Paiute Cutthroat Trout (Oncorhynchus clarki seleniris)

There is naturally a special fascination for sportsmen in the prospect of trying for an example of particularly rare and beautiful game species.

The Paiute Cutthroat Trout survived in only a portion of a single remote stream in the High Sierras, Silver King Creek, (and transplants have been made to only handful of other locations), so Paiute Cutthroats do not grow to a very large size, but with respect to beauty and rarity, they inevitably rank at the top of the heap of potential trophies for the trout fisherman. I say potential, because it has not been legal to fish for Paiute Cutthroats for many decades. Occasionally, one is caught, photographed, and released with special permission by some writer or fisheries biologist.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday on the ironic situation in which environmentalist extremism on the part of two busybodies, has, for more than a decade, successfully blocked efforts by the California fish and game department to restore the rare Paiute Cutthroat to its original home range on the lower portion of Silver King Creek.

In 1912, a young shepherd named Joe Jaunsaras wanted to fish the fishless upper [portion of Silver King] [C]reek, historical records show, so he carried some Paiute trout up in a can. The fish still exist in that upper stretch of the creek.

He unwittingly saved the Paiute trout from extinction. ... State officials later put other trout species into the Paiute trout’s old home. The more-aggressive new fish ate some Paiute trout and hybridized with others. By the 1940s, Paiute trout were gone from the nine-mile stretch of creek.

There are now fewer than 2,000 adult Paiute trout… The fish has been classified as “threatened” on the federal Endangered Species List since 1975.

California’s fish and game department started working on plans to restore the Paiute trout to their old range in the 1990s.

Then Ms. Erman, the bug researcher, found out. At a water conference in Las Vegas around 2000, someone—she doesn’t remember who—mentioned a plan to use the rotenone toxin in Silver King Creek. Ms. Erman says she knew there were few studies on whether that would kill rare insects. She talked to others who were skeptical of using poisons in the wilderness.

Ms. Erman came to believe that angling enthusiasts were driving the plan at the expense of other species.

Mr. Somer of the state fish and game department says a recreational Paiute fishery could be a “benefit” of a successful restoration, though he says the creek may never open to fishing. ...

Ms. Erman joined forces with environmental lawyers, who in 2003 sued in federal court to stop the trout plan because of their concerns over using rotenone. The suit delayed the plan, but state officials got it back on track until Ms. Erman and her allies in 2004 successfully lobbied a water board near Silver King Creek to halt the plan. The state water board overturned the decision.

The following year Ms. Erman’s allies at Californians for Alternatives to Toxics filed new state and federal suits. They won a federal judgment forcing the state to modify the Paiute trout plan by doing more studies.

The trout plan was again on track in 2010, when the state and federal agencies completed final reports in preparation of poisoning the creek.

But a wet winter caused delays and the insect allies kept litigating. In September, U.S. District Judge Frank Damrell issued an injunction on the plan, in part because it “left native invertebrate species out of the balance.”

The plan, wrote the judge, was “failing to consider the potential extinction of native invertebrate species.”

Nancy Erman, a retired invertebrate researcher from the University of California-Davis, and Ann McCampbell, a Santa Fe, New Mexico physician who appears publicly representing the Multiple Chemical Sensitivities Task Force of New Mexico (a group comprised essentially of herself) are waging a campaign against the use of rotenone and antimycin, the piscicides that would be used to eliminate hybrid and competing trout species in order to allow the reintroduction to their native stretch of stream of one of the rarest and most beautiful trout species in the Western Hemisphere.

Erman and McCampbell, with inadvertent comedy, have actually successfully combined left-wing egalitarianism on the level of Natural Orders, essentially winning in court by accusing California of discrimination in favor of vertebrates (!) with their environmentalist fanatical opposition to chemical piscicides and their Puritan hostility to the field sport of angling.

Looking at all this from the viewpoint of democracy, the state of California sells approximately two million fishing licenses a year. The American Sportfishing Association, as of 2006, estimated that 30,000,000 Americans bought fishing licenses each year, but that twice that number actually fished in the course of a five year period.

All two million licensed California anglers and roughly 60,000,000 American anglers contribute money via license fees and excise taxes of equipment for fisheries management and have a legitimate interest in the perservation of the Paiute Cutthroat and the eventual creation over time of a highly restricted, catch-and-release fishery allowing Americans to interact with this rare and charismatic trout.

