Trout are Wildlife Too

On Henrys Lake, an important sanctuary for Yellowstone cutts, Idaho Fish and Game had been stocking rainbow-cutthroat hybrids because they fight harder. But in 1976, when managers announced they would stop stocking the lake with manmade mongrels, anglers threw a hissy fit and got the legislature to hold hostage the department's budget. So today the stocking of Henrys Lake continues, but with sterile "triploid" rainbows, which have three sets of chromosomes instead of the normal two and which hatchery technicians produce by heat-shocking the eggs. Despite the wastefulness and tastelessness of this strategy, native cutthroats in Henrys Lake and elsewhere are much safer than they used to be. Idaho is more progressive than most states; still, it was only in 2001 that it fully implemented a policy of not stocking viable hatchery fish on top of wild populations.

Environmentalists are no more enlightened than sportsmen. In October 1997 the California Department of Fish and Game poisoned alien pike out of 4,000-acre Lake Davis in order to protect the endangered steelhead trout and chinook salmon of the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems. The poison of choice—rotenone, the single most important tool of native-trout restorers—is derived from derris root. It is short-lived, applied at only 0.5 to 4 parts per million, and, after 69 years of use by fish managers, has not been seen to harm or even affect a human. Still, would-be protectors of water quality mounted vicious protests. They held all-night candlelight vigils, chained themselves to buoys, cursed, wept, and marched around the lake with placards that said things like "Burn in Hell, Fish & Game!" For crowd control the state deployed 270 uniformed officers, including a SWAT team. Now that pike are back in the lake, possibly because of sabotage, the state is too frightened to use rotenone again. Instead, it is proceeding with halfway measures, such as explosives, that can only suppress pike, not eliminate them.

Alpine lakes infested with hybrid cutthroats in Montana's Bob Marshall Wilderness are dribbling alien genes into pure westslope cutthroat populations in the Flathead drainage. To keep westslopes off the endangered-species list, the state's Fish, Wildlife and Parks department proposes to apply rotenone to a dozen of these lakes, then stock pure westslopes. But instead of rallying to the defense of this icon of American wilderness, the group Wilderness Watch is doing its best to kill the project, making ridiculous, untruthful pronouncements such as "Poison has no place in wilderness stewardship."

Managers create demand for hybrids just by supplying them. In Lake Superior, restoration of coasters—a race of giant brook trout—is finally getting under way. Ontario is doing great work. So are the Chippewa Indians. Minnesota is making a reasonable effort, but Michigan and Wisconsin are endangering the program by stocking Lake Superior with "splake," Frankenstein fish produced in hatcheries by crossing female lake trout with male brook trout. Not only do splake compete with coasters, the average angler can't tell them from coasters and winds up killing the latter. When I asked Wisconsin managers why they weren't doing more for coasters, I was told that the state has decided there's nothing special about them, that "a brook trout is a brook trout." Such talk infuriates Robert Behnke of Colorado State University, the world's leading authority on trout and the man who rediscovered Lahontan and Bonneville cutthroats after they'd been declared extinct. "A grape is also a grape," Behnke wrote me. "One species of grape (Vitus vinifera) is used in virtually all wine made in the world—reds, whites, best and worst. The grape-is-a-grape point of view is the most simplistic and would save money for wine drinkers, because the cheapest wines would be the same quality as the most expensive wines. I wouldn't want some of the managers [you] quote selecting wine for me or, for that matter, being in charge of fisheries programs where subtle genetic differences that may not show up in genetic analysis can be important." I can't think of a finer rebuttal to the superstition that a "trout is a trout" than the southern Appalachian brook trout, which I first encountered in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Fisheries biologist Matt Kulp had placed me in charge of measuring and releasing fish he'd just netted from a high-elevation rill, after briefly stunning them with an electric shock from a backpack generator. A big coaster weighs eight pounds, but the biggest Appalachian brook trout I handled that day—"huge" by park standards—weighed about four ounces. In sunlight, muted by the kind of cloud bank that gave these mountains their name, the belly of the little fish glowed campfire orange. The markings were different, too. Coasters and the brook trout of my Yankee woods have two or three rows of red spots along their chestnut flanks, but this one had seven. The dorsal fin was proportionately larger and marked with strange but lovely black stripes. Underfins, with the familiar ivory trim, seemed larger, too.

Rainbows, stocked by the park until 1976, have pushed the natives into the high country. So Kulp and his associates have been shocking the aliens and releasing them below natural barriers. Now that teams are working down into bigger water, shocking doesn't work. They need Antimycin, an incredibly selective and expensive fish poison that has a half-life of 40 minutes and is applied at 8 to 12 parts per billion. After rainbow advocates and chemophobes shrieked like scalded hogs, Kulp and his boss, Steve Moore, undertook exhaustive outreach. One sportsman, whom Moore thought he was literally going to have to fight, now admits to being "dead wrong," and, as with so much of the public, is utterly captivated by the South's native trout. So far the park has given 11.1 miles of stream back to the fish that belong here, and it's looking to restore an additional 40 miles, about all that's practical with current technology. Since the park has 750 miles of stream, there will be no shortage of rainbow fishing.

Managers have achieved another stunning success with the Gila trout of New Mexico, America's only endangered inland trout. I'd given up on the species when I inspected its habitat in 1994. In Black Canyon Creek, one of two perennial streams in the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, I encountered cattle in the water, knocking down the banks and defecating. So tolerant of cattle was the local Forest Service ranger that when I stopped in to see her I found cow pies on her office steps. When I asked Brub Stone, then a director of the Gila Fish and Gun Club, why his group opposed Gila trout restoration in Mineral and Willow creeks, he said: "They're using some kind of a fancy-name poison [Antimycin]. . . . Years ago they said the breast implant would not hurt women. My God, it's killing them, isn't it?"

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. Another stream, also cleansed of aliens, was apparently sabotaged. Grant County tried to kill the project—by preventing the use of Antimycin—with what it called the Pollution Nuisance Ordinance Act. Because of this ordinance (as well as the fact that managers wanted to avoid the hassle of evacuating, holding, then restocking rare dace and suckers) a 20-man crew equipped with backpack shockers removed 376 alien trout from Black Canyon Creek over the course of 88 days, a job that would have taken minutes with Antimycin. The reintroduced Gilas have been reproducing for the past two years. The Forest Service has kicked out the cows, and streambanks are healing. In 1970 Gila trout survived in about 12 miles of stream in 4 drainages; now they inhabit about 80 miles in 13 drainages. "As far as we're concerned, we've satisfied the downlisting criteria," the Fish and Wildlife Service's Jim Brooks told me.

There's enough momentum in native-trout restoration that it might succeed nationwide if the environmental community gets behind it. The old-guard managers who flung trout around the country like Johnny Appleseed on applejack are dead, and, with only a few exceptions, their replacements are fiercely committed to natives. But most of these young scientists lack Moore's and Kulp's communication skills. For instance, they attempt to generate excitement for their work by pointing out that native trout are "indicator species," thereby implying that their worth is right up there with, say, a $200 water-sampling kit.

Managers need to quit trying to figure out what native trout can do for us and attempt a new approach. Maybe it starts with a simple statement that these fish are priceless works of art that need to be protected for themselves, for the species that need them, and for people who cherish them for what they are and because they are.

On August 8 the Federation of Fly Fishers, at its annual conclave in Livingston, Montana, presented Ted Williams with its Aldo Leopold Award for "outstanding contributions to fisheries and land ecology."