It’s an arduous hike to get into the headwaters of the North
Fork Frying Pan River, and the payoff is tremendous. Colorado River cutthroat
trout swim these waters, and I’ve gone there with some frequency over the
years, just over the mountain from my It’s a tiny creek, where wearing waders is over-dressing. This little brassy-green trout is stippled black, mostly on
the tail and back. Their bellies are a bruised orange, at least when they are
not spawning. It’s then that their undersides are crimson like freshly spilled
blood, alarming at first to look at. It’s alarming to me that these fish I like
to catch are swimming relics. Catching a About 150 pure populations of The troubles of this fish I catch close to home aren’t an
isolated tale. Western native trout through the 12-state West have similar
stories of peril. Their habitats have been altered against their favor. Their
waters were developed for irrigation, flood control, and hydropower. Nonnative
brown, brook and rainbow trout stocked on top of them in an age much different
than ours have now displaced the native fishes. Native trouts couldn’t compete
for food and space with the introduced trouts. They hybridized into mongrel
fish. The exotic whirling disease found its way into cutthroat waters.
Throughout the West native trouts retreated to isolated and fragmented
headwater streams, and live in meager remains of their natural distribution.
Nine cutthroat trouts through the Rockies and Sierras, and But help is on the way in a landscape-scale partnership, the
Western Native Trout Initiative, which blurs the lines of political boundaries
of states and federal and tribal lands and targets conservation resources where
they are needed for the benefit of native trout. In the past, trout conservation
itself has been fragmented, done piecemeal. The Western Native Trout Initiative
sharpens the focus of native trout conservation with multiple partners planning
and working together on common needs. The Wyoming Game and Fish Department’s
chief of its Fish Division, Mike Stone, chairs the Western Native Trout
Initiative. He leads an engaged and enthusiastic team of similarly placed
people in the western-state fish and game agencies, as well as biologists from
the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the U.S.Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land
Management. The Western Native Trout Initiative is only a few years old,
but it’s already paying off for native trout and the people who fish for them.
A multistate grant from the Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies
and the National Fish Habitat Plan funded habitat restoration projects from We’re making strides. But the western landscape has taken
200 years of steady degradation. We must be dedicated to a very long-term
commitment to staunch the losses to native trout and turn the decline the other
way. As climate changes and people need more water, western
native trout will be the “canaries” showing us that mountain ecosystems are
hurting. That will hurt economies, too. Economists estimate that trout anglers
in the For more information on the Western Native Trout Initiative
see: www.westernnativetrout.org. Mike Stempel is an
ardent angler, mountain biker and fiddle player. He’s also the assistant regional director – Fisheries, for the
This story originally
appeared in the Winter 2008 edition of Eddies (http://www.fws.gov/eddies/pdfs/EddiesWinter2008.pdf),
a
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