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River Ramblings
Any evening from now until mid-October will find
anglers from the beginning of the Merrimack in Franklin to Garvins Falls
trying their luck on the Merrimack River, hoping the next cast will be
the one to prompt a decent fish tale. But not all those who plumb the
great river’s depths are pursuing the trout, salmon, bass, and other
fish that call the Merrimack home.
Some, it turns out, are seeking much smaller prey –
mayfly, stonefly, and caddisfly larvae – in an effort to determine the
health of the river and its inhabitants and help the communities that
share its banks decide how to manage to the resource. Volunteers with
the Upper Merrimack River Local Advisory Committee’s (UMRLAC) Upper
Merrimack Monitoring Program (UMMP) will be setting traps called “rock
baskets” from Franklin to Bow to catch the bugs that will tell the tale
of the river’s health.
Catching those bugs and other invertebrates such as
clams, snails, water mites, and crawfish and getting a sense of how many
of them are in the river is one of the surest ways to determine the
water’s ability to maintain life and it’s one of the tasks UMMP
volunteers happily tackle every year.
UMRLAC was created in 1990 by the New Hampshire
Legislature to provide the six communities – Franklin, Northfield,
Canterbury, Concord, Boscawen, and Bow – the Upper Merrimack flows
through assistance in developing policy regarding the river.
If a town wants to know the effects of development
on the river’s banks, UMRLAC’s Program can help answer those questions.
UMRLAC also keeps track of activities, such as planning and zoning
efforts in each town along the river, and lets the state know what’s
happening on the banks of the Merrimack, which for decades was an
industrial workhorse powering mills and feeding industry.
The river’s industrial days are long gone, though,
and it now features fantastic habitat for an array of wildlife while
also serving as a resource for boating, swimming, and fishing as well as
providing clean and plentiful water to the communities that line its
banks – a situation UMRLAC hopes will continue.
The Committee, currently at fourteen members,
manages the invertebrate collection effort and the subsequent bug
identification program that takes place during the cold, dark winter
months.
Over time, the collection and identification
efforts will give environmental scientists enough information to
understand the river’s health and the direction in which it’s heading
and will help policy makers decide how to both protect and use the
Merrimack. The rock baskets may mean that some fish have to search a
little harder for their next meal, but that may just mean better luck
for the angler on the bank.
This month’s River Ramblings was written by Dave
Kirkpatrick, representative of Bow to the Upper Merrimack River Local
Advisory Committee. Please visit
www.MerrimackRiver.org to learn more about the river and watershed,
view water quality data, access natural resource information and tools,
and to sign up to be notified about river events and news. For further
information, please call (603) 796-2615 or email UMRLAC@MerrimackRiver.org |
