TheDay.com - Ladder Allows Herring To Follow Their Noses: "Waterford — To certain river herring, there's no place that has quite the olfactory allure of the freshwater portions of Jordan Brook.
But the magnetic attraction of that particular piece of water for those particular fish, stirred every spring by memories of smells imprinted at birth, had been confounded for 300 years. That's when the brook was dammed for a grist mill just at the place where the brackish tidal waters of Jordan Cove meet the fresh waters of the brook.
The adult herring would swim in from Long Island Sound to the cove, seeking the freshwater place where they were born and could start the next generation, only to meet the impenetrable obstacle of the dam. Some would still spawn just below the dam, but if the eggs drifted too close to the nearby brackish water, they would die. Spring herring runs that once numbered in the thousands had dwindled to just dozens of fish.
“Hundreds of years ago, people put up dams all across this watershed,” said Curt Johnson, project director of Save the Sound, during an event celebrating the opening of a fish ladder on the brook. “The problem is, the fish would come up here and say, 'Damn! (sic) I can't get through.' They were blocked from the places they had traditionally come.”"
