Down
the Susquehanna to the Chesapeake
by Jack Brubaker
from Ocquionis Creek
Because Shadow Brook is Otsego’s largest feeder stream and because of this long history of travel and anticipated travel along it to the lake, some local residents say it should be considered the Susquehanna’s primary source. Every source has supporters.
Neither Shadow Brook nor any other tributary or landscape feature of this region prepares a visitor for Lake Otsego. In an agricultural area where mediocre soil insufficiently rewards all but the most determined farmers, Lake Otsego is a 50-carat diamond in a 14-carat setting. The Iroquois called it O-te-sa-ga. The word may mean "a place of greeting," and Native Americans certainly met and gathered here. In several of his nineteenth-century novels, James Fenimore Cooper called it the Glimmerglass. Subdued by a haze that often accompanies sunrise at Otsego on calm mornings, the lake can indeed seem to glimmer. Cooper described the lake in The Chronicles of Cooperstown as "a sheet of limpid water, extending . . . about nine miles, and varying in width from about three-quarters of a mile to a mile and a half. It has many bays and points, and as the first are graceful and sweeping, and the last low and wooded, they contribute largely to its beauty. The water is cool and deep, and the fish are consequently firm and sweet. The two ends of the lake . . . deepen their water gradually, but there are places, on its eastern side in particular, where a large ship might float with her yards in the forest."
Like most glacial, deepened valleys, Otsego’s basin is bathtub-shaped and steep-banked. It gathers most of its water from the north and west because its eastern sides are steepest, rising 400 to 600 feet above the water surface. Otsego’s average depth is 74 feet, maximum 166 feet, making it one of the deeper lakes in New York.3 Sited so close to the Susquehanna-Mohawk watershed divide, it is also one of the state’s higher bodies of water—1,195 feet above sea level.
Nearly half of Otsego’s shoreline, unlike Canadarago’s, is forested and protected from development. Most of the lake’s east side remains natural, thanks to ownership of vast acreage by Cooperstown’s philanthropic and paternalistic Clark family. Crucial sections of the western slope, however, are wide open to erosion. Rain washes silt into the lake and landslides occur periodically at several locations. Increasingly powerful motorboats and increasingly numerous personal watercraft add to the problem if they raise wakes close to shore.
The north end of the lake and much of its northern watershed lie on limestone, which buffers acid rain as well as runoff from the acid sandstones and shales that underlie the southern section. Glacial scouring exposed the limestone, which is dissolved by water rushing in from Shadow Brook and other streams and then settles to the bottom of the lake as a white marl. That marl, along with blue sky and the lake’s green plankton, contributes to the lake’s distinctive turquoise color on its best days.
Unlike Canadarago, Otsego is a cold-water fishery—one of the best in the world, according to its devotees. Its cooler lower levels shelter native lake trout and landlocked salmon. Fishing boats occasionally haul in a trout weighing more than twenty pounds. Landlocked salmon can grow to half that weight. Anglers also prize the Otsego bass, a native whitefish called a grayback by locals. It is closely related to another popular lake whitefish, the cisco or greenback, a species introduced to the lake in the 1930s.
All of the cold-water species (with the exception of lake trout and landlocked salmon, whose numbers are increased by annual stocking) have been declining in recent years, largely because they must compete for food with introduced warm-water species. Six species of new fish, including alewives, have been dumped into the lake illegally since the 1980s. Alewives look much like small shad, but there is nothing small about their effect on Otsego. Alewives eat huge meals of crustacean zooplankton, thereby starving Otsego bass, ciscos, and other fish that formerly dined on that food. Before it began disappearing inside alewives, zooplankton ate algae, cutting the souplike growth in Otsego to near zero. Now algae bloom on the lake each summer, reducing the water’s clarity and threatening to turn its turquoise to pea green. When algae die, they sink, decompose, and deplete the lake’s deep-water oxygen, further jeopardizing the cold-water fishery. Thus have alewives, an unwanted species, destabilized the entire lake culture.
Since 1988, more than thirty species of fish have been captured in the streams that feed Otsego, and most of these warm-water species also thrive in the lake. They include large- and smallmouth bass, perch, sunfish, suckers, and catfish. The bass especially are popular among Otsego’s anglers.
Young freshwater eels still occasionally enter Otsego after swimming all the way from the Sargasso Sea, in the North Atlantic Ocean. They come to Otsego by way of the Chesapeake and the Susquehanna, somehow getting past huge hydroelectric dams on the Lower Susquehanna and low-head dams farther north. The arduous trip, one way, takes about a year. As adults, these eels make the return trip to the Sargasso.
Eels are scarce in the lake now, but years ago they filled Otsego and the river. Art Andrews, a retired New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) officer, recalls that during the Depression his father worked the Cooperstown water pump on the Susquehanna, just below the river’s outlet from the lake. When eels migrated back to the Sargasso in autumn, Andrews’s father would shut down the pump wheel, place a big bag over the outlet, and harvest Anguilla rostrata. He sold them downriver in Oneonta for 25 cents each.
Otsego once was rich with shad and herring as well. Before dams, the river and lake teemed with the spawning migrations of these anadromous fish. Wrote Fenimore Cooper in The Pioneers, "Enormous shoals of herrings were discovered to have wandered five hundred miles through the windings of the impetuous Susquehanna, and the lake was alive with their numbers."
Now, on perfect summer afternoons (and Cooperstown does have them, despite enduring 200 overcast days during an average year), Otsego Lake is filled with fishing boats searching for trout and bass, sailboats searching for wind, tour boats searching for Deerslayer’s haunts, and motorboats cruising the scenic waters with water skiers in tow. An increasing number of boats, combined with escalating development around the lake, more pollution entering the water, and the ubiquitous alewives, have prompted calls for greater controls on lake and watershed to preserve an outstanding fishery and Otsego’s other recreational assets.
Not to mention saving Cooperstown’s drinking water. Until recently, the village’s residents drank lake water with only chlorine added. State and federal regulations mandated a new filtration plant and additional chlorine treatment in the mid-1990s, but many residents would have been satisfied to continue drinking unfiltered, unchlorinated water. At the Biological Field Station on the west bank of the lake, SUNY-Oneonta faculty members still drink their lake water straight as they work to provide straight answers on how area residents can protect Otsego.
Bill Harman came to Cooperstown in 1968 to establish a research location for Oneonta students. The university constructed the field station three years later just north of the well-known Farmers’ Museum and Fenimore House. It holds offices and labs and launches research vessels exploring Otsego’s flora, fauna, and water quality. Harman runs the field station as an educational center for researchers, students, and the community. He is a true believer in keeping a "relatively pristine" lake from deteriorating.
"It’s pretty apparent that this is one of those unique situations where the system is just the right size and shape so that with the human population we have, what we do becomes very evident," says the professor. He is preparing to take another class of students out in a boat to show them what nutrients washing into the lake are doing to plant life. "In most places you’re either fighting a losing cause or you don’t have much to worry about. Here we just happen to be in a situation which is very close to the edge."
page 3©2002 The Penn State University