State of Our Trout Part I

To this mantra, John Regan, the tireless Trout Unlimited activist and former California council chair who has fought for 20 years to save Paiute cutthroats and other vanishing salmonids, responds as follows: “They think we’re all a bunch of whackos who can’t wait to hike eight miles into the wilderness to catch eight-inch fish. This isn’t about fishing at all; it’s about preserving earth’s biodiversity.”

Facilitated by ecological illiteracy and chemophobia and waged by environmental groups for which fish don’t count as wildlife, Ann and Nancy’s war drags painfully on. But since I last reported on it there has been a lot more good news than bad. Three years later it’s clear that native-trout advocates are starting to prevail.

Victory on Lake Davis

A “Battle of Midway” has just concluded on 4,000-acre Lake Davis in north-central California. You may recall the public hysteria—much of it whipped up by McCampbell—when, in October 1997, the California Fish and Game Department attempted to eliminate alien pike with rotenone, a resin derived from the roots of South American and Malaysian plants and the most important and usually only tool fisheries managers have for saving native fish from aliens.

Extremely fertile, Lake Davis had been one of the state’s top trophy rainbow fisheries. Rainbows had been the main diet of the pike, but the project’s goal was not restoring the great fishing, though that would be a nice bonus. The goal was saving the threatened Central Valley steelhead and spring chinook and the endangered winter chinook of the Sacramento-San Joaquin basin into which Lake Davis drains. Eliminating pike wasn’t just something enlightened managers felt like doing; it was mandated by federal law—the Endangered Species Act.

In the 80 years that rotenone has been used in fisheries management, there has not been a single documented case of it harming a human. It has no effect on terrestrial wildlife. And while it does kill some aquatic invertebrates, they bounce back within weeks, frequently to higher levels because they no longer have to cope with predation by fish they didn’t evolve with.

Rotenone, applied at .5 to 4 parts per million, degrades completely in a few days. Still, because Lake Davis was a public water supply, fish and game attempted to allay unfounded fears by having wells dug for the public and explaining the facts about rotenone.

It might as well have been speaking Swahili. Protestors held all-night candlelight vigils, marched around with placards that said “Burn in Hell, Fish & Game!” They shrieked, cursed, wept, swam out into the lake and chained themselves to buoys.

For crowd control, the state had to bring in a SWAT team and 270 game wardens, biologists, technicians, highway patrolmen and sheriff’s deputies. A Portola restaurant erected a sign that read: “We don’t serve Fish and Game.” Criminal charges (immediately thrown out) were filed against fish and game by Plumas County.

When I wrote about the Lake Davis debacle in Audubon magazine, we were dressed down by Audubon members who claimed that rotenone had sent 62 residents to the hospital. They’d read this in High Country News so it had to be true.