But our system of laws has become so sclerotic, so open to manipulation by cranks, extremists, and special interests that two malevolent old crackpots can impose their will against the desires and interests of millions upon millions.

Normal Americans, in this particular case, as in so many others, find themselves simply run right over by crazy people utilizing the enabling provisions of feel-good legislation, like the Endangered Species Act, which the majority allowed to be passed into law.

We need to modify and repeal that kind of enabling legislation and we need to pass laws applying some kind of scrutiny to the deceptive fund raising and the lobbying and litigating activities of radical fringe groups attempting to exercise extravagant kinds of power at the expense of ordinary people.

Prospect Park

Anatole France remarked sardonically that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike to sleep under bridges.” In Brooklyn, it forbids both evidently also to harvest fish or game in Brooklyn’s 585-acre Prospect Park.

A year ago, federal agents gassed 400 Canada geese resident in the park, which were considered to represent a hazard to planes using nearby La Guardia Airport. They had their reasons. In January of 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 ran into a flock of geese and would up crash landing in the Hudson River.

But can New York turn a blind eye as former Lehman and Bear Stearns executives now also resident in the park reduce the nuisance population of grey squirrels, pigeons, and geese or take panfish from the lake? Perish, forbid.

The New York Post reports that what my friend from Yale, Mr. Brewer, describes as “an awesome locavore experiment in living off the land” was rudely interrupted by “spoilsport cops.”

Cops have busted a group of oddball poachers in Prospect Park — a band of vagrants that was trapping and eating ducks, squirrels and pigeons.

Parks officers wrote four tickets — two for killing wildlife and two for illegal fishing — totaling $2,100 in fines during a two-day period last week. ...

“This is a dodgy group,” said park-goer Peter Colon, who spotted one of the men catching a pigeon while his friend started a fire. “They are the most threatening people in the park.”

The disheveled — and possibly homeless — tribe in question uses “makeshift” fishing poles and traps to catch the critters, then grills them over the fire, according to park watchdogs.

“One woman uses a net to bag the ducks,” said wildlife advocate Johanna Clearfield.

The kind of person you or I would call a busybody or general nuisance always gets promoted in the conventional journalistic parlance of our time to some form of “advocate” or “activist.”

Lots of luck collecting those fines, New York City. I bet the hobos used the tickets to light their evening cook fires.

Matthew Ridley, in the Wall Street Journal’s Weekend Review, takes the occasion of the recent finding of an array of a very sophisticated chipped-stone fishing implements on Southern California’s Channel Islands to propose the idea that it was exploitation of maritime food-gathering opportunities that really constituted the evolutionary leap that made mankind human.

Last week archaeologists working on the Channel Islands of California announced that they had found delicate stone tools of remarkable antiquity—possibly as old as 13,000 years. These are among the oldest artifacts ever discovered in North America. To judge by the types of tool and bone, there was a people living there who relied heavily on abalone, seals, cormorants, ducks and fish for food.

This discovery fits a pattern. From the stone age to ancient Greece to the Maya to modern Japan, the most technologically advanced and economically successful human beings have often been seafarers and fish-eaters—and they still are, as the latest tsunami reminds us. Indeed, it may not be going too far to describe our species as a maritime ape.

Ridley might have put it slightly differently. He might have suggested that it was the discovery of fishing that made mankind human, and he could then have gone on to expand that theory by noting that the invention of the fishhook directly paralleled the invention of the arrowhead and proceeding to argue that it may have been the intellectual challenge resulting from our more northerly contact with the salmonids that deepened our intelligence, leading to the creation of artificial lures and fly fishing. The maritime ape ultimately evolved into the cultivated and civilized man and the dry fly purist.

Ogden Pleissner, Dry Fly Fishing for Salmon

Brook trout fishing, filmed by F.S. Armitage on June 6, 1900 somewhere along the Grand Trunk Railroad. 1:15 video.
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Who should replace Dennis Blair as National Intelligence Director? No one, proposes John Noonan at the Weekly Standard:

Unnecessary bureaucracy has a venomous effect on the national security establishment, whether it’s infantry or intelligence. The director of national intelligence, which has ballooned to a 1500-man supporting office, was a top down solution to a bottom up problem.

