Feds want more protection for bull trout

Most of the waterways — including three reaches of the Powder River, one of them in Baker Valley — were on a list of critical habitat that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service originally proposed to designate in 2002.

But those stream reaches, totaling about 350 miles, were left off the critical habitat list that the agency approved in September 2005.

Dozens of other streams in Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Washington and Nevada that were proposed in 2002 were also excluded from the 2005 critical habitat maps.

Those exclusions prompted two environmental groups from Montana, Alliance for the Wild Rockies and Friends of the Wild Swan, to file a lawsuit in January 2006 alleging the Fish and Wildlife Service had failed to adequately protect bull trout.

In March 2009 agency officials admitted that Julie MacDonald, a former Interior Department deputy assistant secretary who was appointed by the Bush administration in 2002, had interfered with the process of determining critical habitat.

MacDonald, who resigned in 2007, was involved in the controversial decision by which streams where bull trout were thought to live, but where they hadn’t been confirmed, were deleted from the 2005 list of critical habitat.

On July 1, 2009, the Fish and Wildlife Service voluntarily canceled its 2005 decision and, in essence, started over.

This week the agency unveiled its revised critical habitat list, and it includes thousands of miles of streams that were on the 2002 roster but not on the official 2005 version.

All told, the proposal would increase by 79 percent the stream mileage designated as critical habitat.

Although the Fish and Wildlife Service’s proposed revision would add hundreds of miles of local streams to the critical habitat list for bull trout, those additions probably would have little effect on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest, through which those streams flow, said Paul Boehne, the forest’s fish biologist.

That’s because since the late 1990s, when the federal government first designated bull trout as a threatened species, Wallowa-Whitman employees have in effect treated almost all streams that could harbor bull trout as though they in fact did have populations of the fish, Boehne said.

In other words, the forest designed projects such as timber sales and road rebuilding so the work would not pollute potential bull trout streams — even those streams that weren’t on the critical habitat list and that didn’t have confirmed bull trout populations.

“This is not going to be a big change for projects on the ground,” Boehne said Wednesday.

The bull trout, which biologically speaking is actually a char rather than a trout, thrives in cold, clear streams.

Scientists say bull trout populations have declined throughout the West over the past several decades in part due to logging that removed shade trees and caused stream temperatures to rise.

Logging, livestock grazing and building of roads also have caused dirt to sift into some streams.

The FWS estimates that bull trout have been eliminated in about half of the species historic range.

This newest proposal for designating critical habitat marks the first time Fish and Wildlife has followed the advice of its own scientists on what is needed to restore healthy populations of bull trout, said Michael Garrity of Alliance for the Wild Rockies.

‘‘It’s nice the federal government is following the law,’’ he said.

Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resource Council, a timber industry group, said he did not think it would significantly change the amount of forest open to logging, because many levels of fish habitat protection are already in place.

‘‘We are hoping this administration and the agencies make their decisions based on the best science and not based on politics,’’ he said.

The Fish and Wildlife Service has scheduled a series of public meetings over the next month or so to explain its bull trout habitat proposal.

The meeting nearest Baker City is scheduled for Feb. 4 in La Grande.

The event will run from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Blue Mountain Conference Center, 404 12th St.

More information, including maps showing proposed critical habitat, is available online at: www.fws.gov/pacific/bulltrout

Jeff Barnard of The Associated Press contributed to this story.