 Welcome to a watershed moment, the community media program that celebrates the rivers and connected lands forming the natural circulatory system of our region. The health of these watersheds is intricately tied to that of the humans who live here and affect them. So we invite you to come along as we explore the natural landscape, observe the wildlife, and share the beauty minutes away from our homes and daily commutes. This series will introduce you to the organizations and to the passionate volunteers, organizers, recreationists, athletes, and scientists who work tirelessly to sustain and improve these watersheds. So we have today the executive director, Patrick Herron, of the Mystic River Watershed Association, and I'm Charlotte Pierce, I'm the producer of this series, and I would like to get a sense, you know, I know the watershed associations are key to the health of this ecological system, and we want to do what we can to support what you do. So why don't you tell us a little bit about the mission of the Mystic River Watershed Association and, you know, a bit of history, and we'll have a discussion about it, and then we'll bring your scientist in, Annie Racina, later. Great. Well, Charlotte, I just want to thank you and your team for shining a light on our watershed and neighboring watersheds. Our organization is a non-profit organization founded in 1972 to protect and restore the Mystic River, its tributaries, and all the land around it for both the present and as well as future generations, and to celebrate it, the value and the importance and the beauty of these resources. While we started as an all-volunteer organization just about the time that the Clean Water Act was passed, we're now a professional organization that has 11 staff and involves more than 1,500 volunteers a year out in the parks and on the river and doing science to improve these lands and this water so that we can all enjoy them, and we do our part to create a healthy community. And what are the cities that are in, the towns and cities that are involved in this? There are, great question, there are 21 communities, so it's a long list, but I'll give you a broad swath of them, we'll see if I miss some, but Wilmington, Wakefield, Burlington, Wuburn, Winchester, Lexington, Arlington, Belmont, Cambridge, Melrose, Medford, Maldon, Everett, Chelsea, East Boston as well as Charlestown, Winthrop, Revere, Somerville, Cambridge and Watertown. So I'm pretty close, I may have... That sounds like 21 to me, but so the Maldon River is part of the Mystic Watershed, I mean, how does this work together with the three, the Charles, the Mystic and the Maldon? I mean, are they all part of the same watershed or...? Well, great question. There are three major watersheds that drain to Boston Harbor and so I'll start with the Mystic as one of them, the Charles River Watershed is another watershed that drains to Boston Harbor and then the third is the Neponset River Watershed. The Maldon River is one of the tributaries to the Mystic River Watershed, maybe a great point to put in a graphic that shows both sort of the Boston area as well as the Mystic Proper. Yeah, I mean, I'll just say briefly that the Mystic River Watershed is a really unique place and it's a really exciting place for its characteristics. It's both a freshwater as well as saltwater watershed. It has communities that are really well resourced and communities that have a small amount of resources. It has communities that are among the most diverse in Massachusetts and we have areas that are spectacular natural resource areas like the Mystic Lakes, as well as some of the most urbanized and densely populated areas, whether they're in Somerville and Everett and Chelsea, some of the largest businesses in the Boston area, serving a role as the economic engine of Boston. And do you see that there is a greater awareness now of the need to preserve and sustain the habitats and wildlife and water quality? Do you think there's an increased, is there a dedication to it, or does this kind of come and go with the winds of whoever's in charge of the, you know? Oh, I mean, government. Such a great question, Charlotte, and you can come at it from so many different angles. Certainly, we just came out of a Trump administration and we're in the Biden administration. I won't surprise anybody that the policies that are being put forward now and funding toward the environment is different than it was in the past four years and focus on environmental justice, which is a critical work that needs to happen in our watershed. And we're also coming in a moment where we were all in our homes and staying away from each other, but also a moment where people were streaming out into these parks because they needed an escape. And so we saw so many people accessing the parks and the waters along the Mystic River. And probably what comes along with that is a greater recognition of these resources that were in their backyard. And we're in a moment where people, there's a greater appreciation for climate. The challenges that we face regionally as well as nationally and globally. And so I think people are looking at these same natural resources and thinking about how we can enhance them to create a more resilient watershed and set of communities. And then finally, there's a new lens in all of this work as we're all thinking about equity in a different way. And I'm trying to broaden the set of communities that are involved in watershed associations and welcomed into the community that is accessing these resources. And that's where our organization is really. And so that building that resiliency in the watershed and engaging the communities that are involved in sustaining that. When we think about