Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.
In my eighth decade of floating down the river of life I realize my voyage has been interwoven with bull trout. I’ve grown old with these sinister looking, torpedo-shaped native fish of the Eastern Slopes and bigger rivers. My thoughts have gently stirred the silt of memories, helping me recall the role bull trout have played in my life and career.
I originally knew them as Dolly Varden, a passing reference to a gaily dressed young woman and especially her pink-spotted calico dress in one of Charles Dicken’s novels. In the taxonomic renaming of this char species to bull trout (based on a large head and jaws) I sense the loss of a quaint description for Alberta’s population.
My first encounter was as a child on the Tay River, a Clearwater River tributary, looking down into the depths of a pool beneath a jumbled logjam. In my child’s memory that first bull trout seemed as large as I was and the image has been locked in my mind ever since. Now in that river the trout and its progeny are mostly ghosts, the fate of many of my early memories.
As a young teenager in a hunting camp set on the banks of the Clearwater River, across from the mouth of Rocky Creek, I was sent to get a pail of water from a clear spring. A moose had been shot the previous day and its immense liver was cooling in the cold water. I was startled to see a bull trout tugging on the liver in water so shallow its dorsal fin and back were exposed to the air. My presence did not seem to faze its determination to liberate the liver. My sense of bull trout as summit predators started to jell.
In my early career as a biologist I inventoried trout populations and their habitats in many Eastern Slopes streams. In preparation for those surveys I read the early reports of R.B. Miller, Buck Cunningham, and others. Later, comparing the scant historical information with my data a glimmer developed that the benchmarks of these streams had shifted, especially for bull trout. In many streams the remnant bull trout population was a mere shadow of a former time and the vacancy in other streams was ghostly.
This growing awareness of the plight of the species began a focused status review involving provincial biologists and conservation groups. For my part I decided to compare the historical state of the species with the then current (early 1980s) range and population levels in southwestern Alberta. I’d hoped this would spark and provide a starting point for recovery efforts.
To compare where we were with where we are requires information. But little historical biological data on bull trout existed and even that was fragmented, unsystematically collected, and provided a poor picture of the past status.
My search for the past led me to old photographic snapshots in provincial, municipal, and private sources. I searched dusty historical records for glimpses of former fish presence and abundance. Most useful, as it turned out, were multiple interviews with elderly anglers whose memories were sharp, accurate, and revealing. They recalled, in vivid detail their angling memories in the waters of southwestern Alberta from the 1920s to the mid 1960s.
All those sources told of an unfamiliar world to me, one of big wild and an exuberance of trout. This profoundly reshaped my view of resource management to thinking about where we came from, not just where we are. I was sad I would never see that past world, in the way those others had. But I was grateful for the glimpses offered.
In particular was some work on radiotelemetry to assess bull trout losses from an irrigation diversion. Trout were trapped and had radio tags inserted to track their movements. We worked cooperatively with the Kainai tribe, some of whose members monitored the fish trap. In casual conversation I was surprised to find that they were all part of the Mamoyiksi (Fish Eaters) clan.
This was one of those incredible epiphanies, bringing the distant past into focus. I learned from Elliot Fox, himself a member of the Mamoyiksi clan, that their ancestors had subsisted on bull trout probably in winters when bison and other game were scarce. To me this spoke to an abundance and wide distribution, with a history of use of bull trout only glimpsed at by later European observers.
This was to change and quickly with settlement. In 1890, North West Mounted Police Officer McIllree commented on the changes he had witnessed in fish stocks since he came with the initial troop in 1876. His response, from the Calgary NWMP post records was, “When I fished this section about fourteen years ago, the rivers and streams teemed with fish. Now, it is very different.” That a decline in fish populations was observed so early suggests the beginning of a negative trend that persists to current times.
Photographic evidence exists of these earlier times. In the Glenbow Archives is an 1893 image of two anglers on Callum Creek, a small tributary to the Oldman River. Arrayed around them were no less than 60 trout, several of which were bull trout. Today, there are no bull trout in Callum Creek.
As part of A.O. Wheeler’s provincial boundary survey in southwestern Alberta, one of the crew, John Leather Stelfox, fished the Castle River in 1915. His remembrances were later recorded by Henry Stelfox. He caught bull trout over 90 centimetres long (on a hand line with a large treble hook baited with pork) and records feeding the survey party of six hungry men on one trout with some left over. The thought of such big trout gives pause.
The elderly anglers I interviewed spoke of a landscape with few roads, streams difficult to access, and their impression was of a virtually untouched angling paradise. There is no doubt the landscapes were changing with settlement and development but enough of the wild trout cornucopia remained to awe these early anglers.
As examples, a 1920 photograph showed an immense bull trout caught at the confluence of Mill Creek and the Castle River that must have weighed over eight kilograms. One from Allison Creek, a Crowsnest River tributary, nearly dwarfs the young boy holding it. The memories of this group of elderly anglers were not just “fish stories.”
With development has come the dimming of paradise. The rate and scale of changes started slow and then sped up dramatically. Threats now are cumulative in scope as the weight of development has changed watershed integrity and resilience, sometimes irrevocably. The syndrome of shifting benchmarks haunts us, rarely acknowledging the changes and assuming all is still well in the fish department. It isn’t!
Bull trout are now a Threatened species, extirpated from places like the upper Crowsnest watershed, missing from the lower reaches of the big rivers, and shrinking in the upper tributaries. My review showed a 69 per cent decline in bull trout distribution in southwestern Alberta. Of 45 streams and rivers that had historic populations, in 17 of these bull trout have gone missing. And this was just to the early 1980s. A current evaluation would likely show more losses.
Growing old with bull trout has been a journey of discovery, tinged with sorrow. Their presence signalled much about the habitats they chose in watersheds morphing from melting glaciers. In astonishing ways these fish are superbly adapted to a cold, sometimes raging, turbulent, and unforgiving environment.
As I watch populations decline and slip away from us it’s obvious we are making their habitats warmer, dirtier, simpler, and more fragmented. In many ways there is a parallel to the habitats we require, and the changes we exert on them.
As I look back, even my past experiences seem so long ago. From my connections with bull trout and before, it makes me wonder about the future. In just a few decades, maybe sooner, the world will turn over to a new cast of characters.
Some of the inheritors of the world are in school, some not yet born. How will they know of an aquatic world that exists in fragmented pieces or only on yellowing sheets of paper and fading celluloid frames? Will anyone look back and wonder about the past and possibly the missing wild world of amazing aquatic critters? Will some people try and imagine, as I did, what it was like to experience a world of abundant bull trout that signalled intact watersheds?
I hope we’re smart enough to hold on to part of that life for them because it is a meditation, a reminder of what is real, and the epiphany that the fate of bull trout is also ours. It will come if we keep our eyes open, look for the meaning and connection to us in the life of other world travellers, and remind ourselves that the stakes for our future are as high as they are for bull trout.
Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a past Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.
I wish you could walk in a slap a big bull trout down on the desk of PM Carney stating, "this here fish counts!"
One the size that could feed six hungry men and then some.
And then pull out a wee fish from your pocket, with the obvious markings of something gone wrong.
You might recommend the 1960s movie The Day the Fish Came Out, in case it's easier to consider in a movie that the way of the fish is the way of man.
Sort of as an aside (just sort of, bc the image of self-serving, disrespectful and destructive men is something we are remind of too often these days),
your AI image of a Dolly reminded me of an Ideas episode on Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th century woman artist who captured two lustful men after Suzanna in a painting.
Sadly, men seem unchanged. Which makes men like you all the more outstanding.
Thank you for your writing.
It helps recover something important that was lost,
Mary Anne