A Big Fish Story in Herrontown Woods

Herrontown Woods seems an unlikely source of a big fish story. 

Its multiple streams take but a few steps to cross. A sustained drought slows them to a trickle and dries some up altogether. It can feel like an event to spot a minnow while crossing the main channel on the yellow trail. How did it reach that far up, given the challenge posed by the cascades some distance downstream? When a boy named Felix found a crayfish in a stream next to the parking lot some years ago, it was a revelation. 

The only big fish story told until this spring was the tall tale popularized in an article in the October, 1981 Princeton Recollector, entitled Farming Small in "Herringtown". Written by Jac Weller, who owned a farm where Smoyer Park now stands, the article states that Herrontown Road was originally called Herringtown Road, named after the herring that farmers would haul back from the shore in wagons to fertilize their crops. The soil, the story goes, was so poor up along the Princeton ridge that the laborious trip was worth the trouble.

Like many a good fish story, this one's hard to confirm. That fabulous historical research tool, the Papers of Princeton, compiling digitized newspapers dating back to the early 1800s, offers no evidence that there ever was a Herringtown or Herringtown Road. The Herringtowns that pop up in word searches prove only to be someone's misspelling of Herrontown. Still, I found appealing an explanation told to me by John Powell, longtime farm manager for Jac Weller. Long after Weller departed from this world, John lived in a house at Herrontown Road and Snowden Lane, raising two head of cattle each year on his six acres. In an email to me, John told the story this way:

"The story I have on Herrontown Road is that it was where fish wholesalers lived, on small farms on land owned originally by the Gulick farm, a very large farm. When the road became part of Princeton, its name was dressed up so as to suggest the bird."

In other words, or in the case of this particular word, Herrontown is a hybrid, part fish, part fowl. The idea that fish wholesalers would congregate along the eastern ridge makes at least a little sense, it being downwind of the town and of little value for agriculture. And might there have been a time long ago when the herring migrated upstream to Princeton each spring, saving the farmers a trip to the shore? 

It was with these thoughts in mind that I arrived in Herrontown Woods to lead an ecology walk for the Princeton Adult School on April 4. I was waiting in the parking lot for the participants to arrive when I saw out of the corner of my eye a great blue heron flying up through the trees, heading away from where the red trail crosses the preserve's main stream. I had never before seen a great blue heron in Herrontown Woods, and in that brief instant thought I saw something large hanging from its beak. As it flew away, I strained for another view to confirm, but the dense canopy got in the way. 

Our walk followed an arc along the red and yellow trails, with talk of Herrontown ecology soon eclipsing any thought of that curious heron seen earlier. Then, crossing the main stream on the red trail to return to the parking lot, we heard a splash and saw something incongruously large slicing the surface of the water. There, visible beneath the reflections on the water's surface, were two large fish, about a foot long. Clearly, we weren't in minnowland anymore.

We oohed and ahhed, wondering what sort of fish they might be. I wanted them to be trout, or even better, herring, to make more conceivable the story that the word Herrontown had grown out of Herringtown, just as a real life heron would grow from eating herring. A new logo for Herrontown Woods rose to mind: a heron flying with a herring sticking out of its mouth, or perhaps a chimera--a mermaid with a fish's body and a heron's head. 

After finishing the walk, I headed back to explore further. That's when I took this video:

 

The two fish, alas, proved not to be trout, nor herring, but instead bore the far less appealing name of white sucker, named after their white belly and mouth angled down to eat from the stream bottom. Also called brook suckers, they are native to the eastern U.S. and midwest, living in lakes or streams, then swimming upstream to spawn in the spring. When they spawn, a female is often bounded on both sides by males whose semen mingles with the thousands of eggs released into the stream by the female. There's no nest, nor any followup care. The math of two males to one female would work in this case, if the great blue heron actually did carry off the other male, leaving just two fish. Herons have a remarkable ability to spot dinner in small bodies of water around Princeton. We twice lost our goldfish when a heron came to visit our backyard minipond. 

A friend, Fairfax Hutter, who grew up just a quarter mile downstream of Herrontown Woods, remembers the annual migration of foot-long fish upstream to spawn. Most memorable was when a boy in the neighborhood caught a pair of fish and tried to get them to spawn in a bathtub.

Despite the lowly name, the white sucker is native, and a powerful swimmer that has a salmon-like ability to overcome myriad physical obstructions to reach its spawning grounds. Its annual journey to Herrontown Woods connects us to the romance and ecological power of the great spring migrations of the past, when shad, menhaden, and river herring swam up the Millstone River to spawn. Did these other species reach up into small streams like Harry's Brook as well? 

Though the Carnegie Lake dam prevents any return of shad and other anadromous fish species to Princeton, there have been efforts to remove two smaller dams downstream on the Millstone to bring spring migrations further up the Millstone.  

Shadbush is a native shrub so named because it blooms early in spring when the shad are making their journey up our eastern rivers to spawn. It grows wild in Herrontown Woods, but for decades was kept from blooming by deep shade and hungry deer. Some years back, we transplanted a few of them to the Barden, where sunlight and protection has allowed them to bloom once again. 

Through land protection that began with the Veblens and Herrontown Woods, some stewardship, and the serendipity of a well-timed stream crossing on April 4, we now know that when the shadbush bloom, big fish will come a' courtin', and a great blue heron will come a' huntin', as they have for thousands of years.