Dr R, here, in pictures and print , is proof of why I say you are fluent in the language of hope. The alewives are completely new to me, but now my heart mascot. They do not fester about whether others will join them. Or whether cormorants will decide to be nice. They do what must be done. With all they’ve got! That’s it.
You help us see and understand the world we live in, and keep swimming. Thank you every day. Thank you.
This is worth cheering! I’ve been w you all for weeks of required reading, but so disheartened. The alewives are running and my flowers are blooming and this too lifts my heart and hopes for essential goodness and well-being for all to overcome the desperate actions of lost souls bent on self-aggrandizing acts of destruction.
I will not give these thoughts more space. My heart is with the fish and the flowers. A new spring is here. To celebrate. To renew. Be well. Be strong and loving.
Thank you, Carol. I was cheerful after Trump disappeared and the new people in town were very competent. Now not so .,I am joining you with the fish and flowers.
Nature is our greatest teacher. The primordial urge to re-create causes this churning mass of fish to school from pool to pool, because alone they likely wouldn’t make it.
Cooperatively they swim and jump and grind their way to do what their parents did: find a safe, nurturing, appropriate place to birth the next generation.
What can we learn from these fish?
It’s worth dying for to make things right for the next generation.
It’s being in community that we’ll most likely survive to create a place for the next generation. Together we thrive.
I love what John Meacham said in his Super Soul interview with Oprah Winfrey recently. He talked about what church historian St. Augustine said about what makes a nation:
A nation is a community of beings United by the commonness of their love.” So what we all love could unite us.
These fish love the promise of creating the next generation in waters safer, in an environment whew they have the best chance of survival.
We owe our children the same opportunity.
No less.
See PACEsconnetion.com to learn more about how making the first years of a child’s life safe, stable, and nurturing will help that child’s brain develop in the best way possible.
As a nation we have got to support the parents in providing for their children.
We’ve punished single mothers to the breaking point. Their innocent children are paying the price in prison, morgues, foster care.
Thanks for sharing lessons learned from the fish. We’d do well to protect our fry in like fashion.
Your link isn’t working. I think you may have left out a c in connection? Here’s the sister link with some writing folks here might find interesting. https://acestoohigh.com/
Yes, they are incredible and so are you!!! I cannot tell you how grateful I am for your column. It provides me with the opportunity to learn something new every time I read what you have to say whether it ve current events or science t or whatever else you decide to write about. Your topics are so varied that to have the opportunity to read about and learn something new about a myriad of topics, including FISH is one of the highlights of my day or evening, depending, and I am not kidding!
Thank you, Heather, you are brilliant. I wish you were my next door neighbor, but I will settle for your letters.
There are many amazing cycles, and alewives are surely one of them. It is bittersweet, because, for instance, while a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has many locales with "Alewife" as part of their names, alewives are no longer there, their habitats crushed by development and human encroaching.
Still, there are many hardy species. I do mosses, now in retirement, and am studying them pretty seriously. But they can also be beautiful.
Thanks. My old Cannon Sure Shot point and shoot took great macro close ups, but the lens got stuck. Nobody fixes them anymore. Besides moss, I have myriad mushroom types. I took closeups of those, they look enormous but some are about 1/2 inch high. Purple, orange, grey and cream colors.
I love hearing about and seeing the alewives! Growing up in Chicago in the 50’s and 60’s, on summer days my mom would take the three of us to the beach (Lake Michigan) several days a week. There were always so many alewives in the water and I felt very brave for being there with them slithering all around our little legs!
Thanks for an incredible run…. And thanks for transporting me back to Howard St. Beach! I can taste my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a dash of sand! Aa good as ever! Sweet dreams all!
I live about four miles from Alewife Brook Parkway which forms part of the border between Cambridge and Arlington in metropolitan Boston, and I lived here as a kid in the '60s. But I never saw them until we took a trip to Illinois to take my brother to an American Friends Service project in Kankakee in the summer of '67. We spend a few days in Chicago, and it was the summer of the great Alewife die-off there. They were three feet thick along the shoreline.
HCR's photo of the waters thick with them is amazing, and from now on I'll think of Alewives swirling in their thousands, or tens of thousands on the coast of Maine rather than dead along the shoreline on Lake Michigan.