Admiral Blair was a casualty of Intelligence Community turf wars. Closing the DNI office would reduce unnecessary conflicts and duplication of effort. It’s too logical a course of action to be given serious consideration most likely though.
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Bruce Fleming says that standards at US service academies have been lowered for affirmative action and to allow academy teams to compete in the NCAA top divisions. He thinks standards should be restored or all the service academies closed down.
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Robin Hanson observes a unidirectional dynamic at work in progressive statism.

[I]n any area where we let humans do things, every once in a while there will be a big screwup; that is the sort of creatures humans are. And if you won’t decrease regulation without a screwup but will increase it with a screwup, then you have a regulation ratchet: it only moves one way. So if you don’t think a long period without a big disaster calls for weaker regulations, but you do think a particular big disaster calls for stronger regulation, well then you might as well just strengthen regulations lots more right now, even without a disaster. Because that is where your regulation ratchet is heading.

What if you can’t imagine ever wanting to weaken a regulation, just because it was strong and you’d gone a long time without a big disaster? Well then you apparently want the maximum possible regulation, which is probably to just basically outlaw that activity. And if that doesn’t seem like the right level of regulation to you, well then maybe you should reconsider your ratchety regulation intuitions.

Hat tip to the News Junkie.
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Ann Althouse chides the Washington Post: If you’re going to criticize the new social studies curriculum adopted by the Texas Board of Education, you’d better quote it or link it, not paraphrase it inaccurately.

Winslow Homer, Boy Fishing, 1892

Presidential Memorandum, April 16, 2010:

Today… we are losing touch with too many of the places and proud traditions that have helped to make America special. Farms, ranches, forests, and other valuable natural resources are disappearing at an alarming rate. Families are spending less time together enjoying their natural surroundings. Despite our conservation efforts, too many of our fields are becoming fragmented, too many of our rivers and streams are becoming polluted, and we are losing our connection to the parks, wild places, and open spaces we grew up with and cherish. Children, especially, are spending less time outside running and playing, fishing and hunting, and connecting to the outdoors just down the street or outside of town. ...

it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Establishment.

(a) There is established the America’s Great Outdoors Initiative (Initiative), to be led by the Secretaries of the Interior and Agriculture, the Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) and implemented in coordination with the agencies listed in section 2(b) of this memorandum. The Initiative may include the heads of other executive branch departments, agencies, and offices (agencies) as the President may, from time to time, designate.

(b) The goals of the Initiative shall be to:

(i) Reconnect Americans, especially children, to America’s rivers and waterways, landscapes of national significance, ranches, farms and forests, great parks, and coasts and beaches by exploring a variety of efforts, including:

(A) promoting community-based recreation and conservation, including local parks, greenways, beaches, and waterways;

(B) advancing job and volunteer opportunities related to conservation and outdoor recreation; and

(C) supporting existing programs and projects that educate and engage Americans in our history, culture, and natural bounty.

(ii) Build upon State, local, private, and tribal priorities for the conservation of land, water, wildlife, historic, and cultural resources, creating corridors and connectivity across these outdoor spaces, and for enhancing neighborhood parks; and determine how the Federal Government can best advance those priorities through public private partnerships and locally supported conservation strategies.

(iii) Use science-based management practices to restore and protect our lands and waters for future generations.

Barack Obama thinks America’s children are not hunting and fishing enough? And there’s going to be a federal initiative to do various things about this?

Visions of federally-grant-funded programs hiring aging boffers to take a boy fishing swim before my eyes. I should get one of those How-To-Write-Federal-Grant-Proposals books and start a corporation, rather like ACORN, which would recruit the kinds of individuals my mother used to refer to uncomplimentarily as “woods rats,” the kind of guys who’d rather fish and hunt and drink than work, and sign them on board to take under-Field-Sports-privileged youths out bluegill fishing and bunny shooting. I know some of just the bars to look for my first staffers in.

The idea of a democrat administration ponying up to pay for the gasoline, live bait, cartridges, (and beer) required to expose America’s youth to the out-of-doors is wonderfully amusing.

Hat tip to Peter Wilson via the News Junkie

What happens if PETA gets to write our fisheries regulations?

Probably not, but…

Last October, Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for the well-known tackle company Shimano, warned that President Obama was rapidly developing a fisheries policy report intended to serve as the basis for an executive order that would apply to both saltwater and freshwater fisheries and which would potentially have grave and very far reaching implications. People at Shimano were alarmed at observing the power of influence over the report of radical environmental groups and found themselves and the recreational angling community shut out.

