State of Our Trout Part I

The truth was that 62 hysterical residents took themselves to the hospital because they wrongly supposed they’d been sickened by rotenone. Infuriated by my report, the news editor of the Plumas Audubon Society informed my editors that he had personally witnessed “bald eagles, white pelicans, and other birds and mammals scavenging poisoned carcasses that lined the shores.”

But he hadn’t stuck around long enough to notice that none was sickened. That’s because rotenone-killed fish can safely be eaten by wild animals and, for that matter, humans, who have used it for centuries to collect fish as food. Not one of the outraged “environmentalists” we heard from expressed concern for the endangered and threatened races of chinook salmon and steelhead trout that cling to existence in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River system.

In May 1999, pike showed up again in Lake Davis, more likely than not the result of sabotage. Now fish and game bureaucrats were jumpy as dusted grouse. Instead of assigning federally mandated reclamation to trained professionals, the agency abdicated to local ignorati, establishing a “stakeholder steering committee” that was to devise a “multi-faceted,” non-chemical plan to rid the system of pike (impossible save in the imaginations of people bereft of even rudimentary knowledge of fish). Fish and game director Robert Hight trekked to Portola where, bowing and scraping, he promised an irate rabble that his department would never again use rotenone in Lake Davis.

The “multi-faceted plan” hatched by locals and approved by Fish and Game involved all the quackery that has failed every time it has ever been tried—explosives, electro fishing, trap netting, gill netting, beach seining, even commercial purse seining. And it disgusted the California-Nevada Chapter of the American Fisheries Society, which scolded the department for abandoning “its legal and professional responsibilities” with an unscientific non-solution that was “a violation of state law and biologically and ecologically irresponsible.”

Using everything but rotenone, Fish and Game killed about 70,000 pike, yet the population steadily expanded, spreading up tributaries.

“Your department had to have known this wouldn’t work,” I told California Fish and Game biologist Ed Pert last May.

“That’s exactly right,” he said. “We had scientists at U.C. Davis do some modeling and look at how many fish would have to be taken out. It was clear that it wasn’t going to work because you’re dealing with compensatory mechanisms where if you knock the population down, there’s less competition, and they produce more fry. I think we had to let all of that run its course so local community leaders could see that we’re trying all these things, and they’re not going to work.”

As twisted as that sounds, Pert is correct. Locals weren’t going to believe anything Fish and Game said. They had to make all the old mistakes themselves, even if it meant the extinction of unique races of trout and salmon. After four years of steady pike proliferation and several high-water events in which pike nearly spilled over the dam, the scales fell from the steering committee’s eyes. In 2003 it allowed that rotenone might be okay after all.

That was also the year that Fish and Game got a new director—Ryan Broddrick, a smart, tough, new-breed professional passionately committed to preserving and restoring vanishing fish. Immediately he implemented what may be the most intensive outreach program in state resource-management history. “We had learned how not to do things,” says Pert. “This time we did everything we could to engage the community, treat it with respect and be as open and transparent with the information we had as possible.”

Other factors were working in favor of Fish and Game and the imperiled salmonids. For one thing, Lake Davis was not being used as a drinking-water supply. For another, even among the grossly ill-informed, Ann McCampbell was gaining a well-earned reputation as a crackpot. There’s a limit to how many times you can scream “fire” in a torrential downpour and cause alarm.