by John McPhee
Kynard, as attentive to sturgeons as he is to shad, likes to point out that sturgeons are Cretaceous. That is, the species has existed in the world a hundred million years. This causes him to yawn in the direction of the crossopterygian Coelacanthidae, so-called living fossils (also dating from the Cretaceous) that have turned up rarely in modern seas, inconveniencing Webster’s Second International, which describes them as “extinct.” Kynard says, “Biologists hunt the world for a coelacanth, and sturgeons are right here. When dinosaurs were walking around in shallow water, they were stepping on sturgeons.”
Sturgeons run up to spawn in most American coastal rivers. In Nova Scotia, I have seen them—seven feet long—trapped in shad weirs in the Minas Basin. They inhabit tubs in the Conte lab. The experiments of Erika Henyey, one of Kynard’s grad students, are meant to show how they orient to bottom structures in rivers—shortnose sturgeons, Atlantic sturgeons, highly endangered pallid sturgeons. The fish anatomist Willy Bemis, of the University of Massachusetts, has said of Kynard and his graduate students, “He doesn’t hang around if they’re not good. He’s stiff. As a result, it’s a distinction to have been trained by him. Moreover, he is the very best field biologist I’ve ever known. You can go anywhere with Boyd. He’ll teach you to observe things you would never have seen by yourself and that other people either aren’t able or willing to teach you. The animal sign. The little scrape in a stream. He’s a real honest-to-God naturalist. He might not tell you where to fish with a fishing rod, but he’ll tell you what you need to know to get started. When you’re out there stomping around with him, it’s like being out there when you’re fourteen.”
When Boyd Kynard was fourteen, he fished with a cane pole, “a little short six- or seven-foot cane pole,” he says, “which I would go out and cut in the swamps—cut my own cane poles, cure my own cane poles.” Sometimes, he cut big ones: “Thirteen, fourteen feet; drying them was a long process, seeing what kind of action they had.”
“No reel?”
“No reel. I just pulled fish straight up and out. There was native cane in canebrakes all over the swamps. You pick exactly the kind of pole you want, put eyes on it, and wade out into the oxbows and lower a minnow from the pole.”
Kynard does not talk Massachusetts. A shad is not a piece of broken crockery. A bod to him does not suggest a poet. In his adult life, though, he has lived in the Pacific Northwest, in the desert Southwest, and in enough other places so that his phrases emerge in a phonic palimpsest. It takes a while to hear your way through them and into Mississippi.
With a few feet of fixed line on those homemade poles, he was fishing in the meandering rivers of the central part of the state. He fished the Strong, the Yazoo, and, most often, the Pearl. He trapped. He kept snakes in his back yard. The Pearl was two miles from his home, in north Jackson. He would go there on his bicycle. Alone, or with others, he camped there. He was on the river twelve months a year. “It’s a serious river. It was the nearest wilderness. The rest of it was farms. Crude farms. Once you got to the Pearl, that was it, there was nobody lived there, it wasn’t anything but snakes and alligators and fish and water and trees and swamp.” He caught bass, crappies, catfish. There were sturgeons in the Pearl. Paddlefish. Gar. He was fifteen when he hooked his first bowfin.
“Bowfin?”
“Think of a coelacanth. A primitive, voracious fish. Twenty-five to thirty pounds. You’ll hook a lot more than you’ll ever land. The inside of their mouth is solid bone, with not much to hook onto. Lower a minnow in the oxbows, and my God Almighty you’re like five feet away from these fish. You’d be in there with these monster fish, and when they’d grab ahold you weren’t sure who had ahold of who.” From a canoe, he was lowering a minnow when he attracted that first bowfin. “He weighed at least thirty. I got him up near the surface, and he was running at the boat—right underneath the surface, running right for the boat. All I could do was hold the pole up. His head was like seven inches thick. You’re in a canoe and a fish is charging and you wouldn’t normally be afraid. But that guy was so big and so aggressive. He bent the rod right under and broke the line. That made me a bowfin fisherman.”
“When did it dawn on you that you were never going to leave this field?”
