Shad

Shad will once more migrate freely on the Susquehanna River as a result of an important and long-overdue change of heart by the Philadelphia Electric Co. The utility has agreed to install a fish passageway around its 95-foot-high Conowingo Dam in Maryland, just south of the Pennsylvania border. The decision ends an eight-year fight that pitted the utility against fish and wildlife officials and sportsmen's groups who doggedly pursued a dream of returning the species to the river where it once flourished as far north as New York.

Noting that its responsibilities as a federal agency lie not only in regulating hydroelectric power production, but also in protecting fish and wildlife, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission recently ordered the Philadelphia Electric Co. to allow shad and other migratory fish species to get past its Conowingo Dam on the Susquehanna River near the head of the Chesapeake Bay. The long-awaited decision ends a six-year dispute that pitted the...

Around here, the shad is celebrated in Lambertville's annual festival. In Tidewater Virginia, the shad once made history. When a school of shad swam up Virginia's Nottoway River in the spring of 1865, they spawned the end of the Civil War. It had been a bleak winter for the Confederate army. Confined in trenches around Petersburg, they had been wet, cold, sick and, worst of all, hungry. But now the shad were running, and Brig. Gen. Thomas Rosser's cavalry, patrolling the banks of the Nottoway, saw an end to the famine.

The big plastic bag Mike Hendricks was holding - he let it float in the water where he stood, knee-deep in the Tulpehocken Creek - looked as if it held nothing but clear water. It didn't. Inside were 20,000 American shad. All of about 30 days old, these fish are so small that biologists refer to them as two eyeballs and a wiggle. But they were part of a grand mission. As Hendricks, a biologist with the state Fish and Boat Commission, tipped the bag and let them float away on the rain-swollen waters below the Blue Marsh Dam in Berks County on Friday, they were embarking on an almost epic journey that should take them far away to the Atlantic Ocean this fall and then, four to five years from now, back to the Schuylkill to spawn.

New Jersey is considering limits on the herring and shad that fishermen can keep from the Delaware River. The state Environmental Protection Department has proposed reducing the daily limit on alewife and blueback herring from 35 to 10 per person. The limit on American shad would go from six to three. Officials say the limits are needed to help replenish the supply. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in May ruled that river herring fishing must stop at the end of 2011 unless a state can show that its stock will continue to grow.

January's snowfall in New York state's Catskill Mountains is roaring past Fred Lewis' island these days. And as he stands there, on the Lambertville side of the Delaware River, he's watching a second straight fishing year going downriver. Down the drain. "If we don't get started pretty soon, they'll all be gone," Lewis said, standing by the river last week. "We've lost three weeks of fishing up to now. " "They" are shad. The fish run upriver to spawn, usually from March through May. And as they go, say those who fish, they are so spirited that they bite at anything that glitters.

The Admiral Wilson Boulevard in Camden is lined with gasoline stations, liquor stores and bars where women dance without clothes. Under the overpasses, prostitutes seek work and drug dealers make sales. The Soul + Searchers Evangelist Ministries is on the north side of the boulevard. The Oasis Motel is on the south. Behind the Oasis Motel, behind the liquor stores and the bars and the gasoline stations, a passerby can see the murky waters of the Cooper River. He can also see, along the banks of the river, flowering trees, burgeoning weeds and fishermen.

There's a blurry picture of the first fish pinned to the wall of Chuck Campbell's trailer, near the banks of the Schuylkill in Bridgeport. By first fish, he means the first to clear the new fish ladder downstream of the Norristown Dam, west of the DeKalb Street Bridge. Soon after Campbell filled the stepped passage with river water in January, the pale pioneer swam through. If all goes as planned, others, such as shad, will follow. "As soon as we opened up the passageway, we saw this white sucker," Campbell said, identifying the native river dweller by its name.

1. He begins by slicing open the belly. 2. He cuts the egg-filled roe sac free of the connective membranes, being careful not to puncture it. 3. After chopping off the head, Johnson removes the spine and plits the fish into two halves. 4. With skin side down, he cuts along each side of the center bones. 5. Johnson removes the strip of center bones. He then removes the topside bones from each filet. 6. After flipping over the fillet, Johnson removes the backbone set of bones.

A fish-and-river drama that began almost two centuries ago is moving into its final act. State officials announced yesterday the release of $2.8 million to design and construct a fish ladder at Flat Rock Dam along the Schuylkill in Lower Merion Township. With the ladder, American shad and eels, as well as other fish, will be able to get past the 12-foot-high barrier to spawning grounds in the river and creeks upstream. "We never thought we'd live to see the day," said Matthew Polis, a Berks County resident and member of Environmental Action Committee, a group that has pushed for such projects.

