In just two weeks, it will be a year since we moved to Hudson, and I find myself going to the river every day, to listen and look for the first migrating shad, that much storied anadromous fish whose life cycle is such an extraordinary part of the watery marvel that is Mahicantuk – the Hudson River. When I made my way down to the river last May, the river surface was continually punctuated with the sight and sound of these big fish jumping skyward, or slapping their tails, as they made their way upriver to find spawning grounds.
Coming upon the weatherbeaten, abandoned colony of fishing shanties down at the foot of North Bay, I had no idea that New York State had closed down all recreational fishing for shad in 2010 – just two years before the state had conducted a raid on the shanties. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the Hudson shad fishery had waxed and waned. In 1902, five million shad – worth over $1 million dollars – had been taken from the Hudson River. By 2010, the total annual haul of shad was less than what a single fisherman might net in a day.
After meeting some of the local fishermen, and reading Billy Shannon’s marvelous The River’s Never Full, the shad seemed to me Hudson’s – and perhaps every river town between Kingston and Troy – most ancient and treasured talisman, a gift from the Earth that had fed the region’s people for over 5000 years.
Along with the shad, I am waiting for a much more elusive creature, the “Shad Spirit.” Right into the early 19th century, in the Connecticut Valley there was a belief – inherited from the native peoples – that the great schools of returning shad are conducted by a bird called the Shad Spirit:
It makes its appearance, annually, about a week before the Shad, calls the fish, and gives warning to the fishermen to mend their nets. It is supposed, that without his assistance, the nets would be swept to no purpose, and the fisherman would labor in vain.
The “Shad Spirit” is the piskwa – an onomatopoeic Algonquian Indian name for the Nighthawk, Chordeiles minor. Just as the flowering of the native shrub shadbush, Amelanchier canadensis, was universally recognized throughout the Northeast as a harbinger of the shad’s return (and also as a reliable phenological indicator that it was time to bury those who had died during the winter – thus its alternate name of “serviceberry,” i.e., as in funeral service), the Nighthawk’s spring return heralded in its wake the shad’s return from the Atlantic. Solitary birds during the breeding season, Nighthawks are social during their migration, and commonly follow major rivers as they make their way both north in the spring and south in late summer.
Having in the 1980s come to know Nighthawks as crepuscular companions above the rooftops of Burlington, Vermont, I had hoped to find them here in Hudson. Alas, I have yet to hear their plaintive “peent” or the mysterious booming sounds made by the male’s feathers when he defensively dives above the nest. Once a common summer sight and sound throughout the Hudson Valley and across America, Nighthawks have largely vanished from all their old haunts.
I’m convinced that “Winnie” – the 1896 Saint Winifred bronze statue standing guard at Hudson’s Parade Hill promontory – will again spy the Shad Spirit above Mahicantuk. There may no longer be dozens of fishermen mending their nets and boats to prepare for the incipient shad run, but perhaps a few of us may line up on the river’s shore, to sing a little Shad Spirit Shanty:
To fair Mahicantuk’s northernmost source, O’er sand bars, rapids, and falls,
The Shad Spirit holds his onward course, With the flocks which his whistle calls.
O how shall we know where he went before? Will he wander around forever?
The last year’s shad heads shall shine on the shore, To light him up the river.
Though the wind is light, the wave is white, With the fleece of the flock that’s near;
Like the breath of the breeze, he comes over the seas, And faithfully lead them here.
And now he’s passed the bolted door, Where the rusted horse–shoe clings;
So carry the nets to the nearest shore,
And take what the Shad Spirit brings.
Nice shanty. Did you write it?
Hi KD- Ah yes- let us to perch and be watchful for signs and wonders of every kind. Winnie is a good mentor for positioning ourselves rightly to greet the incoming good graces. ❤️Cheryl