State of Our Trout Part I

All across our nation, but especially in the West, unique species and subspecies of trout are in desperate trouble. Remnant populations hang on mostly in headwaters where natural barriers protect them from competition, predation and introgression from non-indigenous fish flung across the landscape by ecological illiterates, including state and federal managers.

Virtually all those managers are now dead; and virtually all their replacements get it, having acquired what Aldo Leopold called an “ecological conscience” and what George Bird Grinnell called a “refined taste in natural objects.” Typical of the new breed is U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Craig Springer, who writes this about a fish that until 2006 (when his agency down-listed it to threatened) was our only inland salmonid protected as endangered, though others should be: “Gila trout are swimming expressions of antiquity, artifacts of epochs past. In their genes they carry a time capsule. Coiled in the double-helix of their DNA lies the lexis of the environment from which they have sprung forth.”

And Christy McGuire, in charge of golden-trout recovery for the California Department of Fish and Game, tells me this: “We have this library of trout native genes. The diversity of nature is something to be treasured. These fish hold things in their genetics that allow them to adapt to changing climate conditions that they’ve experienced in the course of their evolution.”

Alas, most of the public—even most of the angling public—doesn’t get it. They’re stuck in the mid-20th Century when “a fish was a fish.” Typical of this breed are the editors of the self-described “muckraking leftist online newsletter” Counterpunch who, in a piece entitled “Trout and Ethnic Cleansing,” apply the ruminations of Nazi critic and alien-plant advocate Rudolf Borchardt to native-trout restoration. “So leave those alien brookies alone!” the piece concludes.

To a large element of the environmental community, reclamations have nothing to do with preserving beautiful and unique fauna; it’s all a plot to generate license revenue.

“The California Department of Fish and Game wants to remove all fish from [Silver King Creek in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness of the Toiyabe-Humboldt National Forest], so it can re-stock the area with pure Paiute cutthroat trout,” writes Laurel Ames of the California Watershed Alliance. “But this area”—the entire 11-mile natural range of the rarest trout in the world—“is not needed to save the Paiute cutthroat. In fact, CDFG wants to introduce the Paiute trout into this area primarily because it wants to create an area where anglers can catch them. We shouldn’t poison wilderness streams and lakes for fishermen who want to catch a certain kind of fish!”

Californians for Alternatives to Toxics (CATs)—which, since I last reported on the perennially aborted Paiute recovery project, has taken over for the Center for Biological Diversity and the Pacific Rivers Council as the lead angel of death for this threatened fish—brags as follows: “CATs stopped state and federal agencies from ‘executing’ a creek in a high Sierra wilderness last fall [2005] so they could replant a fish popular with anglers.”

Empowered by and inciting these and other groups have been full-time anti-piscicide crusaders Ann McCampbell, who claims to be a medical doctor although she lacks a practice, and retired macroinvertebrate researcher Nancy Erman (See “Ann and Nancy’s War,” FR&R July/October 2005). In September 2007, McCampbell reported in The (Santa Fe) Sun News that the only reason the New Mexico Game and Fish Department, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and Trout Unlimited volunteers are working so hard to save the Rio Grande cutthroat (New Mexico’s state fish) is to “satisfy a fishing fantasy of a small, but influential, group of fishermen.”