“Quite early. When we moved to Jackson—from Bruce, Mississippi, a small lumber town—I saw my first tropical-fish store. This was 1950. I was twelve. In north Jackson, there were very few stores, but a guy opened a tropical-fish store. We hadn’t been there three weeks when he came. The place stood alone—this small, old building, no others around it. I had never known of anybody who had fish in captivity or used fish for anything other than to eat. You know, catch and eat—that’s what you did with fish. And here was this little tiny store, like six feet wide and ten feet long. I walked in, and there’s these little beautiful fish. I remember thinking, You can buy fish in a store! You gotta be kidding me. You know what I did that summer? I mastered the techniques of not only housing and caring for them but breeding them. I would go down to the pickle factory and get five-gallon pickle jars. I learned to put a kerosenesoaked string around a pickle jar. You light it, and it expands the glass under the string. You just take the top right off. I must have made fifteen or twenty aquariums, and I used them for breeding different pairs. See, I’m so cheap I would buy two fish at the tropical-fish store, and in two months I’d have forty. I was selling them to other kids. I knew a good thing when I saw it.”
He bred zebra danios. (“They were my egg-layers.”) He bred swordtails, mollies, guppies. He sold them for ten cents apiece, undercutting the tropical-fish man by fifty per cent. This went on for three years. “Ask guys who work with fish for a living if they raised fish when they were young. You can’t just look at one and say, ‘There’s a fish.’ You really have to want to get under those fishes’ skins. You really have to understand how to make a situation that fish want to breed in. This implies a great deal of understanding, even for zebra danios. I knew when I was in the eighth grade that I wanted to be a biologist.”
“Did you eat the fish you caught?”
“Of course. The bowfins were real cottony and had a lot of bones in them. You had to marinate those guys.”
Catfish were a whole different thing.
“We would camp out on a beach. There were lots of beautiful sand beaches on the river. You always set out catfish trotlines. Trotlines and Southerners are almost inseparable. We’d put chicken livers and gizzards on there, for channel catfish—oh, goodness! We had the fire going. When we’d catch ‘em, we’d skin ’em down, fillet ’em, throw ’em right there on the fire—I mean the fish was not even fifteen minutes out of the water, and if you’ve eaten fish like that it’s a whole different thing. We’d just do that all night.”
When he was seventeen, he became a Y-camp counsellor, on the swiftly flowing Strong River, where he taught canoeing, camping, tree identification, and survival skills, and led overnight canoe trips twenty miles down the Strong to its junction with the Pearl, and fifteen more down the slower, wider Pearl. There “your attention switched to catfish.” Five miles below the junction was an immense limestone outcrop (“with layers of quartzite, white and crystalline”) that knocked the river right back where it came from—bent it around like the head of a paper clip. At the curve, opposite the outcrop, was the steepest sandbar he would ever see—“as vertical a sandbar as you can pile up sand.” The water in the curve was “probably forty or fifty feet deep.” Kynard and the others were in fifteen-foot Grumman canoes—a hundred per cent aluminum from their molded seats and machined thwarts to their flotation chambers. Traversing the deep curve, Kynard and the others heard an unearthly, weird sound. The air was still, the current silent, but out of somewhere—what else but the river?—came deep down-register tones, halfway across the scale between bull and bullfrog. They camped on top of the outcrop. Kynard took a Grumman, went out, and heard the sound again. He decided that it was coming through the water, and that it was being picked up and amp
lified by the flotation chambers—in effect, sealed drums—in the bow and stern of the canoe. After he had crossed the deep curve, the sound was gone. He turned around, went back, and heard it again. He gave some thought to bowfin, but more to catfish. “I know catfish make sounds. They have a bone that they rub against their air bladder. You can take a channel catfish out of water, and he’ll sit there making sounds. I, of course, had brought my trotlines. I baited them with chicken parts, and caught two of the biggest catfish I’d ever seen. That must have been some concentration of fish.” For years, in Grumman canoes, he listened in other places. Nowhere but in that one place has he ever heard the catfish chorus.
After three years in the Marine Corps, Kynard majored in English at Millsaps College, Jackson, and double-majored in biology. A moment was fast arriving when, as a biologist, he would have to decide between fish and mammals. It was not a long moment. “Fish lend themselves to getting up close and personal,” he says. “I want to be able to understand as closely as I can what’s going on with these guys. Fish—because of their limited sensory ability and limited ability to get away from you—would lend themselves to an up-close-and-personal approach more than, say, a beaver would.”
