Episode 30
Copyright © John Page Williams, Jr. all rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another reading from "Chesapeake Almanac." The month is October and this chapter is entitled "Harvesttime."
Vance Parks understood the richness of autumn on the Chesapeake. He spent plenty of time on the waters around his native Tangier Island, but as science department chair at the island school (he was one of the best teachers in Virginia), he combined a biologist's understanding with a waterman's knowledge. His ideas were worth listening to.
He always put up a batch of Norfolk spot for the winter. He'd wait until the fish got a deep gold sheen on their gray and silver backs, signaling that they had fattened up on summer's bounty. Then he would make a large catch and salt them down to help tide his family through the cold winter.
Fat, gold-colored spot are a good symbol for this time of year, but plenty of other fish are in prime condition as well. Menhaden, silversides, and bay anchovies have been feeding heavily on summer's bloom of plankton, and they too have put on weight. So have all the young-of-the-year sea trout, croakers, and rockfish that have used the Bay system as their nursery. Crabs finished their last slough of the year in mid-September, but they have continued to feed, storing up for the winter.
Summer brings a lot of life to the Bay, but that inevitably must be followed by a lot of death, and so a lot of decaying material comes to rest on the Bay's bottom. A scavenger like the blue crab has plenty to sift through, as do smaller but still important scavengers like the grass shrimp, amphipods, and sea worms that fattened Vance Park's adult spot and the year's crop of juvenile fish.
Upriver, there's plenty more. In the tidal fresh marshes of rivers like the Rappahannock and the Choptank, there are bumper crops of nutritious seeds: wild rice, smartweed, tearthumb, rice cutgrass, arrow arum, Walter's millet, and others.
Throughout the Bay and its rivers, beds of submerged aquatic vegetation have grown and fruited out around Smith and Tangier islands, widgeon grass and eelgrass have peaked in the Potomac and on the Susquehanna Flats. The same is true for hydrilla and wild celery and a dozen more plants. There isn't nearly as much underwater grass around as there was 50 years ago. It's a continuing cause for concern for everyone who struggles to restore the Chesapeake's health. But there's more, a whole lot more, still, than there was 35 years ago, and the plants form an important part of autumn's harvest.
Everywhere around the Bay, the tables are set with tremendous amounts and variety of food. At the same time, falling water temperatures and shorter days signal winter's approach and the need to stock up for the leaner days ahead. The fish and birds that are here for this season feed heavily, with an urgency triggered by those subtle clues.
These harvesttime feasters are a remarkably varied lot. Some are summer residents headed back out to the ocean. Others are just arriving from further north. Some are just passing through. A few are year-round residents. Let's look at a sampling of them.
Many of the larger fish that live in the Bay during the warm months spend the winter out on the continental shelf. Falling water temperatures alert them to winter's approach and stimulate them to feed voraciously on the menhaden and juvenile spot that are headed down the Bay by the millions. This group of fish includes gray trout, speckled trout, bluefish, flounder, Spanish mackerel, and puppy drum (that is young red drum), plus bottom feeders like croakers and Vance Parks's golden spot. Rockfish of all sizes join the party, and some of them will move down out of the Bay to winter off of Virginia Capes and Cape Hatteras with rockfish that have come down from summering in New England.
The anglers who follow these fish through September, October, November, and December from Annapolis and Kent Island to Tillman and Solomon's, to Crisfield and Point Lookout, to Smith Point and the Cut Channel off the Rappahannock, and into the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel between the Virginia Capes, will do very well indeed. They will understand as well as anyone the meaning of harvesttime.
The Bay Bridge-Tunnel plays an especially important role in this fall exodus from the Bay. It forms a valuable complex of reef habitat for prey and predator alike. Because of its location at the mouth of the Chesapeake, it's a natural intercept point to concentrate all the forage fish leaving the Bay. The big fish headed out to the sea will stop off here to feed, and so will some of the fish headed down the coast, especially rockfish that have summered in New England. Fishing for them lasts through December, sometimes right up to the first of the new year.
Not all of the Bay's harvesttime feasters are fish, however. The Chesapeake is a major wintering ground for waterfowl, and it's a natural stopover for a number of waterbirds headed further south. Fish-eating birds like cormorants and loons chase bait fish almost as efficiently as bluefish and rock, while gulls and turrets wheel screaming over the melee, diving for scraps. The loons are particularly adept at working in flocks to herd menhaden. Another tremendous diver that feeds on the menhaden schools are the gannets. Big six-foot wing spread, amazing white birds with black wingtips, gannet storms--that is groups of gannets diving actively--are great indicators for anglers looking for rockfish, because very often there are fish under, driving bait to the surface as the gannets dive into the panicked bait fish below.
Up in the marshes the harvest is more seeds than small fish, but there are plenty of gleaners here too. From the time that the wild rice ripens in September, the upper Bay areas see a steady progression of bobolinks (also known as reed birds), sora rails, red-winged blackbirds, green- and blue-winged teal, black ducks, mallards, and other water birds moving in to pick through the litter at the edges of the rivers, creeks, and guts for the tons of seeds that are the culmination of each marsh's year. The underwater grass beds of the Potomac and Tangier Sound will also attract large numbers of waterfowl. Some, like the teal, will move on as far as Florida, the Caribbean, and even South America, while others, like the black ducks and mallards, will settle in till spring.
In late September and October, Canada geese come down from their summer haunts in the far north. The harvest they seek now is scrap green left by the combines of human farmers after their fall harvest. In November and December, some 30,000 tundra swans will join them, flying in from Canada's Arctic coast and Alaska's North Slope. They too will seek scrap grain, but some will also find patches of underwater grasses on the Bay's waterways and settle in there for the winter. Even though the Chesapeake's migrations of waterfowl are lower than they were a century ago, the birds still form a magnificent part of the Bay community.
Last on the list of autumn reapers, but definitely not least, is us. Whether we gather what is visual, like watching a flight of geese coming in from Canada, or edible, like a baked rockfish stuffed with oysters, the banquet table is set for us too.
Our Bay still has problems that harvesttime reminds us of: swans feeding in farmer's fields instead of on underwater grass beds, rockfish limits of one or two per person per day instead of a cooler full, and oyster harvests a pale shadow of their former abundance. Even so, this is a rich time of year for us Bay lovers and we should enjoy it to the hilt. Perhaps what these problems do at this season is remind us to savor each goose or rockfish or oyster, and never again to take them for granted, as we did in the past when the Chesapeake's bounty seemed to have no end. Savor them and be thankful for all the Bay means to us.
For more happenings around the Bay in October see our other Chesapeake Almanac podcasts and read our blog post "Leaf Peeping from the Water in October."
