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note from Dale: This is a letter that was forwarded to me. It is informative. The opinions are Austin's. Join this meeting to make your heard, if you will.
Hi all, Well, it is time to make our voices heard. The Park Service will be having a scoping meeting on their recovery EA November 30 at 6:30 p.m. in the Hondius Room at the library. They will be sharing the information with the public they have developed, including the alternatives. The input they receive at the public scoping meeting will help them to refine the alternatives or possibly add new alternatives. Remember, one of the alternatives is to make lakes and streams that are thought to have been prehistorically fishless, fishless once again. This includes mainly the Glacier Creek and Gorge drainage, ie, the Loch, Mills, Black, Sky Pond, etc. This policy would also be applied to places like Ypsilon and other high altitude waters. The Park Service has a national policy of returning "disturbed" ecosystems to "natural" conditions. In some folks minds "disturbed" means having fish of any description in lakes and streams that they believe were originally fishless, and the "natural" state being one without any fish. Greenback that now exist are now protected by the T&E Act, but if de-listed in the future, that protection becomes a question mark. Also, while this EA/EIS is only on the Greenback, we can expect the policy to be applied on the west side to the Colorado River Cutthroat as well. And, it has no federal protection. Using low level streams with artificial barriers leaves any recovered population open to sudden and catestrophic failure through "voluntary" restocking of non-native fish or the failure of the barrier itself. Artificial barriers have not proven to be reliable where tried on several national forest projects off the Poudre. You will recall that when stocking ceased in the Park in 1969 over 50% of the park's lakes went fishless. We don't have a number for this alternative, but I would estimate it will eliminate most of the rest. Greenback recovery has been highly dependant upon the isolation and protection provided by the high altitude lakes. The barriers that help assure the safety of a greeback population is probably what would have kept them fishless in the first place. Those barriers are reliable and offer excellent protection to the recovered population. However, we have seen that being thought to be prehistorically fishless does not equate to being poor habitat. Many of our high lakes support vigorous fisheries; some of the best in the park. There is no sound ecological reason to eliminate them, or indeed, to not use that excellent habitat for greeback recovery.
Yellowstone National
Park has embraced non-native species in many of their park waters and have
active high quality management, while recovering and preserving the natives.
Something Rocky would do well study and emulate.
I have already
submitted written comments to the park (back in July), and will do so again.
Get the word out to all who might have a stake in this: guide shops, guides,
anglers, etc. Anyone who has an interest in retaining recreational angling as a
part of Rocky Mountain National Park. |
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