His choice was reinforced by eighteen postgraduate months at the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, in Ocean Springs, Mississippi. During this period, he married Janice Ray, whom he had met at Millsaps. (Their daughter, Kari, is a journalist. Their son, Brian, is a field technician at the Conte lab.) After Ocean Springs, Kynard went into a master’s program at Mississippi State, where he worked on the behavior of mosquito fish and their physiological resistance to DDT. Somewhere along the line, he came upon a book called “Behavioral Aspects of Ecology,” by Peter Klopfer, found himself reading the whole of it in one night, and decided that behavior was going to be his field. “I was ready to be imprinted.”
Imprinted and advised. His “major professor,” a herpetologist who happened to come from Oregon, said to him, “Boyd, you’re interested in evolution, and individuals, and behavior. You’re not going to be able to find that in the South. I think you’ve got to get out.”
Kynard studied journals to see who was doing what on the behavioral ecology of fish. The field seemed to be concentrated in Honolulu, Miami, and Seattle. The School of Fisheries at the University of Washington was the largest and oldest in the United States. Kynard spent five and a half years there, completing a doctoral dissertation on the behavioral ecology of the threespine stickleback. He did his field work in a kayak on a glacial lake in the foothills of the eastern Cascades. He had a microscope, preserving jars, and other lab equipment in the kayak. He had covered the deck with a small platform he could lie on. After observing a fish long enough to note any idiosyncrasies, he would “collect him and collect his nest.”
Within six years, he was a tenured professor at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, where he created the undergraduate fisheries program and developed a strong ambition to establish a desert-fish institute. Arizona was not interested. In 1978, ignoring his tenure, he joined the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and was assigned to a unit in Massachusetts attached to the state university. He had never seen a shad. He was there to work in marine fisheries, but after he saw a shad he transferred into migratory fish. His work on shad and sturgeon has ranged, for the most part, between northern Connecticut and southern Vermont, but has led him in related ways to China, Brazil, Romania, Puerto Rico, and most shad rivers on the two sides of North America. In interior Puerto Rico, where flash floods—“flashy beyond belief”—can turn a stream into frothing “liquid mud,” various fish have developed an ability to go back and forth from fresh to salt as often and as rapidly as they need to. In Pennsylvania and Maryland, Kynard helped the shad specialist Richard St. Pierre work out the restoration program that has to make its way through four huge dams in the Susquehanna River. As a representative of the United States government, he has worked with “high-level conservation officials” in China to illuminate the life histories of migrating Chinese fish. His research in Brazil has been similar. Willy Bemis has said, “When most people are confronted with new environments, their eyes glaze over. It’s all too much for a while. My impression is that Boyd goes into a new environment and begins making original observations immediately.”
Kynard is the only American in the Danube Delta Research Institute. When I went shad fishing with him in South Hadley in May, 1999, he was still feeling traces of jet lag after flying home from Romania. Carrying 55—75-kilohertz hydrophones, he had spent three weeks tracking sturgeon up the Danube, with Dr. Radu Suciu and a three-man Romanian support team. Kynard was the river pilot. It was his boat. He had bought it in Arkansas and shipped it to Romania in a forty-five-foot box. The Romanians named it Sam, because it came from America. It had a seventy-five-horsepower outboard motor. Telling me some of this as he stood in the Connecticut that morning casting darts for shad, he said, “All my trips come back with some kinds of stories; they just don’t include a war.”
Above river kilometre 130 is a zone of intense commercial fishing on the Danube, a drift gill-net fishery, where Kynard and company picked up—mainly from Gypsy fishermen—forty-four sturgeons on the spawning run. They were stellate sturgeons, averaging four and a half feet in length and fifteen to thirty pounds. In addition to fitting them with ultrasonic telemetry tags, it was highly advisable to get them out of the heaviest commercial gill-netting zone before releasing them back into the river. On Sam, which was six feet wide and twenty feet long, they could carry only six of the big fish at a time. They made a canvas sling, pinched it off at the two ends like a brioche, rigged it to a twelve-volt pump that kept water in it, slung it from gunwale to gunwale, and carried six sturgeons upstream to river kilometre 178. They turned around and went back for more. When it was time for lunch, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. The Danube there is the border between Romania and Ukraine. They made the seven round trips in two days. When it was time for dinner, they ate green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam. A hundred miles up the Danube from the Black Sea, all forty-four wired sturgeons went back into the river and most took off upstream. Kynard and the Romanians had no idea where stellates spawn in the Danube. Their purpose was to find out.