Dave Pfeiffer, President of Shimano American Corporation explained, “In spite of extensive submissions from the recreational fishing community to the Task Force in person and in writing, they failed to include any mention of the over one million jobs or the 6o million anglers which may be affected by the new policies coast to coast. Input from the environmental groups who want to put us off the water was adopted into the report verbatim – the key points we submitted as an industry were ignored.”

The Obama administration has ended public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.

This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.

Fishing industry insiders, who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force, had grown concerned that the public input would not be taken into account.

“When the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) completed their successful campaign to convince the Ontario government to end one of the best scientifically managed big-game hunts in North America (spring bear), the results of their agenda had severe economic impacts on small family businesses and the tourism economy of communities across northern and central Ontario,” said Phil Morlock, director of environmental affairs for Shimano.

“Now we see NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) and the administration planning the future of recreational fishing access in America based on a similar agenda of these same groups and other Big Green anti-use organizations, through an Executive Order by the President. ...

Led by NOAA’s Jane Lubchenco, the task force has shown no overt dislike of recreational angling. As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled “Transition Green” (sic) shortly after Obama was elected in 2008.

What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper, according to Morlock.

In late summer, just after the administration created the task force, these groups produced “Recommendations for the Adoption and Implementation of an Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes National Policy.” This document makes repeated references to “overfishing,” but doesn’t reference recreational angling, its importance, and its benefits, both to participants and the resource.

Additionally, some of these same organizations have revealed their anti-fishing bias with their attempts to ban tackle containing lead in the United States and Canada.

Also, recreational angling and commercial fishing have been lumped together as harmful to the resource, despite protests by the angling industry.

Morlock’s evidence of collusion—the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force’s recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. ...

Morlock fears that “what we’re seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There’s no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate.

“Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It’s all just an excuse to put us off the water.”

I looked at the National Resources Defense Council Transition to Green document. It certainly contained plenty of environmental empire building and a very lengthy list of funding requests, but I did not see any specific plan to ban sport fishing.

I think anything that radical is still a long way off in the United States, even for the Obama Administration. But a ban on angling, following the Hunt Ban, is definitely on the table in Britain.

PETA has a front group specifically targeting both commercial and recreational fishing.

The folks at Shimano were quite right though in recognizing that the development of federal land and water management policies hand in glove with radical environmentalist and strongly anti-field sports organizations is extremely dangerous to the interests of sport. Changing the basis of wildlife management from a focus on recreational use and harvest to a junk science-laden ultra-preservationist agenda would have terrible practical effects and there are a thousand ways that minor regulations can be crafted on the basis of one pretext or another to cripple little by little anything the left is not able immediately to openly ban.

Signing Keep America Fishing’s petition is not a bad idea.

Cameron Mortenson, who (there’s no accounting for tastes) actually likes fiberglass fly rods, has a posting (with a slideshow of photos) on the late Robert Traver (John D. Voelker)’s camp at Frenchman’s Pond in winter.

He quotes Voelker, describing a childhood visit in winter to the camp:

I went along on a few of those outings as a kid, and usually wound up skiing around outside while the laughter echoed out of the cabin. I would busy myself by looking at the pond and surrounding woods. Even in the dead of winter the pond would never freeze completely over. Open spots would reveal where a spring bubbled up from below. I would mark those spots in my mind and revisit them on the hot days of late summer. There I would throw hopper patterns with my 8’glass Fenwick six weight that my Grandfather bought me at the local sporting goods store. On occasion, I would be rewarded for my craftiness and provoke a swirl from a large Brookie that had claimed the spot to fin in the cool water.”

Hat tip to Brad Reiter.

Via a bamboo fly rod list:

T’WAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CADDIS
BY
RICHARD FRANK

He then mounted his sled and he flew out of sight
Shouting, “Merry Caddis to trout and to all a good night!”

Hat tip to Wilmer Price.

Correction: Guide Tim Roller holding new world record Brown Trout

A potential world record 41 lb, 7 1/4 oz. (19.1 k.), 43.75” (1.11 meter) Brown Trout (currently Salmo trutta, formerly Salmo fario) was caught on Wednesday in Michigan’s Manistee River.

Thomas Healy of Rockford, Michigan was fishing a crankbait (a plug with a lip causing it to dive when retrieved, “cranked,” i.e reeled in) using a spincasting rod and reel.

