Volunteers clean up Weymouth Herring Run 4-7-18
Volunteers clean up Weymouth Herring Run
By Audrey Cooney
The Patriot Ledger
Posted Apr 7, 2018 at 1:10 PM
Updated Apr 8, 2018 at 9:59 AM
Around 50 people gathered to help clean up the Weymouth Herring Run on Saturday.
Volunteers sipped donated coffee and hot chocolate during the chilly, damp morning before pulling on work gloves, grabbing trash bags and tools and heading off to pick up trash and debris, reinforce fences and clear fallen branches from the herring run and the wooded areas surrounding it.
Daniel McDonald, a member of Boy Scouts Troop 22, said the troop usually helps out with the annual event and had almost ten members there that morning.
"Last year was really rainy," he said. "But it's for the herring, so it's worth it."
Members of Hingham's cub scout pack 41 were also there, as were volunteers from the New England Aquarium.
William Gifford, a Weymouth native who now lives in Detroit, joked that he came back to visit Weymouth partly to see his mother and partly to see the herring breed.
"I've always been fascinated by the herring," he said.
The Weymouth Herring Run is one of the largest in Massachusetts. Each spring, usually around April 22, herring swim upriver through the run to Weymouth's Whitman's Pond to breed. Trash and debris in the Herring Run can make it harder for them to do that, explained Weymouth Herring Warden George Loring.
And if herring fail to breed, he said, a negative impact could ripple through the surrounding ecosystem. Loring explained that herring are an important food source for animals like sharks, tuna, whales and porpoises. And, he said, freshly hatched herring eat microscopic plankton near where they hatch, "cleaning" the pond.
Loring said he's hosted the event for 31 consecutive years.
"At first it was just me," he said. Decades later, he sometimes organizes clean-up events that draw 125 people.
Volunteers were kept busy. They used rakes to pull trash out of the water, used saws and clippers to trim and carry away fallen branches and used zip ties to secure parts of the fence around the Herring Run.
Still, Loring said there's not as much trash in the herring run as volunteers would find in years past. Previously, volunteers have pulled large items like tires, car batteries and mattresses from the water, he said.
"People are more in tune with nature now," he said.
Gretchen Elmerdorf, the pastor of the nearby East Weymouth Congregational Church, was there helping rake away dead leaves and grass.
"Our church school prays for the herring. We pray for all creatures great and small," she said.
Elmerdorf and Loring agreed that, in addition to keeping the herring run clean, they'd like to revive Weymouth's Herring Run Festival, which used to be an annual celebration that involved serving freshly caught herring right next to the herring run.
"We want to conserve our land and our waterways and show our pride in the nature that's here," said Elmerdorf.