Going up the river, they stopped at one-kilometre intervals and put the hydrophones over the side. The hydrophones, with their long arms, were like boom mikes on a movie stage. There was no sound from the sturgeons. Kynard heard only the soft rustle of sediment moving in the river. A 0-1,000-hertz hydrophone is so sensitive that it can hear sand grains in motion, even in very quietly moving water, as Kynard would demonstrate to Willy Bemis, me, and others one day in Willy’s boat in the Holyoke Pool. A relaxing and soothing sound, not unlike the recorded surf played above the cribs of infants, it was audible geomorphology—you were listening to mountains on their way to the sea. The sound is the signature of rivers, Kynard said. The Danube’s differs from the Yangtze’s, the Yangtze’s from the Connecticut’s. He had never heard the Yukon River. With its great load of glacial Hour—jagged particles of fresh-ground rock—the Yukon would sound like a chain saw.
At the Danube River’s kilometre 250, he had not caught up with the sturgeons. Before long, the Danube, having crossed eastern Romania, became the boundary between Romania and Bulgaria. At river kilometre 500, he had still not heard the sturgeons, nor at 600. The Danube is a braided river, full of islands, and Sam the fishing boat tracked all channels and both sides of islands as well as the left and right banks. In all, Kynard figures, he tracked about fifteen hundred kilometres, stopping once a kilometre to listen for the fish. Kynard and company camped out all the way. Each morning for breakfast, they had green onions, feta, salami, bread, and jam.
This was at the height of the 1998-99 Kosovo war, when the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was bombing Serbia intensely. Danube kilometre 830 is the Serbian border. On the east side of the river, Romania continues, but on the west side Bulgaria ends and Serbi
a begins. When Sam had progressed as far as Calafat (Romania) and Vidin (Bulgaria), which flank the Danube at kilometre 815, the hydrophones had still heard nothing from the sturgeons’ acoustic tags. Spawning sturgeons swim side by side in pairs. In Kynard’s words, “They have a form of communication that is probably tactile.” The male has a large anal fin, which cups the milt. The milt and the caviar are blended by the current. Ichthyologists would not call the eggs caviar. A single female sturgeon may carry a million five hundred thousand eggs. Sturgeons engaged in sex and simultaneously broadcasting to hydrophones will outbolero “Bolero.”
As the boat had come ever nearer to Serbia, other traffic had diminished on the river. Along the Bulgarian side were towers, in which were guards equipped with machine guns and telescopes. “The Bulgarians were not happy about the hydrophones on their side of the river.” When the guards reached for the telescopes, it was not clear—from the water—if they were reaching for the telescopes or the guns. Sam had a cabin enclosure and looked pretty much like a fishing boat, but Kynard, in earphones sitting by a receiver with a hydrophone shaft sticking out a window into the water, created a somewhat martial impression. In a specialized way, he had become known up and down the Danube, but not to these Bulgarian tower guards. Even the Hungarians, isolated by dams and far to the north, were aware of his Romanian project. They had asked him to come to Hungary and track the sterlet sturgeon, a freshwater species, because sterlet is good caviar. Kaluga sturgeon, pallid sturgeon—there are numerous species of sturgeon and four genuses, three of which are subjects of studies by Kynard. See Bemis, W E., and B. Kynard (1997), “Sturgeon Rivers: An Introduction to Acipenseriform Biogeography and Life History,” Environmental Biology of Fishes 48:167-183. The acipenseriform sturgeons are the most typical and common: in North America, the shortnose, Atlantic, lake, white, and green; the sevruga and beluga in, for example, the Black and Caspian Seas. At Galati, on the Romanian Danube, Kynard spoke at a 1998 symposium involving all the Danube countries. He advocated a Danube River compact for sturgeon conservation.