The sunlight bounces off the glassy surface of Sitka Sound as community herring fish egg harvesters navigate the waters with boats loaded with hemlock branches for the fish to lay eggs on ...

Every spring millions of herring return to spawn in Sitka Sound. The small, silvery fish are prized by commercial fishermen. They sell them for their eggs, known as herring roe.

In Sitka, the herring-egg harvest is enshrined in an early Tlingit story: A woman sang to the herring in Sitka Sound, then fell asleep on a rock. While she slept, the herring laid eggs in her hair ...

Herring eggs on the menu… exciting," Ferguson said. ANMC’s menu also includes dishes such as piruugax̂, or fish pie, salmon soup, salmon bacon, fiddlehead ferns, and reindeer pot pie.

Tons of herring are scooped up in seining nets in Sitka Sound, then transferred to processing boats where lines of workers slit each fish open, remove any egg sacs present, and toss out the herring ...

But Mr. Moody said the roe-herring fishery, in which the spawning fish must be killed to extract the eggs, is taking too big a share of the catch, depriving the Heiltsuk of opportunities to ...

The amount of herring eggs harvested is on the decline, Thornton said. Decades ago, he said the harvest brought in 400-500,000 pounds of herring eggs. Now, it’s about 250,000 pounds.

Subsistence users capture eggs by allowing herring to spawn on branches, which happens after herring make it through a gauntlet of million-dollar fishing boats hoping to scoop them up.

To err is human, sure, but herring is divine. Especially at this time of the year and you needn’t be a Borscht Belt comedian to know it. “This year is fabulous,” says Sandy Ingber… ...

The spectacle of herring spawn—adult fish returning to these shores to blanket tens of thousands of eggs with a milky, turquoise cloud of seminal fluid known as milt—is over in a matter of days.

The herring that return to Vancouver Island each spring attract birds, whales, sea lions, and even bears to feast on the energy-rich fish or their eggs. Fishing for Roe It's against this backdrop ...