This is the critical season of a river, when it is fullest of life.

April 11. 

Saturday. 8 P. M. —Went to the Head of the River to see them catch smelts. 

The water there is fresh when the tide is out. They use nets five or six feet square, stretched from the ends of crossed semicircular hoops, at the ends of poles about twelve feet long. The net bags down when raised. 

There were twenty or thirty fishermen standing close together, half on each side of the narrow river, each managing one of these nets, while a good part of the village appeared to be collected on the bridge. The tide was then coming in, but the best time is when it is going out. 

A fisherman told me that the smelt run up in the night only. These fishers stood just below a two-arched bridge. The tide was coming up between the arches, while the fresh water which the smelt preferred was running down next the shore on each side. The smelt were ascending in these streams of fresh water on each side. 

The shore for half a dozen rods on each side was lined with fishers, each wielding a single net. This man told me that the smelt had been running up about one month and were now about done. The herring had been seen for a fortnight. They will run this month and all the next. The former leave off when the latter begin. Shad have not been caught yet. They come after herring. Eels, too, are occasionally caught now, going up from the deeper river below. These fishes spawn in the little pond just above the bridge. 

They let the net rest on the bottom and every two ,or three minutes lift it up. They get thirty or many more smelt sometimes at one lift and catch other fish in the same way, even bass, sea perch, pickerel, eels, and sometimes a trout. The shad make a ripple like a harrow, and you know when to raise the net. 

The villagers were talking across the stream, calling each other by their Christian names. Even mothers mingled with the fishermen, looking for their children. 

It suggested how much we had lost out of Concord River without realizing it. This is the critical season of a river, when it is fullest of life, its flowering season, the wavelets or ripples on its surface answering to the scales of the fishes beneath. 

If salmon, shad, and alewives were pressing up our river now, as formerly they were, a good part of the villagers would thus, no doubt, be drawn to the brink at this season. Many inhabitants of the neighborhood of the ponds in Lakeville, Freetown, Fairhaven, etc., have petitioned the legislature for permission to connect Little Quitticus Pond with the Acushnet River by digging, so that the herring can come up into it. 

The very fishes in countless schools are driven out of a river by the improvements of the civilized man, as the pigeon and other fowls out of the air. I can hardly imagine a greater change than this produced by the influence of man in nature. 

Our Concord River is a dead stream in more senses than we had supposed. In what sense now does the spring ever come to the river, when the sun is not reflected from the scales of a single salmon, shad, or alewife? No doubt there is some compensation for this loss, but I do not at this moment see clearly what it is. 

That river which the aboriginal and indigenous fishes have not deserted is a more primitive and interesting river to me. It is as if some vital quality were to be lost out of a man’s blood and it were to circulate more lifelessly through his veins. We are reduced to a few migrating (?) suckers, perchance.

I saw the herring on sticks at the doors of many shops in New Bedford.

I saw the myrtle-bird here about a week ago.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, April 11, 1857

The very fishes in countless schools are driven out of a river by the improvements of the civilized man, as the pigeon and other fowls out of the air. See March 23, 1856 ("All the great trees and beasts, fishes and fowl are gone.")

The sun is not reflected from the scales of a single salmon, shad, or alewife ... See April 15, 1856 ("First salmon and shad at Haverhill to-day.");April 13, 1853 ("First shad caught at Haverhill to-day.")