Grayling are artifacts
from the Pleistocene, little fish of big country with flanks of
pink and silver and sail-like dorsal fins trimmed with orange and
splashed with red, white, turquoise, green and neon blue.
Fluvial grayling, the race that dwells in rivers, are common in the
Arctic and sub-arctic, but in the Rocky Mountain West, they survive
in only 4 percent of their historical range, and they’re
barely hanging on in Montana’s Upper Big Hole River system.
Should they be allowed to die out? Yes, says the Bush
administration. No, says the Endangered Species Act, which requires
the federal government to recover “distinct population segments”
that persist outside a species’ principal range. The law is
very clear on this. There is no wiggle room.
Montana’s fluvial grayling were petitioned for listing under
the act in 1982 and 1991. Both times the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service determined that they did indeed constitute a “distinct
population segment.”
No legitimate researcher could
possibly have concluded otherwise. Montana’s fluvial grayling
population has been proven to be genetically unique. What’s
more, it is the only one that exists in rivers collected by the
Gulf of Mexico instead of the North Pacific, the Arctic Ocean or
Hudson Bay.
So the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service made
the segment a “candidate” for listing. That wasn’t good
enough for the Center for Biological Diversity and the Western
Watersheds Project, which sued the agency for clearly violating the
law. This action spawned a 2005 settlement in which the Fish and
Wildlife Service agreed to make a final determination on listing by
April 16, 2007.
Its determination — not to list —
stunned the scientific community, including the agency’s own
biologists. In explaining the flip-flop, the Department of Interior
laid down smoke like a Navy destroyer, contradicting itself
whenever it lapsed into intelligible diction. For example, after
citing “clear heritable differences” between fluvial
and adfluvial, or lake dwelling, grayling, after referencing a
study that demonstrated these differences and after acknowledging
that adfluvial grayling cannot survive in rivers, it stated that
fluvial grayling “do not differ markedly in genetic
characteristics from adfluvial populations.”
The
determination disgusted and dismayed legitimate fisheries
biologists inside and outside the Fish and Wildlife Service. Every
agency biologist who worked on grayling had strongly advocated
listing. That unanimous determination to list was reversed by
Interior’s Washington, D.C., office.
One political
appointee who loudly and aggressively inserted herself into the
process was Julie MacDonald, a civil engineer with no knowledge of
or interest in fish and wildlife. On April 30, 2007, she resigned
in disgrace after the Inspector General confirmed that she had
“been heavily involved with editing, commenting on, and
reshaping the Endangered Species Program’s scientific reports” and
that she “disclosed nonpublic information to private sector
sources” which were inconvenienced by and adamantly opposed to the
Endangered Species Act.
But the only thing aberrant about
this Interior official was that she got caught. At every turn the
Bush administration has contravened, circumvented and flouted the
Endangered Species Act, and it continues to do so.
By
writing off Montana’s fluvial grayling, the administration
has discarded one of the Endangered Species Act’s most
efficient tools–“Candidate Conservation Agreement
Assurances.” This is how it had worked: In exchange for such
habitat restoration as fencing cows from the river, installing fish
ladders and screens and plugging water diversions, ranchers
received a guarantee that they wouldn’t be charged with
violating the Endangered Species Act if the population segment got
listed. “There’s no hammer anymore,” complains Noah Greenwald
of the Center for Biological Diversity.
And Montana Trout
Unlimited director Bruce Farling makes this observation: “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.”
It is not just illegal for
the federal government to allow fluvial grayling to flicker out in
the contiguous states. It’s a heist of priceless jewels that
belong to the world.
There may be plenty of fluvial
grayling in the far north, but Aldo Leopold’s observation in
A Sand County Almanac applies equally to the West’s
population segments of this fish and of our great bear:
“Relegating grizzlies to Alaska is about like relegating
happiness to heaven; one may never get there.”
Ted Williams is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado. He is
conservation editor of Fly Rod & Reel magazine and lives in
Grafton, Massachusetts.
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