Buckeye Brook, like the river herring that will hopefully be running through it in the coming weeks as the weather turns warmer, has been the topic of a steady stream of activity in recent days.

On Tuesday a small gathering of volunteers, neighborhood advocates and officials from the Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM) geared up for another season of counting alewives, a herring species known colloquially as “buckeyes,” which run up Buckeye Brook from the ocean in order to spawn in freshwater ponds, such as Warwick Pond.

Patrick McGee, fisheries biologist for DEM, explained from the bank of Buckeye Brook near the Knights of Columbus the process and significance of counting the herring, which can be conducted by volunteers in 10-minute intervals throughout the running season that begins in March and peaks in the middle of April. Volunteers observe the area and look for herring crossing a white marker buried into the bottom of the brook, clicking a counter as fish swim by in the direction of the pond.

The stock of herring has decreased significantly in the state since the late 90s and early 2000s, so getting an accurate count on the number of fish is an important part of DEM’s conservation efforts.

“We’re still nowhere close now to where we were back in the 80s and even the early 90s. This is why we’re working on these,” McGee said. “We’re trying to get these stocks up and we’ve been doing a lot of work getting rid of dams, getting rid of fish movement issues as best we can. Hopefully we can get the numbers up.”

DEM data shows herring stock in Rhode Island numbered near the 250,000 to 300,000 mark in the two counting locations – Gilbert Stuart Run in North Kingstown and Nonquit in Tiverton – in the late 90s and early 2000s. Those numbers declined dramatically as the 21st century progressed, so dramatically that a moratorium on recreational fishing of the species was put in place in 2006. Numbers steadied and slightly increased in the following years, but have also fluctuated wildly depending on the counting location.

“Essentially we want those stocks to be back where they were before we had to close the fishery. We would love to open the fishery back up and have enough fish to be able to do that, but we’re not anywhere close to that,” McGee said. “With these fish counts we’re trying to keep an eye on where those fish stocks are.”

Counting at Buckeye Brook began in 2003, and has seen sharp swings in herring stock from year to year. The estimated count swung from 38,949 in 2003 to just 5,010 in 2014. It jumped all the way back to a high of 90,625 in 2012, but last year the count was down to 8,241.

“This is a site where there is the potential when they’re running heavy you may see a couple hundred fish running when you’re here for a 10-minute count,” McGee said, adding that they had already spotted fish in the brook this season. “But don’t be frustrated if you don’t see anything. There are going to be a lot of zeroes.”

Phil Edwards, Supervising Biologist, Freshwater & Diadromous Fisheries for DEM, said on Wednesday that fluctuations in the herring stock could be caused by a number of factors, from accidental overfishing via offshore netting to natural predators (sport fish and birds primarily) preying more heavily on the fish from one year to the next.

The hope, Edwards said, would be to see herring levels rise back to a point where they would be self-sustaining within the various bodies of water in which they travel to spawn, without a need for intervention efforts from DEM.

Phragmite fever

Earlier this month, during the meeting of the Warwick City Council on Monday, March 19, the Buckeye Brook Coalition and the Friends of Warwick Ponds neighborhood advocacy groups were out in full force to discuss a controversial bid to conduct more research into what is causing Warwick Pond to overflow some residencies that border the pond and, possibly related, what is helping a type of bacteria that can be harmful to people and pets to bloom in the water during the summer months.

The bid to begin to address these issues, totaling $127,751 was proposed by the city’s engineering department to go to the lone bidder, EA Engineering, Science, Technology, Inc. – however there was much confusion among the advocacy groups and city council as to what exactly that money would be going towards.

Was it to hire a team to perform work on unclogging the brook? Was it a proposal to begin some other sort of remediation process to remedy the flooding?

“There's no proposal yet,” Eric Earls, city engineer, explained at the podium. “We're looking for someone to come in and propose how to tackle this.”

This approach didn’t sit right at the time with Philip D’Ercole Sr., facilitator for Friends of Warwick Ponds, who said that the city had been alerted of the flooding issue going back as far as Christmas Eve of 2015. From there, the city approved a $30,000 bathymetric study of Buckeye Brook to gather more information on possible obstructions that could account for rising water levels in the pond.

This study was finished around the end of last year, and revealed that an invasive version of the common reed plant known as phragmites was primarily responsible for the blockage of the brook, and the subsequent higher water levels in Warwick Pond. There are also some anecdotal concerns among the Friends of Warwick Ponds and the Buckeye Brook Coalition that excessive growth of phragmites could affect the numbers of herring making it into Warwick Pond.

Phragmites are difficult to remove permanently without the use of targeted herbicides, as physically removing them has proven to only be a temporary measure due to the seeds spreading and re-rooting during the process. Regardless of the procedure used, alterations made to any wetland area in Rhode Island require extensive permitting approval from DEM before anything can be done.

The aforementioned bid supposedly includes the cost of acquiring the necessary permitting for accomplishing such work, but D’Ercole and Michael Zarum, president and chairman of the Buckeye Brook Coalition, questioned at the meeting as to whether or not they could examine alternative approaches to lower the cost and simplify the process – at the very least they felt the 80 families around the brook and the advocacy groups should have a seat at the table to discuss the matter.

D’Ercole and Zarum offered to assist in the process by sitting down with the city’s Department of Public Works, DEM and other stakeholders around Warwick Pond to figure out the best approach – whether that would involve awarding the bid to EA Engineering to conduct its study or if there is another less costly way to begin dealing with the phragmites. Such a meeting was accepted by the city and was set up for 10 a.m. on Thursday morning.

The meeting was intended to give stakeholders around Warwick Pond a chance to voice concerns and raise questions that weren’t satisfactorily answered in EA Engineering’s bid which, in an email sent Thursday afternoon, D'Ercole indicated was done satisfactorily and with respect.

“Getting input from different areas, in my professional career that's what we did,” said D’Ercole in a recent interview. “To get everyone's opinion, everyone's input, what that does is when you go out with the final product – a project or a report – you've already had those people involved. So when it goes for approval you have total buy in.”