Pogies for Profit

While they've seldom been directly eaten by people, pogies (menhaden) have furthered human welfare in the food chain of nearly all the other fish that we harvest in New England, and as a prime source of agricultural fertilizer since pre-colonial days when Native Americans used them to enrich the soil in their hills of corn.

Horse turning capstan to tighten the menhaden haul net¹

By the early 19^th century menhaden had become an "industrial-scale fertilizer" for the coastal farmlands of New England and the mid-Atlantic. When vast schools of migrating pogies swam past the beaches, farmers themselves would row out to surround them with seine nets. The hard problem was how to tow the bulging nets into shore.¹

Menhaden sloops and steamers in Gardiner's Bay, Long Island¹

Dumping fish on the top floor of a factory¹

Menhaden oil and fertilizer factory,
served by steamers unloading fish and an elevated railway¹

By the middle of the 19^th century the menhaden fishery was about to surpass whaling as the predominant  American harvest of the seas. Whales had been hunted relentlessly to be rendered into oil primarily for illumination, which was becoming supplanted by petroleum sources of energy. Menhaden were becoming recognized as a valuable source of oil for many industrial uses. Processing menhaden is known as 'reduction,' a series of factory renderings that produce oil and fish meal for both fertilizer and animal feed. With the development of the purse seine and engine power, seemingly unending quantities of menhaden could be brought to port.

Eben Phillips of Swampscott and Rockport²
The Fish Oil King

One of the first entrepreneurs to recognize the industrial potential of menhaden was Eben Phillips (1808-1875) who as a young man had dory-fished, then on schooners, from his native Swampscott. His achievements grew to include merchandising interests in Boston. One day in 1850 a woman from Blue Hills, Maine, showed him a sample of oil she had skimmed from a kettle in boiling menhaden for her hens. Phillips testified to the United States Fish Commission in 1877, "I told her I would give her $22 per barrel for all she would produce. The husband and sons made 13 barrels the first year. The fish were caught in gill-nets. The following year they caught 100 barrels. From that time and from that circumstance has grown a business as extensive as I have represented."³  His report refers to handling over a million and a half gallons of menhaden oil, as well as its fertilizer byproducts.

Promotional map of the Ocean View development
Rockport Town Hall archives

Eben Phillips lent his name to Phillips Avenue, a mile and a half meander by carriage that he constructed through extensive tracts of shoreline property he purchased from Pigeon Cove to Halibut Point, that at the time featured mostly subsistence farming, pastureland, and fishermen's dwellings. He laid out 175 prime residential lots. Astute in all things, he had begun acquiring the land in 1855 in anticipation of railroad service for urbane riders. The train from Boston reached Rockport in 1862.

Halibut Point and Ocean View
Detail of G. M. Hopkins Atlas, 1884

The acquisitional momentum of Ocean View surged into the present-day State Park lands in 1873 with the purchase of a twenty acre lot from Mary Babson, between Babson Farm and the Gott House. Shortly afterwards Eben Phillips reached the end of his life and the developing thrust of fine estates retracted. Ultimately the Rockport Granite Company absorbed this parcel within its quarrying operations. Many of the grand themes of Cape Ann history have actually or nearly affected this spot. 

Sources

1. H. Bruce Franklin, The Most Important Fish in the Sea: Menhaden and America, Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2007, with illustrations taken from G. Brown Goode, A History of the Menhaden, 1880.

2. D. Hamilton Hurd, History Of Essex County Massachusetts, With Biographical Sketches of Many of its Pioneers And Prominent Men, 1888.

3. Eben Phillips, "Statement concerning the menhaden fishery," from United States Fish Commission, Report of the Commissioner for 1877, Part V, 1879.

People and Pogies

This summer I looked down from the Halibut Point promontory at what seemed to be sport fishermen on the bay below, not so far from a commercial netting operation.

I assumed they were trying to catch game fish like stripers, bluefish, or tuna attracted to their favorite food, pogies. No, the anglers were pulling up the pogies themselves. I wondered how these guys could get plankton-eaters to bite on a hook.

