California trout are in hot water
Just imagine it. The San Benito River is a year-round waterway,
shaded by trees that were already standing when the first Europeans
beheld it. San Juan Creek flows steadily, and each year salmon
return to drop their eggs.
Those fortunate enough to have permission from local ranchers
fish Lone Tree Creek, bringing home limits of 50 trout.
California trout are in hot water
Just imagine it. The San Benito River is a year-round waterway, shaded by trees that were already standing when the first Europeans beheld it. San Juan Creek flows steadily, and each year salmon return to drop their eggs.
Those fortunate enough to have permission from local ranchers fish Lone Tree Creek, bringing home limits of 50 trout.
That’s no pipe dream, but the reality of life in San Benito County within the living memory of old-timers.
Set that past in the context of a future, a future in which most of California’s native salmon and trout species face extinction.
The state’s leading salmon expert predicted the latter outcome unless California moves quickly to provide adequate water and habitat.
Twenty of the state’s 31 trout and salmon species are in sharp decline, according to Peter Moyle of U.C. Davis.
Moyle’s findings are the result of a study commissioned by California Trout, a sportsmen’s advocacy group that is using the study to try to convince legislators and the governor to help the state Department of Fish and Game better carry out its mission of conserving stocks of wild fish.
The prized fish are reeling from the combined body blows of a network of dams and poor controls over agriculture, logging, grazing, mining and development within their habitat areas.
“Our fish need cold, clean water to survive, but they’re getting less and less of it,” Moyle said in an article published last week in the San Francisco Chronicle. “Dams block access. Climate change is now looming to exacerbate the threat and it increases the urgency. All of these things are pushing our fish toward extinction.”
Like canaries in a coalmine, trout and salmon are strong indicators of the larger health of the ecosystem. A healthy population of salmonids means things are probably pretty good in the larger picture, too.
Already, the bull trout has disappeared from California, not seen since the 1970s.
The solution will not come from the state Department of Fish and Game. DFG traditionally derives its budget from fees collected through hunting and fishing licenses. As California’s population grows more urban, those “consumptive” outdoors activities are growing less popular, slowly starving DFG of its resources.
DFG retains its legal mandate to manage and conserve fish and wildlife, even as it lacks the tools to do so.
Just as wild salmon and trout have nearly disappeared from San Benito County waters within a generation, the larger catastrophe could visit itself upon the entire state within the next generation.
But there is cause for hope. Two preliminary agreements were reached earlier this month to remove four dams on the Klamath River, and in a separate case, a court settlement will put water back in the San Joaquin River, possibly bringing back the spring salmon run that was rendered extinct with the construction of the Friant Dam east of Fresno in the 1940s.
Volunteers are seeing success in re-establishing the California golden trout to the southern Sierra and the Goose Lake redband trout near the Oregon border.
It can be done, if only we care enough to do so.
