The Wrack

As the warmest part of the summer is upon us here in southern Maine, the movement of fish in Branch Brook has slowed down and researchers here at The Reserve have caught a break from their fishing efforts. We recently removed our fyke net from the river at the Route 9 intersection but are continuing to monitor the trap at the top of the fish ladder at the Kennebunk-Kennebunkport-Wells Water District and are finally having some time to look at our data of what was caught, tagged, and recaptured this year and compared to last. So far, some interesting results!

On Thursday, May 7, a little bit of history was made at the fish ladder located at the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport and Wells Water District. For the first time since restoring the fish ladder in December 2013 we successfully caught a fish that we had previously captured and tagged downstream at our Route 9 Branch Brook fishing net. Now, sea lamprey #181 is famous here in the research department!

Earlier this month, about 30 people assembled behind an isolated and nondescript brick building along U.S. Route 1 at the boundary of Wells and Kennebunk during one of the wettest mornings of our rather soggy spring.

Everyone was good natured about the rain. After all, we were standing alongside an important water supply that had recently been improved for fish. We huddled under popup tents in foul-weather gear to celebrate the reconstruction of the Branch Brook fish ladder, a piscine highway past the water district's dam.

In his recent post, Spreading the Fish Ladder News, Jake mentioned our imminent use of passive integrated transponders, or PIT tags, to track fish. But just what is a PIT tag and exactly how does it work?

A passive integrated transponder is a miniature electronic circuit typically encased in glass and implanted under an animal's skin or in a body cavity (the fish tags we'll use are thin and just 12mm long). Each tag is programmed with a unique number to identify an individual animal. That number is read automatically when the animal travels close to a receiving station.

This month customers of the Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, and Wells Water District (KKWWD) got some news about the upgrades and repairs to the fish ladder on Branch Brook in the Winter 2014 Newsletter. Chief Plant Operator Greg Pargellis provided a nice write-up on a really positive collaboration with the Wells Reserve to bring the fish ladder back on line.

This isn't the first time that the fish ladder has been in a KKWWD report. In the 1954 Trustees Report (see pg. 14), the Water District mentions plans to increase the height of the dam by 2 feet and to build a fish ladder which was ordered by the Maine Department of Fish and Game.

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 11/3/13:

Jake Aman, a researcher at the Wells Reserve at Laudholm known fondly as our “river guy,” is building a ladder this month. At a cost of $40,000, provided by funders including the Nature Conservancy, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the Maine Coastal Program, the local water district and the Reserve, it’s not some ordinary stepladder. It’s fancy.

None of us will be climbing Jake’s ladder anytime soon, though. It’s a ladder for fish. With it, they’ll be able to climb up and over a small but insurmountable dam on the Branch Brook, a tributary of the Little River here on the Kennebunk/Wells border. With this ladder, the Wells Reserve will reestablish an essential connection between the ocean downstream and vital nursery pools upstream. A small piece, missing for twenty years from a mosaic that stretches from New Hampshire to Newfoundland, will be replaced.