resilience of the watershed, it's not just about fish and property. It's really about people. And so we also recognize that the Mystic River Watershed Association doesn't own any land. So the work that we do really is in collaboration. And we have formed a very strong collaboration with our municipalities and formed that group called the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. And these municipalities have taken this opportunity to lead. And we're there as staff to help catalyze and help bring to action some of the ideas that the municipalities are coming up with. But in general, we're working on regional projects that will protect our communities from greater precipitation in the future, from sea level rise and storm surges, as well as what's expected to be a much hotter climate in the future. And so these communities will plan together. They're doing some modeling together, designing structures and green infrastructure together. And we're doing science together, whether it's mapping heat or mapping where waters are flooding. So it's a really exciting project and that's the Resilient Mystic Collaborative. And it goes hand in hand with another initiative, our Mystic Greenways Project, which is really trying to augment the park system along the edge of the river. So it really becomes a resource and both for travel and recreation, as well as for storing water as these as this future comes upon us. So your staffing and your volunteer programs all are feeding into that effort, as well, I assume. Yeah, that's right. There are a lot of ways that people can get involved in our work. And one of the most prominent roles that volunteers play is actually doing some of the science that underpins the investments and decisions that we make, both as an organization. But for data that we share with the municipalities. And so our volunteers are collecting water quality data. We're currently recruiting people to collect data on temperature. And people help us count fish, of course. Yeah, love counting fish. Can I ask you just about the inclusionary initiatives you might be promoting to bring people who normally wouldn't be walking along the greenway? Or do you have youth programs? Do you facilitate those kinds of things as well? Well, I think one of the most powerful ways that we interact with communities is around these volunteer events and these science work that we do as volunteers. But we're also in the school system across the whole watershed in each of our communities. My colleague, Marion Miller, who's our educator, does extraordinary work meeting with students and talking about these issues, whether they're climate change, water quality, stormwater or litter. And so that's one of the most powerful ways for us to interact with the next generation. We're not preaching to the choir because it's really the general population in the classrooms. So we're having access to families and sharing information that I think is really useful. Very cool. I love that. Yeah, I noticed when I was walking my dog this last year along the lower Mystic Lakes, there were all these families that had come down from Medford, you know, and they were having, you know, just their kids slashing around in the water and stuff. And, you know, they were and they were very good about I mean, as time goes on, they got better at sort of taking the trash out. And, you know, they were very receptive to no suggestions about that, too. Well, the great thing is that a water quality in the Mystic Lakes and the Mystic River really is excellent, particularly we encourage people to recreate during dry weather or when it hasn't rained for a few days. But during that warm months when it's been sunny, you know, the Mystic Lakes really can't be beat for the view, for the nature. If you don't see river herring, you see bald eagles overhead. So it really is wonderful. It's great. Well, let me ask you now. The herring is like the icon of the Mystic Lakes. I wanted to bring in maybe bring in Andy Hussina. Andy, you're the scientist for the Mystic River Watershed Association. Is am I correct about that? That is my title. I've learned from the best Patrick Herring is is a PhD plant ecologist. So I'm not certainly not the only scientist on staff. But yes, got it. So there's the herring, the natural phenomenon of this migratory run that is is, you know, created the notoriety around the herring. But then you also have a fundraising event, the Mystic River Herring Run and Paddle. But we wanted to kind of first just briefly talk about what the herring run is and how long has it been going on? And the would have been the challenges and hindrances to it over the years. Oh, sure. And I never tire of telling this story. And this is we often. Say that there's an amazing. Wild life migration on the scale of 750,000 individual animals that migrate through from the ocean to the through the heart of Boston under the Tobin Bridge and up to to the Mystic Lakes, up the Mystic River past Somerville and Arlington and Medford. And but it's hidden because they're they're fish and they're underwater. And normally people can't see and witness and sort of appreciate the scale of this major migration. So. So yeah. So there are two. These are so-called river herring. They're two species. There's blueback herring and alewife. And alewife, not coincidentally, is the name of the tea station and the brook and the reservation in Cambridge and Arlington. And it speaks to the. I for many, most of my life didn't know what alewife referred to. Turns out to refer to this migratory fish that comes back every spring to to this system. And it speaks to the sort of extraordinary abundance in the past of this fish. It used to be less super abundant fish. You know, the