Environmentalists Vs. Native Trout

"This watershed," continued the center, "is historic habitat for the mountain yellow-legged frog, a species in serious decline." Had it read the literature, it would have understood that yellow-legged frogs don't occur in the proposed treatment area.

As part of a legal settlement with the center the Forest Service is currently engaged in more National Environmental Policy Act review, re-studying everything the state has already studied and everything the scientific community already knows about rotenone and fish reclamation. The agency hopes to resume work in the fall of 2004, but the NEPA process leaves the project vulnerable to endless appeals by the center and others.

The Pacific Rivers Council, with which I also work closely and for which I also have helped raise thousands of dollars, does all sorts of fabulous work, too. Yet it swallowed the BS about rotenone hook, line, boat and motor. It filed a scathing critique of the project's first environmental assessment; and it issued an "action alert" in which it recycled the misinformation about the yellow-legged frog and made the astonishing claim that "neither the Silver King Creek nor Tamarack Lake drainages historically supported the threatened Paiute cutthroat" when these were the only habitats that had supported it.

The National Audubon Society is making progress. For example, its magazine recently condemned "chemophobes" and defended piscicides in a piece entitled "Trout are Wildlife, Too." But the society is routinely embarrassed by its affiliates. Seven years ago the California Department of Fish and Game rotenoned alien pike in 4,000-acre Lake Davis in order to protect endangered steelhead trout and chinook salmon of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems. [See "Fish Poison Politics," March 2001.] But, instead of helping fight a real threat to biodiversity, local Audubon members and other enviros attacked an imaginary threat to water quality. They mounted vicious protests, held all-night candlelight vigils, chained themselves to buoys, cursed, wept, marched around the lake with placards that said things like "Burn in Hell, Fish & Game!" For crowd control the state deployed 270 uniformed officers, including a SWAT team. Currently, on the National Audubon Society's Web site, Harry Reeves, editor of the Plumas Audubon Chapter's newsletter, goes on and on about the alleged evils of rotenone and laments: "Bald eagles, white pelicans, and other birds and mammals scavenged poisoned carcasses that lined the shores." They did indeed, and not one was sickened because rotenone-killed fish don't harm wildlife.

Also weighing in on the Web site is one Ann McCampbell of Santa Fe, New Mexico-the nation's busiest piscicide protestor, who rarely misses a chance to spread bogeyman stories about rotenone and antimycin and who professes to be so allergic to all chemicals that she can participate in public hearings only by phone-a tedious, time-consuming process that tests the patience of everyone involved. The rotenone used in Lake Davis, writes McCampbell, who also claims to be a medical doctor, "made residents sick." It did not.

Concern for people and scavengers is admirable even when based on hogwash. But now that pike are back in Lake Davis (possibly because of sabotage) and now that Fish and Game is too frightened to eliminate them, I wish the environmental community would express as much (or even some) concern for the endangered salmon and steelhead, which surely will be ushered into oblivion unless rotenone is used again.

To save Montana's state fish, the westslope cutthroat trout, the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife, and Parks proposes to kill introgressed Yellowstone cutts dribbling alien genes into the South Fork of the Flathead River. To do this it must apply antimycin and rotenone to 11 high-elevation ponds in the Bob Marshall Wilderness. The westslope cutt, named for Lewis and Clark, is as much an icon of American wilderness as the grizzly. So you'd think that any group advocating wilderness would rally to the defense of this magnificent, vanishing creature.

But Wilderness Watch is doing its best to kill the project, making absurd and untruthful pronouncements such as "Poison has no place in wilderness stewardship." (Piscicides are essential to wilderness stewardship.) And: "Both poisons have adverse effects on aquatic biota." (They do not.) Wilderness Watch expresses outrage that managers would have to make some noise with motorboats and helicopters. And while it correctly observes that the ponds were originally fishless, and might even make a case that they should remain so, it claims that the westslopes (to be stocked as eyed eggs) have been diminished by domestication and therefore threaten the natives. Considering the gross genetic pollution now underway and the group's ongoing attempt to block removal of the mongrels, I can't imagine a more hypocritical and disingenuous argument.

In New Mexico's Gila National Forest, Wilderness Watch has been agitating against the use of antimycin in the ongoing recovery of the Gila trout, America's only endangered trout. It's all about sport, according to Wilderness Watch: "The purpose is to remove stocked trout and replace them with the listed Gila trout, in an effort to boost the population to a level that will allow delisting and resumed sport fishing of the species." Other untruths include: "It is not known whether antimycin is a carcinogen." (It is known that it's not.) And: "It is highly likely that the poison will adversely impact the endangered Chiricahua leopard frog that inhabits the area." (1. The Chiricahua leopard frog is threatened, not endangered; 2. Antimycin is very easy on juvenile amphibians, has no effect on adults, and the Forest Service evacuates tadpoles from target streams anyway.) And: "The poison antimycin will kill . . . all the native macroinvertebrates and amphibians in the streams." (Most likely it will kill none of the amphibians, and it will kill very few macroinvertebrates. Researchers from the University of Wyoming's Department of Zoology and Physiology, reporting on their stream studies, write: "Antimycin alone seemed to have little to no effect on invertebrates, with drift rates not substantially different than control sites during the antimycin addition.")

Wilderness Watch is also trying to derail restoration of New Mexico's state fish-the Rio Grande cutthroat, endangered in fact if not by fiat. It upbraids the state's Water Quality Commission for ignoring the rantings of Ann McCampbell who, for example, testifies that the antimycin label carries "a skull and crossbones . . . warning that it is fatal in humans if swallowed." (I'd agree that the public shouldn't drink it from the bottle.) Here, too, the alleged motive is frivolity and greed: For no purpose other than to amuse anglers and generate license revenue, the U.S. Forest Service, the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish and the US Fish and Wildlife Service are conspiring to "dump poison in 30 miles of Animas Creek and 21 miles of the Gila River to kill introduced non-native trout and then re-stock the streams with native Rio Grande Cutthroat trout. . . . The Rio Grande Cutthroat is not an endangered species, but is a popular sport species among fishermen. . . . It is both sad and ironic that it was Aldo Leopold who convinced the Forest Service to protect the Gila as our nation's first wilderness in the 1930's-now, it is in danger of being converted to a fish farm for recreationists."