Who Needs Grayling?

By removing candidate status from fluvial grayling the Bush administration has damaged an important and effective tool of the Endangered Species Act called Candidate Conservation Agreement Assurances (CCAA). Basically it's a habitat conservation plan that happens before listing. In exchange for habitat restoration--plugging water diversions, fencing out cows, planting willows, digging stockwater wells, installing fish ladders and screens--landowners get a legally binding pledge that they won't be charged with a "taking" if grayling get listed. "I think there will be fewer people signing up to cooperate," remarks Noah Greenwald of the Center for Biological Diversity. "And what people are willing to do might be less, if it's something that impacts their bottom line--like leaving more water in the river. There's no hammer anymore."

While the biologists claim the determination hasn't hurt CCAA signup, Munday asserts that it has reduced funding. "So long as we had an imminent listing there was money through ear-marked appropriations or other kinds of routes," he says. "That appears to have rapidly diminished and may dry up entirely."

Montana Trout Unlimited director Bruce Farling weighs in as follows: "The recent Fish and Wildlife Service decision indicates that the administration's hatred of the Endangered Species Act is so extreme that it is willing to throw out promising examples of how the law can work for everyone--landowners, wildlife enthusiasts and agencies. . . . The question I've been asking is: If the fluvial grayling isn't a candidate anymore, how can a CCAA apply? The agencies say it does, but they haven't been able to explain to me why."

Still, Farling thinks the hammer may not have entirely disappeared. "I thought all the ranchers would bail," he says. "But I was at a meeting with them the other night, and they're saying, 'Yeah there's a decision not to list, but we don't think it's going to last.' They know it was a BS finding and that it will come back and bite them. We're working with these guys. I still think this CCAA thing can work."

He may be right. At least before grayling lost their candidate status the ranchers were doing more for them than the Bush administration (judging from performances with other species) would have done if they'd been listed. Thirty-one landowners had signed up 151,000 acres. "This thing has just taken off," says Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks grayling biologist Jim Magee. "The focus now is not just on the supply of water but on the condition of the stream. The number of projects is huge. We've even got a brood willow stock. We take clippings along the Big Hole, then raise them in the state nursery."

In addition, Magee and his colleagues have implemented an aggressive grayling transplant program. Now that they've gone to instream egg incubation they're getting good young-of-the-year survival in the Ruby River. There may even be some natural reproduction, but Magee won't know until he pulls the incubators--probably after one more year. And he reports good survival (as well as evidence of limited natural reproduction) on the north fork of the Sun River.

As ranchers go, CCAA participants along the Big Hole are superstars. But good ranching in semi desert is an oxymoron. For one thing, most watershed landowners have gone to a water-profligate method of hay production whereby they basically dump the river on their fields for the whole growing season, rendering the earth so soggy it no longer produces grass but sedge, an inferior forage. Fifteen years ago they would put up their hay, then quit irrigating in early to mid-July. Moreover, like all Western ranchers, they're working under an archaic water law based on "first in time, first in right" and enacted when no one cared about native fish. If you don't use the water you're allotted, you lose it. So if a rancher needs 6 cubic feet per second (cfs) and his water right entitles him to 10, he's apt to dump the extra 4 on his fields just to keep it from "going to waste."

Despite all the great work that's going on along the Big Hole, everyone involved needs someone like Jon Marvel, director of the Western Watersheds Project, to get in their faces with a reality check. He says this: "Water is a finite resource in the Big Hole valley, especially in August. I'm skeptical of these projects that take money from everybody else in America to try to save the private irrigation of hay. The public needs to consider the nature of livestock production as the proximate cause of the decline of ecosystems everywhere in the West because it dominates the landscape in such a way that wildlife and fisheries will suffer. Livestock production is the culture of death and extinction in the arid West. It is incompatible with the survival of species like the grayling."

And Pat Munday adds: "According to fisheries biologists, the upper wetted perimeter at Wisdom is 160 cfs. At 160 cfs, grayling recruitment and survival is rated at 100. . . . At 20 cfs, grayling recruitment and survival will be rated at -100. At this level, some grayling will be able to move to cold water refugia, but many will perish due to lack of cover, exposure to predators (such as pelicans), and high water temperatures."

As I write this--only four days into the summer of 2007--the flow at Wisdom is 19 cfs, and the river is in free fall. Last autumn Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks survey crews could find only 40 adult fish in an 80-mile section of river. This means it may already be too late for the Big Hole grayling.