* Forget daffodils - it's the shad run that really heralds spring 'round here. Sam Mink's Oyster House (1516 Sansom St., 215-567-7683) celebrates the migratory fish's annual swim-by with seasonal dishes from Chef Andy Kitko, including a three-course shad dinner for $40, available nightly Monday through March 17. * Now here's a worthy wine and food pairing: R2L restaurant (Two Liberty Place, 50 S. 16th St., 215-564-5337) and Napa's Cakebread Cellars will hold a Vintner Dinner hosted by Dennis Cakebread and R2L chef/owner Daniel Stern at 7 p.m. Wednesday.

Seven years ago, when Paul Kimport was looking for a house, his requirements were few: It had to be cheap and near the Standard Tap, the pub that he co-owns in Northern Liberties. Kimport settled a few blocks north, across Girard Avenue, in Fishtown, a neighborhood that got its name from its shad-fishing roots in the 18th century. Yet by the early 21st century, Fishtown had come to mean shut-down factories, a poorer working-class population, and continual news reports of petty crime and fires.

New Jersey is considering limits on the herring and shad that fishermen can keep from the Delaware River. The state Environmental Protection Department has proposed reducing the daily limit on alewife and blueback herring from 35 to 10 per person. The limit on American shad would go from six to three. Officials say the limits are needed to help replenish the supply. The Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission in May ruled that river herring fishing must stop at the end of 2011 unless a state can show that its stock will continue to grow.

BACK IN THE COLD spring of 1778, with starvation not far from many, soldiers in George Washington's army scoured the banks of the Schuylkill for food. What they found, in many instances, was a thick, bony, flavorful fish racing upstream to spawn. According to a Historical Society of Pennsylvania publication, the shad runs were uncommonly rich and "probably saved the lives of many Continental soldiers, men who had been reduced to eating boiled boots over the long winter. " Later, the spring shad runs up the Delaware River would give rise to the 19th-century village of Fishtown, home to several dozen fisheries.

On the streets of resurgent Fishtown last week they were laying plans to celebrate the (somewhat) resurgent shad, the fish that, after all, gave the place its name. Memories have grown a little fuzzy over time, giving rise to various theories of how Fishtown - the river ward east of Kensington from whose bosom it sprang, and sandwiched between Northern Liberties and Port Richmond - came, finally, to be called Fishtown. But really, it's as simple as you'd suspect. It apparently wasn't Charles Dickens' idea, a favored myth.

There's a blurry picture of the first fish pinned to the wall of Chuck Campbell's trailer, near the banks of the Schuylkill in Bridgeport. By first fish, he means the first to clear the new fish ladder downstream of the Norristown Dam, west of the DeKalb Street Bridge. Soon after Campbell filled the stepped passage with river water in January, the pale pioneer swam through. If all goes as planned, others, such as shad, will follow. "As soon as we opened up the passageway, we saw this white sucker," Campbell said, identifying the native river dweller by its name.

Together, they stood for a total of more than 500 years. But in the end, all it took was a couple days' work with an excavator, and the dams, one built as long ago as 1697, were reduced to rubble. Pennypack Creek began to flow free, or freer, than it had in living memory. With plans to remove or modify four more barriers, opening 22 miles of stream to flow unchecked into the Delaware River, officials from as far away as Virginia and Connecticut came streamside recently to cheer the advent of a new Pennypack.

The whale will have the run of the river, for now. Experts who evaluated the 12-foot beluga whale that made a 1,200-mile trip to the Delaware River said yesterday that the animal did not appear to be in any immediate danger and that it would be unsafe to try to capture him. "Even if we wanted to catch the animal, we couldn't do it," said Larry Dunn, a beluga specialist with Mystic Aquarium in Connecticut. "The animal is too strong. " One main threat to the whale now is humans - particularly boaters who might take to the river with good weather this weekend, Dunn and officials said.

The big plastic bag Mike Hendricks was holding - he let it float in the water where he stood, knee-deep in the Tulpehocken Creek - looked as if it held nothing but clear water. It didn't. Inside were 20,000 American shad. All of about 30 days old, these fish are so small that biologists refer to them as two eyeballs and a wiggle. But they were part of a grand mission. As Hendricks, a biologist with the state Fish and Boat Commission, tipped the bag and let them float away on the rain-swollen waters below the Blue Marsh Dam in Berks County on Friday, they were embarking on an almost epic journey that should take them far away to the Atlantic Ocean this fall and then, four to five years from now, back to the Schuylkill to spawn.

They were translucent threads, barely two-thirds of an inch long, so tiny they seemed to vibrate rather than swim. Some fish. Mike Hendricks had opened one of the plastic bags he had carried to the banks of the Schuylkill yesterday to show off what was inside: American shad. The 570,000 shad released into the river yesterday between Reading and Pottstown held the hopes of biologists and river conservationists who are working to restore a once-thriving fish to the Schuylkill.