![]() ![]() Coupled with hydrologic shifts from logging, and the loss of beaver, the watershed has lost much of its ability to store moisture and stream sections periodically dry up. Past cattle grazing may have reduced streamside willows, increasing bank instability.Ĭlimate change brought persistent drought periods. Roads begat more recreational traffic, with spirals of off-highway vehicle (OHV) trails, adding to the linear density and sediment produced. The Trout Creek watershed has been extensively logged, with large clearcuts, a web of logging roads, and inadequate streamside buffers. The loss of a native population of cutthroat trout calls for a post mortem-how could this have happened, after the species was designated as Threatened, a recovery strategy was implemented, and much fanfare was made of restoration efforts? Call it death by a thousand cuts, starting with the cruelest cut, timber harvest. It might be like Hemingway’s description of bankruptcy-gradual, then sudden. If it falls off the edge, this is extirpation in real time, not ancient history, but virtually overnight, with a timeline of just yesterday. The population may not be functionally extirpated, but is teetering. Unfortunately, contagion with genetic material from non-native rainbow trout was already well established.įurther investigations in 2021 by the Blackfoot Confederacy Tribal Council Native Trout Recovery project, using environmental DNA, have failed to find any strong evidence of pure-strain cutthroat trout in the watershed. By 2019, those hundreds had dwindled and TU caught only two from a subset of the same stream reaches. When government of Alberta biologists sampled the stream in 2015 they recorded “hundreds” of trout. They were still present in 2013 when Elliot Lindsay, a biologist with Trout Unlimited (TU), caught his first cutthroat trout there. Native cutthroat trout lingered, though declining, over the next century or so in this tiny stream that flows off the east side of the Porcupine Hills in southwestern Alberta. July, 1902.” And what a catch it was- a pile of native cutthroat trout, well over a hundred, and maybe 75 kilograms in total. The photograph, now in the Glenbow Archives, is labeled “Fishermen with catch, Trout Creek, Alberta. On a summer’s day an unknown photographer focused his Kodak Brownie on four adults and a child, out for a days fishing on Trout Creek. If the Trout Are Gone, Is It Still Trout Creek? ![]()
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