State of Our Trout Part I

McCampbell and Laurel Ames as litigants—“kept looking for a weak link. And in the fall of 2005 she got a preliminary injunction.”

Providing legal counsel to the litigants was the non-profit Western Environmental Law Center, which unsmilingly describes itself as a “public interest law firm that works to protect and restore Western wildlands.”

CATs et al had sued Fish and Game in state court and gotten blown out of the water. But they simultaneously filed in federal court before a judge who didn’t understand fish or the preliminary injunction process. A preliminary injunction is supposed to be for an emergency that comes out of the blue.

“But what Erman does,” says Regan, “is wait till the last minute because she knows we’ve got about a three-week window—the last two weeks in August and first week in September. Silver King Creek is high up, and after that it gets too cold for rotenone to work.”

In the most recent court action the Forest Service rolled over on its back and pointed its arms and legs at the sky (as opposed to its pit-bull defenses when challenged on resource extraction). It withdrew approval of the project, agreed to prepare a needless, redundant and grotesquely expensive environmental impact statement, and paid the litigants $91,346 in taxpayer money.

The preliminary injunction came down the night before treatment was to get underway. Somer had his reclamation team on site with drip stations in place and ready to go. Hundreds of thousands of dollars went up in smoke.

Western Environmental Law Center attorneys untruthfully argued that rotenone would “eliminate” nontarget species, some “rare or endangered.” Nontargets never get eliminated, and the only “rare or endangered” species in the watershed that could conceivably be affected by rotenone if it existed in the project area (and it doesn’t) is the mountain yellow-legged frog. All frogs are extremely resistant to rotenone, in fact unaffected in the adult stage; and all mountain yellow-legged frogs in the watershed are above an impassible waterfall, cohabiting with the last pure Paiute cutthroat.

This may not be a coincidence. The rainbow-Paiute hybrids in the 11 miles of Silver King Creek below the falls may have eliminated yellow-legged frogs. In any case, intensive rotenone applications in Silver King Creek and its tributaries above the falls from 1963 to 1993 didn’t harm the frogs.

These highly successful treatments—without which the Paiute almost surely would be extinct—were necessary because some bucket biologist had unleashed alien trout in this last refuge. Ironically, the only reason pure Paiutes were there and the only reason they survive today is that an earlier bucket biologist had thrown them over the falls into then-troutless waters.

This tiny, unnatural sanctuary is good enough, according to Erman, who is even less committed to the truth than to native ecosystems. When, prior to one of the aborted rotenone treatments, TU volunteers, Fish and Game and the Forest Service evacuated as many introgressed trout as they could electro-shock from the 11-mile project area of Silver King Creek, and moved them to an isolated lake, Erman reported in the newsletter of the California-Nevada Chapter of the American Fisheries Society that they dumped the hybrids into “a source for pure Lahontan cutthroat trout.”