The previous record Brown Trout weighed 40 lb. 4 oz (18.26 k.) and was caught in 1992 on the Little Red River in Arkansas by Howard Collins.

Healy was being guided by Tim Roller of Ultimate Outfiteers.

The fish was weighed and measured by two Michigan state biologists.

Ludington Daily News

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Mr. Healy holding the gigantic trout
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Thanks to commenter Amy of Riverside Charters for correcting the top photo ID.

11 Year old Jessica Wanstall of Sittingbourne, Kent, on vacation with her father in Spain, set a new world record for a freshwater fish caught by an angler aged 16 and under, by landing a nearly 9’ (2.74 m), 13 stone 8lb (193lb – 87.7 k) Wels catfish (Silurus glanis) from the Ebro River. The catfish was considerably larger than the young angler, but was defeated in 20 minutes.

Daily Mail

Telegraph

Lt. Gen. H.G. Martin, in his memoir of soldiering and sport in pre-War British India, Sunset From the Main (1951), recalls an unpleasant encounter on angling expedition to the Simla Hills in search of mahseer.

The steep path dropped down to the bed of the gorge past brakes of thorn and matted evergreen and across unexpected lawns where the encircling cactus reared its knotted candleabras, rigid and grotesque as submarine coral-beds. In these occasional clearings troops of brown monkeys basked, scratching in the sunshine: plebeian monkeys, vulgar, thieving, shameless, who lowered and gibbered as we passed. I do not love the brown monkey. Who has ever seen him look pleasant? A typical, politically minded proletarian, he has the Communist’s capacity for hating all creation.

New 53 minute video with Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Russell Chatham, and the late Richard Brautigan. Music by Jimmy Buffet.

Guy de la Vadene was one of the film makers.

Tip from Steve Bodio.

Wife Gerri Carlos wraps a fly rod, as semi-recumbent Morgan looks on through special glasses

Forbes describes how Tom Morgan has managed to overcome MS to continue to produce state-of-the-art custom fly rods.

In his case, the “thought rod” metaphor takes on another meaning. Considered by many to be the world’s finest living fly-rod-maker—a craft that relies almost solely on feel—the 67-year-old Morgan has not been able to cast, or even hold, one of his creations for more than a decade.

Morgan has multiple sclerosis, a still mystifying degenerative disease that occurs when a mix-up in nerve signal transmissions causes the immune system to attack the insulating sheaths around the nerves. Morgan has a particularly debilitating form of MS and has extremely limited movement below his neck. He is confined to his bed and to a high-tech wheelchair with a headrest, a reclining contraption that resembles a dental examination chair. Morgan’s thought rods are a pure extension of his mind.

Read the whole thing.

Tom Morgan Rodsmiths

Think you can cast?

0:57 video

I bet you didn’t even know that there was a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or that it had a National Marine Fisheries Service. I didn’t myself.

There’ve been so many complaints about the weather recently that you can tell they’ve been doing a lousy job of administering the oceans and the atmosphere, and that Marine Fisheries Service has never once delivered fish and chips to my house. But it is clear those federal bureaucrats in charge of the waters and the air and lords of the fish that swim in the sea have other ways of occupying their time.

They’re now proposing to license sport fishing in the ocean. They don’t even really want the money. The states get to keep it in return for selling the licenses. But that way, they can keep better track of us, you see.

The Boston Globe has the story.

The only thing anyone’s ever needed to sportfish off New England’s coast is a rod, reel, and good luck.

Now, the more than 2.5 million people who fish for fun here will probably need a license.

The federal agency that manages fishing announced yesterday that it intends to require most saltwater anglers to register before fishing begins in 2009 and plans to start charging for the privilege by 2011.

Fishery officials have grown increasingly concerned about how many fish the nation’s recreational fishermen reel in from the ocean each year.

“This will lead to better stock assessments and more effective regulations to rebuild and manage these valuable fish,” said Jim Balsiger, acting assistant administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries Service.

The rule will mean most fishermen – whether fishing from a dock, beach, or a boat – will have to have a permit. State waters within 3 miles of shore aren’t normally covered by federal rules. But the new regulation would apply to fishermen who might catch any species that travels between fresh and saltwater, such as striped bass, one of the most popular New England sportfish.

Progressive states, like California, have already thought of this.