State of Our Trout Part II

Last issue I promised and delivered some good news about the recovery of the West’s imperiled trout, though in the case of Paiute cutthroat recovery—aborted for the fourth time by retired macroinvertebrate researcher Nancy Erman and her troupe of loud, aggressive, fish-stupid chemophobes—you had to look hard for it. Herewith, good news that— once you get past some discouraging elements—is more obvious.

Let’s begin with Apache trout, Arizona’s state fish. It’s neither cutthroat nor rainbow, but a unique, heat-adapted salmonid of the high desert that evolved in Arizona’s White Mountains. Listed as endangered in 1967 (via the earlier, weaker version of the Endangered Species Act), it was down-listed to threatened eight years later.  

No native-trout recovery program has progressed more smoothly, and few have produced more spectacular results. For one thing, only brown trout occupy Apache habitat; so, while browns displace Apaches and must be chemically removed, introgression hasn’t been an issue. Arizona is also blessed with a dearth of chemophobes, a plethora of ecologically literate anglers and enlightened fish managers at the state level and in the White Mountain Apache Tribe, which set about restoring these fish in the 1940s while state and federal resource agencies were flinging alien trout around America like confetti. 

The recovery goal was 30 populations; today, there are 27. “We’re hoping within the next two to three years to finish the last three,” says Julie Meka, native trout coordinator for Arizona Game and Fish Department. The department has opened two recovered streams to catch-and-release fishing, and will doubtless open more in the near future. It also stocks large Apaches in non-recovery areas so that bucket biologists won’t be able to contaminate recovered populations.

Greenback Cutthroat

Blighted by mine waste, over-fishing, de-watering and, especially, introgression and competition from non-indigenous fish, the greenback cutthroat trout faded from the Arkansas and South Platte Rivers in Colorado’s Front Range mountains and its few native South Platte tributaries in southeastern Wyoming. In 1939 it was declared extinct. 

Thirty years later a young Colorado State University scientist named Robert Behnke rediscovered greenbacks in a tiny headwater stream in the Roosevelt National Forest in north-central Colorado. When Congress passed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in 1973, the fish became one of the first listings. 

With the recovery plan underway in 1978, greenbacks were down-listed to threatened. It was purely a political move, but a smart one because it allowed catch-and-release fishing. With the angling community rallying around the project, there was intense political motivation. The alien brookies, rainbows and browns had never done well in greenback water. But, with the home-court advantage, the greenbacks became fat and robust, reaching lengths of 18 inches. Rocky Mountain National Park, a main sanctuary, became a destination fishery. In 1994, Colorado made the greenback its state fish. 

Brookies, notoriously hard to eliminate, keep popping back up in greenback streams. For years the Park Service has been begging anglers to kill brook trout. In fact, you can legally keep 18 a day. Not that it matters much in overall greenback recovery, but so ingrained is the no-kill mindset that more than 90 percent of all brook trout caught by anglers in the park get released, according to 2007 creel-census data.