Gilson Harbor, Wilmette. In 1967, fisheries biologist Howard Tanner from MSU postulated that the introduction of another ocean dwelling native, salmon, might mitigate the annual die-off of millions of alewives. A resounding success! And the Great Lakes recreational salmon fishing industry was born. Spent about 25 years in off-shore pursuit of these fighters. Yet 99 out of a hundred Chicagoans have no idea the largesse right in front of them! Wild salmon, caught hours before: you can’t buy that at Whole Foods!
Lake Michigan - Wells St Beach in Gary, IN. One summer (or two) the alewives all turned up dead on the beach, by the thousands. It was mysterious and awful and I not sure why that happened. We thought it might be pollution from the surrounding steel mills, but I think it was some other phenomenon. Anybody here know what caused it?
It's nice to learn about alewives and mosses. And flowers and bats! And with R. Dooley's poetic touch and Pamela's John Muir quote,.it all sets a nice sense of peacefulness and calm much needed by me this Sunday. Thank you Dr. Richardson and all LFAA'ers.
Yes, I read this a while ago, but on the Gary beaches, it wasn’t an annual occurrence, as the Racine area seems to indicate. Thanks for sending, though.
The 1967 die off: "Feeding on small crustaceans, now nearly extinct in the lake, they multiplied rapidly, peaking in 1967, when a bloom of toxic blue-green algae near Gary killed millions of the fish."
We haven't had major alewife die offs in northwest Michigan for awhile, probably because introduction of salmon which keeps numbers down (and fishery up!) But part of that is due to invasive species (e.g. zebra mussels) feeding on the zooplankton that are a staple for alewives, reducing their numbers, which reduces salmon and other lake fish that feed on them.
Ah I remember that - I was in high school then - grew up in a Chicago suburb but I remember the alewive die off and people upset about the smell. I wasn't sure if my memory was faulty - since alewives in Maine are migrating from ocean - and Chicago is pretty much not near an ocean. Good to know an odd teenage year memory is accurate.
This reminds me of the time my dissertation adviser took a group of us to see a bat out flight from a cave in New Mexico. The bats leave en masse, and it's a spectacle. But like you with the alewives, I was completely unprepared for the actual sight. River upon River of bats pouring out of the cave with a sound like helicopters, staying bunched together like starlings while the hawks tried (and, more often than not, failed) to pick them off. I'm glad you had time with the alewives. I miss the bats.
Lovely conversation. As an original "back-to-the-land" hippie from the 60s, I was amazed (and the college-educated part of me was a bit ashamed) to realize that I'd never properly appreciated the cycle of all those anadromous species which journey back up into mountains with the nutrients they've gathered in the oceans as being nature's nutrient pump, cycling vast stores from one bioregion to another. What a wonder it all is! I never knew about sea silk until a few weeks ago, either: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sea_silk
Beautiful spring evening. My rhododendrons are in full bloom. Figs on my fig tree. Moss on the rocks and some on the concrete path (even some on the roof where I prefer they weren’t). Dinner with friends on the deck overlooking the garden. Lots of laughter heightened by Prosecco. Used pliers to pull the cork! Talked about Heather’s letters. Lovely Saturday evening.
Yes, Nature IS amazing. In spite of all the crap going on, solace can ALWAYS be found in some aspect of Nature. Kings and kingdoms pass away into dust, but Nature always remains. It is eternal. We aren't.
Sometimes it’s good to be a human being, not a human doing:
“Every once in a while, I’ll go outside and catch my goats just standing there, staring at a wall or fence. They could be facing any direction in their enclosure or doing any number of things but instead they’re just head first at big blank nothing, chewing like it’s totally normal. Are they stupid or something? It occurred to me recently that they aren’t actually doing nothing. They’re being goats. They’re not supposed to do anything but be alive. Standing there is their job. It’s their purpose.
“Follow that old joke: Don’t just do something. Stand there!”
Dr R, here, in pictures and print , is proof of why I say you are fluent in the language of hope. The alewives are completely new to me, but now my heart mascot. They do not fester about whether others will join them. Or whether cormorants will decide to be nice. They do what must be done. With all they’ve got! That’s it.
