Hutzell: Finding balance on Chesapeake menhaden, the most important fish in the bay

Most years, ospreys call every morning until mid-September above the creek at the end of my street.

When the hours of light and dark begin to equal out, they vanish — southbound for Mexico.

Not this year.

The autumnal equinox is at 8:05 tonight. The cree-cree, cree-ek of the osprey disappeared from Annapolis skies a month ago. I’m not the only one who noticed that something is out of balance.

“We expect the breeding population to decline an average of 14% per year,” my neighbor Gerald Winegrad said. “This can result, without changing course, in a 50% decline in the population in the next decade.”

Winegrad, a former state senator known as an uncompromising environmentalist, was talking — and talking — at a Sept. 15 meeting in Annapolis as federal regulators consider changes to a factor contributing to that decline.

It’s a little silver fish so small it fits comfortably in your hand.

Atlantic menhaden. Alewives. Pogies. Bunkers. Brevoortia tyrannus. The name depends on who you ask and where it’s swimming.

Ospreys love menhaden. They make up 75% of the raptors’ diet.

Ocean Harvesters and Omega Protein love them too. The affiliated Virginia companies land and process 75% of the menhaden caught off the East Coast. They use large walls of nets called purse seines, hauling in up to 51,000 metric tons a year from the Chesapeake.

It’s reduction harvesting, a sterile industrial term for grinding billions of fish at a Reedsville factory into tons of meal and oil every year. It feeds salmon farms and becomes nutritional supplements for people.

There’s evidence those totals don’t leave enough for the ospreys.

Bryan Watts, who’s been following ospreys for years at the Center for Conservation Biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, published research last week showing this was the worst summer on record for their reproduction.

Ospreys, according to his findings, can’t find enough of those little silver fish to feed their chicks.

The birds are starving.

“Clearly the menhaden harvest is telling us that not only osprey populations are suffering, but also rockfish and other fish that are partly or highly dependent on menhaden,” Winegrad said.

He was among 50 people who filled a few rows of seats at the Annapolis High School auditorium the day after Watts released his study for a public hearing on menhaden catch limits.

The Atlantic States Marine Fishery Commission is considering possible changes to the Chesapeake Bay limits, part of the 186,000-metric-ton catch for the whole East Coast.

Each state gets one vote on proposals for next year’s catch. Options include cutting up to 50%, setting lower early- or late-season limits to help reproduction, or leaving things as they are.

The hearing, run by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, gave the public a chance to weigh in on how the state’s delegation should vote when the commission meets in November.

Fifteen states and two federal agencies make up the regulatory group.

“It’s one state, one vote,” said Michael Luisi, DNR’s director of fishing and boating services.

The Annapolis crowd clearly wanted a total ban. That’s not an option.

Despite evidence that ospreys are starving, the Chesapeake Bay menhaden fishery isn’t considered overfished, effectively ruling out a ban.

Here’s the reason: Regulators know how many menhaden are caught every year, but no one knows how many of these little fish — a crucial part of the food web — are in the bay.

“We can see the change in landings, but again, they’ve been capped, so we don’t really have a good sense of the abundance,” said James Boyle IV, the fisheries commission coordinator for the hearing.

“We have no ability to say what’s the availability — or abundance — of menhaden in the bay.”

Without that, there’s no way to achieve balance. That finally may be changing.

After years of failed efforts in the Virginia General Assembly to fund a study of the population, Gov. Abigail Spanberger won approval in June for $2 million for annual surveys.

The Virginia Institute of Marine Science and the Virginia Marine Resources Commission will conduct the study, including the impact on ospreys, rockfish and other species dependent on menhaden. It should be completed by June.

“This funding shall be used for Atlantic menhaden research necessary to inform a scientifically defensible and ecologically meaningful Chesapeake Bay harvest cap,” the Democratic governor wrote in her proposal.

Even Ocean Harvesters, the fishing company sweeping up all those fish, sees the change that just took place in Richmond.

After the Chesapeake Bay Foundation accused Ocean Harvesters of behind-the-scenes intrigue to kill funding for the study, the company’s CEO denied it and supported Spanberger’s supplemental budget.

“We are also very grateful to the legislators who have worked to help ensure that jobs are protected and the study is based on sound scientific data,” Monty Deihl said.

None of this will likely influence the Atlantic Menhaden Fisheries Board, part of the commission that will meet in Rhode Island. It sticks to the process: proposing change or keeping the status quo, taking public comment and then making a decision.

Even when it’s clear things are out of balance.

“The board, in the 20 years I’ve been working with ASMFC and even beyond that, has very, very rarely done emergency action on anything,” Luisi said.

Daylight hours will get shorter now that we’re passing the equinox. The sun rises at 6:50 a.m. and sets at 7:01. We will lose 2 minutes and 30 seconds of daylight on Wednesday.

The Annapolis Boat Shows start in two weeks, another sure sign that one season is ending on the Chesapeake and another is about to begin.

Maybe the ospreys will come back strong and on time in the spring, arriving at my little creek in March, when the sun crosses the equator again.

The only way to ensure that is for scientists, bay-scouring companies and recreational fishermen, politicians, environmentalists and federal regulators to find the right balance.

Happy equinox.