Eric Hutchins, Fisheries Biologist at NOAA, helped unravel the story. Eric advised, "They do only eat plankton. They way you catch them is to simply cast a 3 way treble hook into the dense school of menhaden and they are snagged. They don't try to eat the hook." Sure enough, a close look at this photos revealed the hook had lodged in the skin behind the fish's head.

After awhile the bait catchers zoomed off across Ipswich Bay toward Plum Island where they evidently planned to target desirable sport (and culinary) species.

Meanwhile, the menhaden (pogey) fleet was busy offshore.

Three sizes and specialties of boats coordinated the capture of the densely schooled pogies: net-carrying and handling vessels, skiffs to quickly surround the fish with a purse seine, and a floating 'factory' to haul the catch onboard.

A spotter plane roamed over the Bay directing the operation.

As the net was hydraulically tightened around the captive fish they were sucked aboard by a vacuum pump and conveyed below deck on a belted trough.

The handful of 'fishermen' efficiently completed the harvest and departed for their processing port in southern Maine where the pogies would be rendered into oil, fish meal, and fertilizer.

The Most Important Fish in the Sea

Two remarkable resources have come my way since the last blog posting, "Diving on Pogies." One reader writes, "our nephew up in Maine has been on the prowl with his new drone.  We thought you might like a different peek at pogie fishing.  Unless this cormorant is doing a lot of underwater feeding, it looks like the fish are winning." Take a peek from this overhead view, of a hard-working cormorant repeatedly and unsuccessfully diving on pogies. As illogical as it may seem to you and me, their concentration in a school may actually be making it harder for the hunter to 'catch a fish in a barrel' by somehow confusing the predator with plenitude, as is also said of flocking birds and insects.

Striped bass attacking a pogey school along the Halibut Point shoreline

Such a defensive strategy may backfire when pogies are attacked by mackerel, bluefish, or striped bass, which slash their way wantonly through a school, leaving lacerated victims for secondary diners.

Gannet plunge-diving

High-flying gannets roam the skies in search of pogey schools, with a view similar to the drone of those dense submarine shadows. The bird's dive takes it well below the surface and capable of swimming under water in pursuit of the fish.

A title with a startling assertion

The second astonishing resource I've referred to in regard to pogies (menhaden) is the book The Most Important Fish in the Sea. Its subtitle, Menhaden and America, doesn't make it onto the cover of the book because so few people have ever heard of or seen this fish, and none of us has eaten it directly. The book is a story full of ecological revelations and consequences, which will be the subject of our next postings.

Diving on Pogies

There are times especially in early fall when the water roils in the coves of Cape Ann and birds congregate in a feeding frenzy on tiny fish migrating from coastal nurseries to the open ocean. These fish are juvenile menhaden, or pogies, driven to the surface attempting to escape the jaws of predators pursuing them from below. Considering what must be the vast numbers consumed - or that throw themselves up on the shore in a vain leap for freedom -  it seems remarkable that these 'schoolies'  populate the ocean year after year as a sustaining element of the maritime food chain.

Double-crested Cormorants, Folly Cove

Cormorants that are usually solitary hunters congregate for a feast when pogies are trapped along the shoreline.

They gorge on the myriad silvery fish that at this stage of their life have various local names, including "peanut bunkers."

Ring-billed Gull and cormorants

Cormorants are not the only opportunists. Certain aerodynamically buoyant species of gulls hover over the water surface waiting for the pogies to be driven upward by voracious bluefish and striped bass.

Laughing Gulls swarming...

...and plucking fish from the surface.

Cormorant surfacing with mature pogey

When they move through our inshore waters earlier in the year, calorie-rich pogies become a favorite food of many other species.

A 15-inch adult pogey challenges the elasticity of a cormorant's jaws and throat.

One supposes the bird will not have to fly far or frequently after such a satisfying meal.