Trout are Wildlife Too

On August 6, 2002, the PMDs started coming off Armstrong Spring Creek at 10:00 a.m. PMDs (pale morning duns) are delicate yellow mayflies that shuck their larval skins on the surface and, if they don't vanish into the maws of trout, dance around like garden fairies, with sunlight flashing on translucent wings. A spring creek leaps full grown from rocks or wet earth. Armstrong, the most famous spring creek in the world, is collected by the Yellowstone River in Montana's Paradise Valley.

As I stood in the icy flow, nighthawks and swallows dipped from the cloudless, mountain-rimmed sky, picking off emerging PMDs, while all around me large trout were finding plenty of their own, bulging through the surface and wagging flaglike dorsal fins. These were browns and rainbows that, at the sting of my hook, somersaulted into the air and raced off on long runs, most of which ended with a sickening snap because my fluorocarbon "tippet" was so fine it broke at 1.5 pounds of pressure. Anything heavier and the trout would refuse my PMD imitation. As an angler I've been trained to measure the quality of game fish by this kind of strength and selective feeding behavior. But as a naturalist I'm conflicted. Browns evolved in Europe, rainbows in the Pacific Northwest. Both were unleashed decades ago in the interior West by managers blind to the beauty and importance of native ecosystems.

The trout that belong here are cutthroats. Rainbows hybridize with them, swamping their genes. Browns displace them, as do brook trout (imported from the East). Of the 14 named and unnamed cutthroat subspecies, two are already extinct, and the rest are in desperate trouble, pushed into river tops where they're protected from alien invaders by waterfalls or manmade barriers but where they're also genetically isolated.

Late in the day, when the PMDs were gone, I was delighted and astonished to catch a Yellowstone cutthroat, the native subspecies of this river system. It slurped my beetle pattern on a sloppy drift, and it came in easily, shaking its head and rolling. All wild trout are beautiful, but cutthroats mesmerize me. This one glowed with the gold of autumn aspens and the pinks of a Big Sky sunset. Its flanks were flecked with obsidian spots that got bigger and more profuse toward the tail, and under its jaw were the two scarlet slashes that give the species its name. Cutthroats are hardwired: They're not selective, because they evolved in sterile water where they couldn't afford to let something drift by that might have been a bug; and they never developed the kind of energy-draining musculature of other trout. When the state of Idaho sought to restore Yellowstone cutts to Island Park Reservoir, one prominent guide—an educator of local anglers—declared: "They're stupid, and they fight like slugs." So fierce was public opposition that the project was abandoned.

In the Yellowstone drainage, however, cutthroats are making a comeback, because trout managers of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks are the most progressive in the nation. They've leased water rights on tributaries dewatered by irrigators. Now native trout are spawning in these rivers again.

Montana has learned that hatcheries, which the angling public underwrites with license fees and a federal tax on fishing tackle, are among the greatest threats to wild (stream-bred) trout, whether naturalized or native. Genetic diversity, by which trout adapt to different habitats in large river systems, is bred out of hatchery trout. They are selected for domesticity, warped by inbreeding. They survive in the real world only long enough to suppress and displace wild trout. Moreover, hatcheries spread pathogens such as whirling disease, imported from Europe with frozen pike and to which North American trout lack natural immunity. But when game and fish departments try to phase out hatcheries, anglers—unwilling to learn the truth—scream to their legislators, who threaten budget cuts. "If you cross a sacred cow with a military base, you get a fish hatchery," says Bernard Shanks, the gutsy former director of the Washington Fish and Wildlife Department, who tried to de-emphasize hatchery production.

In 1970 Montana stopped stocking hatchery fish (browns and rainbows) in a section of the Madison River where these species had long been established and which is far too big for native-trout restoration. Four years later large fish (three years and older) were up 942 percent. The study horrified anglers and hatchery bureaucrats, who wanted to believe that stocking was the key to trout abundance. In apparent sabotage, the study area was stocked in 1972 (presumably with trout purchased at a private hatchery) and the towing hitch on the department's truck was loosened so that boat and trailer parted company on the highway. The illegal stocking only corroborated the earlier data, because immediately the brown trout biomass dipped by 24 percent, then, with two more years of no stocking, jumped back to where it had been. The study convinced Montana to cease all trout stocking in moving water. As a result it is now the number-one trout-fishing destination in the nation.

In 1998, as the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the state of New Mexico were preparing to reintroduce pure Gilas to Black Canyon Creek, they found rainbows, browns, and cutthroats (alien to the region and of undetermined race). The project had been sabotaged.