stories, those, you know, it's one of those fish that gets the stories told that you could walk over the backs of the herring to cross the stream because they're so they were so. I didn't realize that the hair. The alewife were were technically a herring. Yeah. Yeah. And so it's these two closely related species. They're also related to Shad, which is another migratory species. And in any case, they they live in the ocean most of the time, most of their lives and most of the year. But their adults of reproductive age come back to spawn in fresh water. And this turns out to be this this ability to move from salt water to fresh water or vice versa. And the migratory behavior associated with it. So they're migrating just the way bird migrations happen, you know, that you think of birds coming to the northern forest to nest and then returning to Central America. These are fish who live in the ocean and come to fresh water to spawn. That behavior is very rare among fish species. There's, you know, I think 60,000 fish species and fewer than 1 percent show this ability to admit this behavior of moving back between fresh water and salt water. But in any case, they come and amazingly and with a lot of fidelity, they come back to the river they were born in. They can detect the unique chemical signal. Right. That's just so touching, you know, it's it's amazing. Yeah, and it's both touching and just like awe inspiring. It is. I thought that about salmon and steelhead. You know, I grew up on the West Coast and I just like, how do they even know, like, the little sense that they have? But yeah. And so, you know, the big story in the mist is one of. So again, through this monized watershed in New England, we like to say these fish come back and there is a story that's played out over over the past. Several years since 2012 of ecological restoration. So you were mentioning earlier that you in 2008 were helping carry river herring physically over the dam at upper mystically in 2012. That turns out to be a wonderful but inefficient way to move hundreds of thousands of fish. The efficient way to do it is to install a so-called fish ladder and it's a bit hard to describe without pictures, but it's a passage through the dam that allows fish to kind of swim upstream and get from one lake to the other. And in 2012, that a new one was installed at Mystic Lakes. And in that same year, we collaborated, started collaborating with the Division of Marine Fisheries in Massachusetts to count, literally count, the fish that are getting from one lake to the other. And we don't count, and I should say by we, I mean volunteers who apply in droves to be monitors for us, go once an hour essentially from April to June, once an hour and count for 10 minutes. That is each person goes for one 10 minutes lot a week. And we have- So they get a sampling then. They get a sampling. And then from that, we estimate the total. Cool. So in that first year, it was estimated that 200,000 fish crossed that fish ladder. So there were at least 200,000 fish returning to the Mystic every year. But then we watched this play out over time and the amazing thing is that since that, since 2012, the population of fish loyal to the Mystic River has more than tripled. And now the number is 750,000 fish at its height, up passing through from one lake to the other. And this is the explanation for that is that, so remember that the fish returned to the river they were born in. So the fish loyal to the Mystic River would return every year to the Mystic River, but they were constrained in their breeding habitat. They could only breed in a certain limited area in the river and then in lower Mystic Lake by opening up Upper Mystic Lake, which is prime river herring habitat for spawning. It allowed this group of fish, this population of fish to expand its population. And by the time those juveniles, first juveniles that were born in that first year when they could spread out in this kind of pristine environment in Upper Mystic Lake, when they returned at age three and four, we saw this big doubling, this big jump in the population. And all the pieces fit together, the fishery scientists are confident this is what happened. And so that was helpful. Yes, please. I just had a question. Can the ecosystems to sustain that level of increase? Well, that's a really interesting kind of lens to look at it through. So a couple of things come to mind. So the juveniles eat, so the eggs hatch and the larvae come out and they turn into juvenile fish and they eat zooplankton, very small crustaceans and things that are floating in the water column. And Mystic Lakes is prime zooplankton habitat. And there's actually a research team at University of Massachusetts that we've collaborated with as well, but they're studying juvenile habitat throughout New England and including in the lake. And they find that there's evidence that in a very crowded lake as Mystic Lakes becomes because of this huge number of fish that are coming into it. They exhaust their preferred prey items and shift sometime in the season to less preferred prey. And there's even evidence that in a very crowded lake, like Mystic Lake, because again, just the number of fish that were allowing to pass into it. In these crowded systems, the fish grow more slowly than they do in other systems where there's less competition for food. So that's one. Oh, that's, they're smart. Yeah, no, no, no, absolutely. The other, one really interesting question someone asked is, so the next big target for restoration is to get these fish to horn pond in Wuburn. That's the next big lake upstream. And we see them pooling. They want to get in there. And there's right now very ineffective fish passage. So millions of dollars are