Trout are Wildlife Too

In most habitats, trout are not easily seen. Except where they are conditioned with pellets, they don't come to feeders. While they're every bit as colorful as birds, they're cold and slimy, and most of the public remains unmoved by their plight. Groups such as Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers are winning important battles for native-trout restoration, but they're outnumbered and outshouted by the gull-like masses for whom trout genes (and even trout fins, abraded into fleshy stumps by the sides of hatchery raceways) have no relevance, for whom a trout is not part of a native ecosystem but a slab of meat.

Anyone seeking the answer to "What good is a native trout?" need not look beyond Yellowstone National Park. Eighty percent of the world's remaining pure Yellowstone cutthroats abide in 87,000-acre Yellowstone Lake, spawning in at least 59 feeder streams. Today Yellowstone cutts fuel aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems in and around the park the way sockeye salmon fuel ecosystems in southern Alaska. But it wasn't always this way. Thirty years ago the park's native trout had been pretty much wiped out. Dead cutthroats—caught, killed, and discarded by tourists—comprised the main item in park garbage cans. Grizzlies, sustained by this and other garbage, had been reduced to circus bears. Then, in the early 1970s, a smart, tough biologist named John Varley (who now directs the park's Center for Resources) led a successful effort to require anglers to release most of their trout. The initiative was far more contentious than wolf reintroduction (which Varley also led). Outfitters charged the park with plotting to "put them out of business." Outdoor writers reported that the feds planned to end all sportfishing. Fisheries managers parroted the old wives' tale that "you can't stockpile trout."

When the Craighead brothers were studying grizzlies in the 1960s, they never saw a bear take a fish. By 1975 bear activity was being observed on 17 of the lake's 59 cutthroat-spawning streams. Now bears work at least 55 of those streams, and one research team has observed a sow with cubs averaging 100 fish a day for 10 days. In 1988 there were 66 nesting pairs of ospreys in the park; by 1993 there were 100. While in the park, white pelicans get almost all their nourishment from cutthroats, consuming an estimated 300,000 pounds a season. In all, Yellowstone cutts provide an important food source for at least 28 species of birds and mammals.

Last July 18 I stood in the swollen Yellowstone River in the park's Hayden Valley with the current piling up around the top of my chest waders. I fish here not to "fight" native trout but to connect with them and their world. Sometimes the insect hatches are so prolific that the fish don't bother to rise; they just hold in the current with their heads out of water and, like drunks under wine spigots, let the river's richness fill their bellies. The nutrient flow starts with the sulfurous fumes that bubble white and pungent from underwater vents; cycles skyward with squalls of caddises and mayflies; drops back to the trout; then out onto the banks with the otters and minks; up and south with the eagles and ospreys; seaward with the loons and pelicans; high into the stream-etched Absarokas with the massive spawning run; and, finally, into the gullets of grizzlies.

The cutthroats of Yellowstone Lake, restored by the no-kill fishing regs that were going to ruin the outfitters, now generate about $36 million a year for them and other local businesses, and the figure doubles when you include other restored park waters. But now Yellowstone's trout-based ecosystem and trout-based economy may collapse again. Lake trout, unavailable to wildlife because they live and spawn in deep water, have been illegally stocked in the lake, and wherever these large, voracious predators have been superimposed on native cutthroats, the cutthroats have been eliminated.

When a fisherman caught the first lake trout on July 30, 1994, the news made Varley physically ill. Unless the park can permanently suppress the aliens (elimination is out of the question), Yellowstone cutthroats are doomed in the lake and probably the world. In a never-ending project that leaves virtually no money for other trout restoration, crews on two large boats set gill nets at depths favored by lake trout. They're getting good at it; in 2001 they killed 15,000 lake trout with an accidental cutthroat bycatch of only 600. But there are alarming indicators. On Clear Creek the cutthroat spawning run has declined from about 12,000 to 8,000 fish; there's a corresponding decline at sample stations in the lake.

Particularly discouraging is the ignorance of sportsmen. Facing a future no less bleak than the Yellowstone cutthroat is the westslope cutthroat. Ambitious restoration projects are under way in Montana, where pure westslopes have been driven out of something like 75 percent of their historic range. But the most ambitious westslope-restoration project ever proposed has been derailed for the past three years by a sportsmen-endorsed property-rights group called the Public Lands Access Association. The group's president, Bill Fairhurst, threatened to sue the state in federal court on the grounds that it would "pollute" public water with the safe, selective, short-lived fish poisons with which it plans to remove the brook trout, rainbows, and hybrid cutthroats that infest 77 miles of Upper Cherry Creek, in southwest Montana. What's really bugging the association and its allies is that 85 percent of the project area is owned by media mogul and native-ecosystem champion Ted Turner, who has offered to pick up $343,350 of the $475,000 cost. Like the previous owner, Turner doesn't invite the public onto his land, although the Montana access law permits anglers to wade Cherry Creek.

In January 2002 Fly Rod & Reel magazine, where I serve as conservation editor, recognized Turner's commitment to native trout by making him its Angler of the Year, thereby eliciting the biggest blizzard of nastygrams we've seen in our 23-year history. I had "a political agenda," I'd done it for money, I was a "snot nose," a "moron," a "nasty bully," a "nature Nazi," an acolyte of "Hanoi Jane," an espouser of "vitriolic leftist environmentalism." "I see your magazine is lining up lock-step with the wild-animal-rights fly-fishing crowd that Left Wing Ted [Turner] leads and which appears to be taking over the leadership of Trout Unlimited and the Federation of Fly Fishers . . ." wrote Bruce Cox of Springdale, Pennsylvania. "I am completely opposed to the wild-at-any-cost perspective of this left-wing animal-rights crowd and to wit will . . . politically align myself with anti-wild-fish groups and politicians."

Preserving Cherry Creek's alien and mongrel trout was the priority of most readers we heard from. The fishing was already good—why change species? Anglers had been programmed by the mass-circulation hook-and-bullet press, particularly Outdoor Life magazine, which had attacked the project with an article rife with misinformation entitled "Playing God on Cherry Creek." When the editors invited readers to vote for or against making Cherry Creek a sanctuary for westslope cutthroats, 98 percent voiced opposition.

In the late 1980s the Idaho Department of Fish and Game announced that it would cease polluting the Big Wood River with hatchery trout. But to appease the masses, which had threatened legislative intervention, the department kept stocking a few token fish. Idaho also went to wild-trout management on the Teton River but found it necessary to buy a four-acre gravel pit—safely isolated from the river—into whose seepage it poured a gravy train of hatchery fish. This direct dump-and-catch approach proved so popular that the department now does it all over the state.