You help us see and understand the world we live in, and keep swimming. Thank you every day. Thank you.
"Just keep swimming, just keep swimming!" ~Dori
Thank-you for saying what I feel so well!!
Which, if they were able to, is what most other species would do - if allowed.
This is worth cheering! I’ve been w you all for weeks of required reading, but so disheartened. The alewives are running and my flowers are blooming and this too lifts my heart and hopes for essential goodness and well-being for all to overcome the desperate actions of lost souls bent on self-aggrandizing acts of destruction.
I will not give these thoughts more space. My heart is with the fish and the flowers. A new spring is here. To celebrate. To renew. Be well. Be strong and loving.
Thank you, Carol. I was cheerful after Trump disappeared and the new people in town were very competent. Now not so .,I am joining you with the fish and flowers.
I join you too, with cactus blooming here in New Mexico.
Native New Mexican here. I miss the Land of Enchantment. Enjoy for me, please?
Yes fish flowers and fun this Sunday.
and be these things not only because you can be, and it feels good, but also because in doing so you will bring others along with you
🙏
Yes yes yes!
I just love you.
Thank you for sharing.
Nature is our greatest teacher. The primordial urge to re-create causes this churning mass of fish to school from pool to pool, because alone they likely wouldn’t make it.
Cooperatively they swim and jump and grind their way to do what their parents did: find a safe, nurturing, appropriate place to birth the next generation.
What can we learn from these fish?
It’s worth dying for to make things right for the next generation.
It’s being in community that we’ll most likely survive to create a place for the next generation. Together we thrive.
I love what John Meacham said in his Super Soul interview with Oprah Winfrey recently. He talked about what church historian St. Augustine said about what makes a nation:
A nation is a community of beings United by the commonness of their love.” So what we all love could unite us.
These fish love the promise of creating the next generation in waters safer, in an environment whew they have the best chance of survival.
We owe our children the same opportunity.
No less.
See PACEsconnetion.com to learn more about how making the first years of a child’s life safe, stable, and nurturing will help that child’s brain develop in the best way possible.
As a nation we have got to support the parents in providing for their children.
We’ve punished single mothers to the breaking point. Their innocent children are paying the price in prison, morgues, foster care.
Thanks for sharing lessons learned from the fish. We’d do well to protect our fry in like fashion.
Carey Sipp
Yes we owe our children and grandchildren a safe environment and a democracy that works.
💯!! Very well said Carey Sipp!! Thank you for putting the ACES link out there. Such important information. 🙏❤️
Carey left our letter in “connection”. The website is
pacesconnection.com
This website honors children and the care and nurturing that all of us must contribute to.
Your link isn’t working. I think you may have left out a c in connection? Here’s the sister link with some writing folks here might find interesting. https://acestoohigh.com/
Beautifully said, Carey.
I learned a lot from your post, Carey, thanks.
Here's Paces Connection: https://www.pacesconnection.com/
Yes, they are incredible and so are you!!! I cannot tell you how grateful I am for your column. It provides me with the opportunity to learn something new every time I read what you have to say whether it ve current events or science t or whatever else you decide to write about. Your topics are so varied that to have the opportunity to read about and learn something new about a myriad of topics, including FISH is one of the highlights of my day or evening, depending, and I am not kidding!
Thank you, Heather, you are brilliant. I wish you were my next door neighbor, but I will settle for your letters.
Nina Snegg
Amen to your thanks Nina. So aptly put!!!
Nina, I am with you, well said
“… spending the day with alewives rather than politicians.”
An immensely sane choice, Professor Richardson.
“Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled --
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.”
Excerpt from “The Ponds” by Mary Oliver
There are many amazing cycles, and alewives are surely one of them. It is bittersweet, because, for instance, while a section of Cambridge, Massachusetts, has many locales with "Alewife" as part of their names, alewives are no longer there, their habitats crushed by development and human encroaching.
