis Island is named after the family.
Each spring, during the shad's northward migration, Mr. Meserve, his family and a group of volunteers haul shad from the Delaware nearly every evening. Once a commercial operation, haul seining has become a seasonal ritual, performed to honor their forebears and to gather data on the shad population for wildlife biologists and environmental officials. Lambertville celebrates the migration every year with a two-day Shad Fest, which is taking place this weekend.
'We haven't made any money at this for a long time,' said Mr. Meserve, 63, who makes his living as an I.T. professional. 'It's about stewardship and the legacy. It's a way to connect to the river and the environment and the fish.'
The crew — which ranges from five to a dozen members on any given evening — offers camaraderie and a community, knit together by the wet, muddy teamwork required for haul seining. 'It does get into your blood,' Mr. Meserve said.
'Every haul is a story, and every season is a story,' said Charlie Groth, a crew member who teaches cultural anthropology at Bucks County Community College in Newtown, Pa. Two decades ago, she began researching a book on the Lewis fishery, 'Another Haul,' and was so taken with the beauty, the fellowship and the lore that she joined up. 'History,' Ms. Groth said, 'is very thick on Lewis Island.'
The island is a narrow, mostly wooded strip of land, about a mile long and separated from Lambertville by an inlet and a wooden footbridge. Lambertville, a 4,000-person community of graceful Victorian homes, has a rich history shaped by the river, ferries, a canal, a railroad and the New Hope-Lambertville Bridge.
In pre-colonial times, the Lenape people fished for shad from Lewis Island, and the abundant fish were a staple in their diet. In 1771, a colonist named Richard Holcombe established a commercial fishery on the island.
Mr. Meserve's great-grandfather took over the fishery in 1888, and in the peak years hauled in more than 9,000 shad annually. (Today, the annual haul is in the hundreds.) 'Captain Bill' passed the fishery on to his son, who in turn taught Mr. Meserve everything he knew. After Mr. Meserve returned from college, his grandfather fell ill with cancer, and he took over. 'It's our heritage,' said Mr. Meserve, who runs the fishery with the help of his wife, Sue, a theatrical technical director and professional carpenter. 'I felt a responsibility to continue the legacy. Someone had to speak for the shad.'
Shad was a popular meal in early America, but its oily, bony flesh does not appeal to many modern American palates. Nearly all of the Lewis fishery's customers are now from India, Bangladesh and China, where a similar fish from the herring family, hilsa, is highly prized.
'We call hilsa the king of the fishes, and shad is very similar in taste,' said Sam Ghosh, a customer for more than a decade, who bought three fish one evening last week. The price, $4 for a male and $6 for a female, hasn't changed for decades. 'We bake it and make curry out of it,' Ghosh said. 'We're crazy about it.' He and other customers are also fond of shad roe, which some call 'poor man's caviar.'
The American shad is an anadromous species, meaning it begins its life in freshwater rivers along the East Coast and then migrates to the ocean. Adult shad live in the Atlantic as far south as Florida for three or four years, dining on plankton and tiny shrimp, before returning to their original rivers to spawn.
Delaware River shad mostly head for waters near Hancock, N.Y., a heroic swim against the current of more than 300 miles from the mouth of the river in Delaware Bay. Biologists think that shad, like salmon on the West Coast, are guided to their birthplaces by a highly sensitive sense of smell, visual cues and memory.
By the mid-20th century, the shad population had shrunk significantly as shipbuilding, industry and sewage fouled the Delaware, which was left with virtually no dissolved oxygen for fish to breathe. The catch on Lewis Island plunged to zero in two years during the 1950s, prompting Bill Lewis to start a campaign to persuade state and federal officials to clean up the river.
An interstate commission found that there was a 'pollution block' near Philadelphia that stopped shad from swimming upriver. After decades of legislation and cleanup efforts culminating in the Clean Water Act of 1972, the river's waters cleared, and the shad returned — but in far fewer numbers than a century earlier.
No one really knows why.
'From a historical perspective, the river is quite clean,' said Jake Bransky, a biologist at the Delaware River Basin Commission. Since shad populations have dropped in all East Coast rivers, he said, 'there could be something going on in the ocean we don't know about.' Some speculate there may be an environmental reason, while others theorize that shad are being caught in the nets of commercial ocean trawlers before they reach the rivers.
Mr. Meserve's meticulous records, which he updates every night, show that the shad population 'is below historical standards, but it's stable.' He's confident that his niece and nephew will pick up the oars and haul the seine when he finally puts them down.
'The next generation has every intention to keep it going,' he said. 'The connection to the legacy is very powerful.'