Agency maps bull trout habitat involving 10% of region's rivers
November 15,
JONATHAN BRINCKMAN, The Oregonian

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday proposed designating 10 percent of the rivers and streams in Oregon, Washington, Montana and Idaho as critical habitat for bull trout, a fish it declared threatened in 1998 after losing a four-year legal battle with a Montana environmental group.

The proposal would only affect federal actions and agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, and it would not bring new restrictions to private landowners. The Endangered Species Act already makes it a federal crime to harm a bull trout or damage its habitat.

But Thursday's proposal is sweeping, comprising 18,471 miles of the Northwest's rivers and streams, but only up to the riverbanks. Bull trout are known to live in about 85 percent of those waterways, so 15 percent of river segments not previously considered within the fish's range would win protection.

Any federal project within such critical habitat would not proceed without approval from the Fish and Wildlife Service. A federal project is anything that spends federal money, from highways to logging to smaller state improvements that include federal funding. Though such projects would occur on land -- technically outside the designated habitat -- they could affect river or stream quality, triggering review.

The habitat proposal is the latest development in a long battle over the bull trout, a predatory fish that lives only in clear, cold water. Bull trout have been reduced to about 50 percent of their historic range in the Northwest. The fish was listed as threatened when two small Montana environmental groups, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Wild Swan, won a protracted lawsuit against the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Critical habitat was designated in just two of five areas where bull trout are protected: the vast Columbia River Basin, which covers much of the four Northwest states; and the much smaller Klamath River Basin in Southern Oregon. The Fish and Wildlife Service next year will designate critical habitat in the remaining three areas: Puget Sound, northern Montana's St. Mary-Belly River Basin and southern Idaho's Jarbridge River Basin.

Neither industry groups nor conservationists are happy with the habitat designations.

The decision brings more bureaucratic delays to logging without helping fish, said Chris West, vice president of the American Forest Resource Council, a Portland organization that represents the timber industry.

"Critical habitat tends to cause federal agencies to avoid management decisions because they know they will face extra scrutiny and review," West said.

Kaz Thea, executive director of the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, called Thursday's proposal too limited in scale and said it fails to connect isolated bull trout populations in a consolidated habitat.

"You have to link up places where bull trout live," she said. She also criticized the agency for proposing that only wet areas of bodies of water be designated as critical habitat, and not the banks and adjacent lands that drain into them.

The Fish and Wildlife Service on Thursday also released a draft recovery plan for bull trout in three of the five areas: the Columbia River Basin, the Klamath River Basin and the St. Mary-Belly River Basin. Recovery plans outline actions that would aid the fish but contain no measures required by law. Those plans were developed by 24 bull trout recovery teams of federal, state, tribal and private biologists working with representatives of local watersheds, private landowners, industry and conservation organizations.

"Together we can recover this once abundant fish," said Wendi Weber, chief of endangered species for the service's Pacific Region. "Bull trout are a good indicator of water quality. If bull trout like the water, you know it is good."

Jonathan Brinckman: 503-221-8190; jbrinckman@news.oregonian.com