By Michael Hunter Adamson

“Follow the birds,” says Ryan Bartling of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “If you want to find the herring spawns, they’ll do it for you.” At the conclusion of the 2017-18 Pacific herring run, Bartling is confident that data collected from spawns across the San Francisco Bay will show herring numbers consistent with the year before, if not slightly increased. While the fishery may no longer be an economic powerhouse, the herring continue to return for those who seek them.

 

Read More

Hopeful Outlook for Pacific Herring

By Michael Hunter Adamson

“Follow the birds,” says Ryan Bartling of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “If you want to find the herring spawns, they’ll do it for you.” At the conclusion of the 2017-18 Pacific herring run, Bartling is confident that data collected from spawns across the San Francisco Bay will show herring numbers consistent with the year before, if not slightly increased. While the fishery may no longer be an economic powerhouse, the herring continue to return for those who seek them.

 

Read More

Related Content

About the author

Michael Hunter Adamson was born and partly raised in the Bay Area and spent his childhood balancing adventure with mischief. As an equally irresponsible adult he has worked for The Nature Conservancy, the arts and education nonprofit NaNoWriMo, taught English in Madrid-based High School equivalent, and volunteers with The Marine Mammal Center. As a writer for Estuary and the editor of the Bay Area Monitor, Michael employs his love for nature and his interest in people to help tell the unfolding story of the living Earth.

Related Posts

American Avocet on managed, former salt ponds in the South Bay. Photo: Roopak Bhatt, USGS

One-of-a-Kind Stories

Our magazine’s media motto for many years has been “Where there’s an estuary, there’s a crowd.” The San Francisco Estuary is a place where people, wildlife, and commerce congregate, and where watersheds, rivers and the ocean meet and mix, creating a place of unusual diversity. In choosing to tell the...
dam spillway oroville

Supplying Water

Ever since the state and federal water projects were built in the 1930s and 1940s, California has captured snowmelt in foothill reservoirs, and moved the fresh water from dam releases and river outflows to parched parts of the state via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A convoluted system of ancient...

Tackling Pollution

Though the Clean Water Act did an amazing job of reducing wastewater and stormwater pollution of the San Francisco Estuary, some contaminants remain thorny problems.  Legacy pollutants like mercury washed into the watershed from upstream gold mining, PCBs from old industrial sites, and selenium from agricultural drainage in the San...