The Bull Trout Show
The bull trout, Salvelinus confluentus, is Alberta’s official fish. This native trout species, believed to have inhabited the waterways of present-day Alberta since the last Ice Age, once populated streams and rivers from the Rocky Mountain headwaters well onto the prairies. European settlement starting in the 1800’s changed that, with settlers deeming the bull trout a ‘garbage fish’ that ought to be extirpated in favour of other trout. In the 1960’s and 1970’s, naturalists and fishers in Alberta documented the decline of the species, and in the early 1980’s, they initiated the first efforts to urge the provincial government to protect the species in Alberta. Despite nearly 40 years of local and national scientific advocacy to protect the species, where there were once thriving populations of bull trout, today there may be only a handful or even none in the waterways where they once thrived. In 2019, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans (now Fisheries and Oceans Canada) declared the bull trout a threatened species under the Species At Risk Act, acting on a recommendation from the Committee on the Status ofEndangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) issued in 2012. The Government of Canada subsequently issued a species recovery strategy for the Saskatchewan-Nelson River bull trout population in 2020, and in 2021 a species critical habitat order was issued.
The Bull Trout Show
02 - There Once Was An Exuberance Of Fish with Lorne Fitch
Lorne Fitch is a keen observer of the natural world, a conservationist, and a man of many stories. He is author of the new book “Streams of Consequence: Dispatches from the Conservation World”. Indeed, the streams of Alberta’s eastern slopes were Lorne’s childhood playground. That is where he learned to fish and first encountered the bull trout of Bighorn Country. As a young man, he turned his passion for the outdoors into a lifelong career as a professional biologist and Fish and Wildlife Officer with the Province of Alberta. Lorne’s career paralleled the decline of native bull trout as human access and industrial development encroached dramatically into the forests of the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains. Journalist Cheryl Croucher talked with Lorne Fitch about the changes he has observed over his lifetime.