Still, there are many hardy species. I do mosses, now in retirement, and am studying them pretty seriously. But they can also be beautiful.
https://user.fm/files/v2-229612b6837a9d7a80b7ddc4ab085083/M1141711.JPG
https://user.fm/files/v2-981af0a1f7f26d072748981c554637b7/M1342205.JPG
https://user.fm/files/v2-5a2f248db852ae962706b2d626c451cc/M1402299.JPG
https://user.fm/files/v2-e408650794122bbb1fc5b5e7a2af0e45/M1402303.JPG
Come to my house, I have a moss farm, many types! I like to get down close, they look like little forests
I love moss, the symbol of motherhood. My father used to say moss should only be trodden on by paws or bare feet.
A moss farm ... how interesting! I would love to see it.
Love love love moss!
Worlds within worlds.
I love moss, too! Thanks for the photos.
You are welcome! Check out the Jepson Herbarium : https://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/CA_moss_eflora/
Jan, Thank you for bringing us closer to the moss with your wonderful photographs.
Thanks for the compliment! There'll be more.
fabulous! Makes me so happy looking at them. Thank you!
What a cool thing to be able to say…”I do mosses…”.
Yeah, mosses don't get enough love. Thx.
Thank you, Jan. I also mentioned Alewife Station/Brook/Parkway in another comment. It's around here somewhere.
Aaaah. The mere mention of my hometown brings back so many memories.
What camera did you use? My iPhone doesn’t take that clear a picture up close.
That's taken with an Olympus TG-6, using macro mode.
Thanks. My old Cannon Sure Shot point and shoot took great macro close ups, but the lens got stuck. Nobody fixes them anymore. Besides moss, I have myriad mushroom types. I took closeups of those, they look enormous but some are about 1/2 inch high. Purple, orange, grey and cream colors.
I love you and your alewives. As John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”
A wonderful quote. TY Bruce!
That's wonderful and so true.
Congratulations on crossing the finish line!
I love hearing about and seeing the alewives! Growing up in Chicago in the 50’s and 60’s, on summer days my mom would take the three of us to the beach (Lake Michigan) several days a week. There were always so many alewives in the water and I felt very brave for being there with them slithering all around our little legs!
Thanks for an incredible run…. And thanks for transporting me back to Howard St. Beach! I can taste my peanut butter and jelly sandwich with a dash of sand! Aa good as ever! Sweet dreams all!
I live about four miles from Alewife Brook Parkway which forms part of the border between Cambridge and Arlington in metropolitan Boston, and I lived here as a kid in the '60s. But I never saw them until we took a trip to Illinois to take my brother to an American Friends Service project in Kankakee in the summer of '67. We spend a few days in Chicago, and it was the summer of the great Alewife die-off there. They were three feet thick along the shoreline.
HCR's photo of the waters thick with them is amazing, and from now on I'll think of Alewives swirling in their thousands, or tens of thousands on the coast of Maine rather than dead along the shoreline on Lake Michigan.
Many a summer day spent at Whiting Beach, just over the state line.
Gilson Harbor, Wilmette. In 1967, fisheries biologist Howard Tanner from MSU postulated that the introduction of another ocean dwelling native, salmon, might mitigate the annual die-off of millions of alewives. A resounding success! And the Great Lakes recreational salmon fishing industry was born. Spent about 25 years in off-shore pursuit of these fighters. Yet 99 out of a hundred Chicagoans have no idea the largesse right in front of them! Wild salmon, caught hours before: you can’t buy that at Whole Foods!
What a funny coincidence--see my post about seeing the '67 die-off a couple above yours.
I’ve been gone awhile but I had NO idea.
Lake Michigan - Wells St Beach in Gary, IN. One summer (or two) the alewives all turned up dead on the beach, by the thousands. It was mysterious and awful and I not sure why that happened. We thought it might be pollution from the surrounding steel mills, but I think it was some other phenomenon. Anybody here know what caused it?
https://journaltimes.com/news/local/annual-alewife-build-up-hits-lake-shoreline/article_9dc4481f-4152-5d99-83c4-d9dd82c74931.html#:~:text=%22There%20are%20two%20main%20causes,to%20a%20fresh%20water%20environment.
It's nice to learn about alewives and mosses. And flowers and bats! And with R. Dooley's poetic touch and Pamela's John Muir quote,.it all sets a nice sense of peacefulness and calm much needed by me this Sunday. Thank you Dr. Richardson and all LFAA'ers.
