Things are opening up again. Buds are emerging and boats are being uncovered. It’s still officially mud season, but new opportunities are emerging there as well, even in the mud that often lies beneath our bays. In Brunswick, that means that quahog season has begun again. Quahogs are the hard shelled clams that have the thick, purple tinged shells you might find along the shore.

Pronounced “co-hogs,” hard shell clams are delicious and typically bring in a higher price per clam than their smaller, softer cousins – the soft shelled clams. While they are perhaps best known as a chowder clam rather than the soft-shell steamer clams, quahogs are eaten in a variety of ways depending on their size. The littlest ones are the littlenecks, which can be eaten raw on the halfshell much like oysters, followed by cherrystones and then topnecks which are great grilled or steamed, and finally the big chowder “hogs” that measure more than 4 inches across.

In recent years, quahogs haven’t been as easy to find in some of the flats around town as harvesters and seafood-lovers might like. For that reason, they are left alone to rest out the winter burrowed into the safety and relative warmth of the mud. From January until April 1 or so each year, they cannot be harvested. This is the result of a conservation closure put into place back in 2016.

The town coordinated with the state to define a seasonal closure in order to protect the quahog resource during the coldest months of the year. Clams that come to the surface in extremely cold temperatures often do not fare well, so leaving them alone allows them to get fatter until they can be harvested in the spring. This is also a time when it is tricky to harvest due to sea ice, so it was a good fit for the harvesters as well as the clams.

Now that it’s spring, it’s time to see how those clams fared, and how many are big enough to harvest. For quahogs, that’s one inch across the hinge. You can find them in local seafood markets anytime after about April 1 through the end of the year.

Protecting them with winter conservation closures is just one way to help the wild population along in areas they already inhabit. Another effort is taking place right in the same bays to bring quahogs back to areas where they haven’t been in recent years. It might seem easy to take quahogs from one area, put them in another area, and watch them grow.

But, this isn’t always successful. What seems to work better is to get them in the mud as babies, or maybe more like teenagers. The problem, however, is that the size matters quite a bit and, while you can buy newly “hatched” clams (called seed), the ones just a bit bigger are harder to find.

The solution has been to try growing them out in mesh bags floating on the surface of the water. This has been in the works in Mere Point and Maquoit bays over the last year or so. With a substantial grant from the Maine Shellfish Resilience and Restoration Fund, the town collaborated with a number of partners including harvesters and scientists to buy short of a million baby quahogs. These seeds were “planted” in bags last June and July to get big enough to survive when “replanted” in areas where there currently aren’t many quahogs.

For the same reasons the winter closure was put in place, these little M&M-sized quahogs wouldn’t fare very well during the coldest months of the year. Instead, they spent the winter at the Downeast Institute in Beals, Maine. They’re still not quite ready, though, and will likely need another growing season before they’re plantable. They’ll go back into the water to continue to put on weight. So, if you see a flotilla of mesh bags floating inside of protective wire cages this summer, wish the baby quahogs well as they may be part of this project.

While you’ll have to wait awhile for these quahogs to be edible, you can buy market-sized quahogs ready for eating right now. They are well worth getting fresh and trying the different sizes in your favorite dish.

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