coming over the next few years from federal sources thanks to settlements from pollution events in the Abra Jonah Subwatershed from settlement money from an oil spill in the Mystic, money coming to build a fish ladder to horn pond. And it will be exciting. It will be exciting. And sport fishermen on the horn pond asked the question, wait, do we really want, you know, hundreds of thousands of new fish into our lake where we're after, you know, the stock trout and smallmouth bass and other sport fish. And it turns out that there's evidence again from this UMass group that if you reintroduce herring to a lake that they formerly occupied but haven't been in recently because of a dam, the abundance and fit condition of the sport fish actually increases. It doesn't decrease because there are now millions of baby herring for those sport fish to eat. So the, and so I think the short answer to your question is this will help improve the productivity and diversity of the ecosystem rather than be a drain on it. Oh, it's going to be exciting to watch. I'm just so thrilled. I think I'm going to go volunteer for the counting. I can, if I'm not behind the curve, but I just want to bring out Patrick back in and because the herring have created this wonderful event that I have actually participated in. And we did also a trash pickup, I think related to it. Is there a trash? Yeah, and so tell me a little bit about how that piggybacked on the natural run of the herring and just how that event came to be, how long has it been going on and how important it is, is it to your funding for your association? Yeah, we have been running a mystic herring run in paddle event for more than 20 years. It launches from the blessing of the Bay in May each year. But it runs each year. It includes both a running race that's a 5K as well as a variety of paddle length distances up the mystic river. And it attracts hundreds of people who come to both enjoy the competition but also just enjoy connecting with this community. It does raise critical funding for our organization. It's unrestricted funding, which allows us to be creative in the future and develop new programs. But I think the greatest power of the event is really bringing our community together along the edge of the river. There are so many friends and people who share an interest in the river who are able to come together on what's usually a beautiful day and see each other. And more than ever, I think we're trying to find these moments. So this year is a virtual. Everybody has to go out and do it on their own. But we're really excited for next year when we'll have the crowds back and that we'll be able to do it. Because I'm a rower, can I do a row, virtual row? I think it's appropriate for us to break as many rules as we can. So, you know, Charlotte, you should get out there and do it right. I don't know if you would know my friend, Rich Whalen at the blessing of the bay, gentle giant. I just, you know, he's really totally involved in it, Yeah, Rich is great, you know, he brings a lens to involving people in the river and getting people to row who wouldn't otherwise think it's their sport. So he's a champion for both clean and available to everyone to row. A lot of Canada geese and swans along the river, but you also see a remarkable diversity of birds in the parks along the edges of the river. I see the night herons when I row and they're kind of like a little bit above the river and then the blue herons are kind of down on the river and they must be nesting now, right? I'll defer to Andy, our bird expert. I think that's right. The news that I learned recently is that there are by all reports, two chicks of bald eagle pair that have nested in Arlington. That's like really exciting news for the birders among us in the Mystic Watershed. I wanted to ask you, in particular, Patrick, about your, since these are all connected ecosystems, you know, I know you have separate watershed or we have in this region, separate watershed associations but what organizations and, you know, how do you share information and interact with them? Well, we are really lucky to have a remarkable set of organizations throughout Massachusetts working on improving water quality and improving access in different watersheds. So locally, we frequently are interacting with watershed groups like Charles River Watershed Association and the Ponset River Watershed Association or the Ipswich River Watershed, the Merrimack River. They each have great organizations and the challenges that each of us face are nearly identical. We all are challenged by stormwater and by climate change and how to get people excited about the river. And so yes, we team up and work on policy together but we also learn from each other that sometimes another organization ends up developing an amazing way to interact with their community or to draw new people into the work that we can learn from. So both at the level of leadership but also at the level of our practitioners, our scientists, our program managers, there's frequently dialogue going on to learn from each other. Okay, well, thank you so much for this tour of the Mystic River Watershed Association and the watershed itself and Patrick Herron, Executive Director, thank you so much and Andy Rossina, I thank you guys. You're just so important to the health of this region and thank you for being here. Well, to be continued, there's a lot more to cover. Anything you'd like to say in closing? Just thank you so much, Charlotte, for providing this platform and for those who are watching this video, please come down to the Mystic, enjoy a walk, enjoy a paddle and we'll look forward to seeing you. Andy? Thank you so much. All right, thanks for coming. See you again soon.