Groups Seek To Expand Bull Trout Protection Environmentalists Tell Federal Court Fish Endangered Throughout The West

A month after the federal government recommended protecting bull trout in the Columbia and Klamath river basins, environmentalists filed a motion Thursday seeking to protect the fish throughout the West.

“Once again, we are forced to litigate to gain the protection the bull trout so desperately needs to survive,” said Mike Bader, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, based in Missoula.

The fish thrives in cold, clear water. Its habitat has been affected by logging, grazing, mining and other development that has reduced shade and added silt to rivers.

The alliance and Friends of the Wild Swan, also based in Montana, filed the motion for summary judgment in U.S. District Court in Portland. They asked Judge Robert Jones to rule there was not enough evidence to separate bull trout into five distinct populations.

The groups want to protect bull trout in the Puget Sound and coastal areas of Washington state, the St. Mary River in northern Montana, and the Jarbidge River in northern Nevada.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created the five groups after reviewing pre-1994 data on the fish. In response to a lawsuit by the Montana groups, the agency proposed June 10 to list Columbia River Basin bull trout as threatened and Klamath River Basin trout as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act.

David Klinger, an agency spokesman in Portland, defended the proposal and said the Fish and Wildlife Service was merely following court orders.

“And that’s what these two environmental organizations asked us to do, too,” Klinger said.

“We were told to go back and re-analyze the data from 1994, but only use that data. We could not look at any new data. We did that, and we proposed the two trout populations for protection.”

Bader, however, said the groups never accepted the agency’s division of the fish into five populations.

Montana recently asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to discuss whether its bull trout restoration plan, which is nearly complete, could be made into a conservation agreement allowed under the Endangered Species Act to preserve state control, said Julie Lepeyre, natural resource policy adviser to Montana Gov. Marc Racicot.

“We’re keenly interested in the state maintaining authority of management over the species,” Lapeyre said. “It will affect a great part of Montana and our native fish populations mean a great deal to us.”

Klinger said the agency is collecting new data during public hearings on its proposal to list the two trout populations.

“If new data come in, or new information, that could influence the final outcome,” he said.