Review Team Wanted Higher Priority For Fish

A paper trail of memos and letters at the Fish and Wildlife Service shows an agency team reviewing the bull trout’s prospects wanted the fish given more immediate attention than it got.

The status-review team recommended in February 1994 that bull trout be made a “priority 2,” placing it in the “high” and “imminent” category on a scale of 1 to 12.

Fish and Wildlife ended up settling on a “priority 9” last June, finding a “moderate to low” threat to the fish’s existence.

A briefing statement prepared for the agency’s regional director in Portland on Feb. 22, 1994, said the Olympia-based review team “has determined that threats facing bull trout are imminent and high in magnitude.”

Carolyn Scafidi, a Fish and Wildlife Service official in charge of the original team, wrote in a Feb. 21, 1994, memo to panel members that “threats were clearly imminent.”

She advised a “priority 2.”

Wade Fredenberg, a member of the team and fish-production coordinator of the agency’s Creston Fish and Wildlife Center in Kalispell, Mont., said in a Feb. 23, 1994, memo to Scafidi that “bull trout are clearly in a state of decline rangewide.”

On the same day, team member Lori Nordstrom in Helena: “The ongoing cumulative effect of threats are high and imminent, supporting a listing priority of 2.”

Other memos raise concerns about securing “conservation agreements” with the Forest Service and other agencies to protect the bull trout short of a federal listing under the Endangered Species Act.

In a Nov. 3, 1993, letter to team members, Scafidi said thenRegional Director Marvin Plenart was pressing for such agreements.

“I think Marv expects a proposed rule to (list the fish) to go out, but is hopeful something can happen before a final is needed,’ she said.The bull trout already is extinct

in California, has been virtually eliminated from large river habitats in Oregon and has disappeared from a large portion of its historic range in the Columbia River Basin in Washington, Plenart said.

“The complexity of the threats facing bull trout and the lack of proven knowledge on how to alleviate those threats make the overall threat `high’ in magnitude,” Fredenberg wrote.