Yes, I read this a while ago, but on the Gary beaches, it wasn’t an annual occurrence, as the Racine area seems to indicate. Thanks for sending, though.
The 1967 die off: "Feeding on small crustaceans, now nearly extinct in the lake, they multiplied rapidly, peaking in 1967, when a bloom of toxic blue-green algae near Gary killed millions of the fish."
We haven't had major alewife die offs in northwest Michigan for awhile, probably because introduction of salmon which keeps numbers down (and fishery up!) But part of that is due to invasive species (e.g. zebra mussels) feeding on the zooplankton that are a staple for alewives, reducing their numbers, which reduces salmon and other lake fish that feed on them.
Ah I remember that - I was in high school then - grew up in a Chicago suburb but I remember the alewive die off and people upset about the smell. I wasn't sure if my memory was faulty - since alewives in Maine are migrating from ocean - and Chicago is pretty much not near an ocean. Good to know an odd teenage year memory is accurate.
Wow! That’s a very useful explanation- thanks for that, Mary Pat!
This reminds me of the time my dissertation adviser took a group of us to see a bat out flight from a cave in New Mexico. The bats leave en masse, and it's a spectacle. But like you with the alewives, I was completely unprepared for the actual sight. River upon River of bats pouring out of the cave with a sound like helicopters, staying bunched together like starlings while the hawks tried (and, more often than not, failed) to pick them off. I'm glad you had time with the alewives. I miss the bats.
You are a gift sent to us. Thank you for lighting up my life with beauty and thought during the past year.
Lovely conversation. As an original "back-to-the-land" hippie from the 60s, I was amazed (and the college-educated part of me was a bit ashamed) to realize that I'd never properly appreciated the cycle of all those anadromous species which journey back up into mountains with the nutrients they've gathered in the oceans as being nature's nutrient pump, cycling vast stores from one bioregion to another. What a wonder it all is! I never knew about sea silk until a few weeks ago, either: https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Sea_silk
Fred, you are responsible for my deep dive this morning. Anadromous! Sea silk! Here's a treat for you in return: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv1qq6ypiTk
Absolutely breathtaking. A work of art! TY Becky. As a lifelong seamstress I love fine fabrics.
Glad you enjoyed it, br. I was also very impressed. And I share your love of fine fabrics!
unfortunately we're interfering greatly with that nutrient pump https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/big-animals-poop-out
Thanks for this tip Fred. (I recommend Fred's link on Sea silk!)
2 votes for the link! TY Fred.
Whoa! That’s a lot of fish! I’ve never heard of them. But I thought you were through with schools for a bit. ;-)
Have a nice evening!
I don’t know why you don’t spend everyday with alewives instead of politicians, but THANK GOD you don’t!
Beautiful spring evening. My rhododendrons are in full bloom. Figs on my fig tree. Moss on the rocks and some on the concrete path (even some on the roof where I prefer they weren’t). Dinner with friends on the deck overlooking the garden. Lots of laughter heightened by Prosecco. Used pliers to pull the cork! Talked about Heather’s letters. Lovely Saturday evening.
In Portland, OR, our rhodies are wrapping up their blooming - so lovely while it lasted.
We're loving the lilacs, so abundant this year, and their fragrance !
Yes, Nature IS amazing. In spite of all the crap going on, solace can ALWAYS be found in some aspect of Nature. Kings and kingdoms pass away into dust, but Nature always remains. It is eternal. We aren't.
Sometimes it’s good to be a human being, not a human doing:
“Every once in a while, I’ll go outside and catch my goats just standing there, staring at a wall or fence. They could be facing any direction in their enclosure or doing any number of things but instead they’re just head first at big blank nothing, chewing like it’s totally normal. Are they stupid or something? It occurred to me recently that they aren’t actually doing nothing. They’re being goats. They’re not supposed to do anything but be alive. Standing there is their job. It’s their purpose.
“Follow that old joke: Don’t just do something. Stand there!”
https://thoughtcatalog.com/ryan-holiday/2015/08/human-being-not-human-doing/
Afternoon, Lynell!! Standing is doing?!
Almost Evening, TPJ!! Standing is being!!
I love your goat analysis and human analogy!
That's good. Thanks.