05 - The Long Slow Battle to Protect Bull Trout with Peter Rodger Artwork

The Bull Trout Show

The Bull Trout Show is a podcast series that tells the story of the bull trout and the decades of efforts to recover this native species. Journalist Cheryl Croucher interviews the players, including fisheries scientists who spent their careers raising the alarm over the demise of native species like the bull trout.

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.

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The Bull Trout Show

05 - The Long Slow Battle to Protect Bull Trout with Peter Rodger

February 20, 2024 • The Bull Trout Show • Season 1 • Episode 5

It was the early 1990’s when concern over the decimation of Alberta’s bull trout populations reached a critical mass. Fisheries biologists raised the alarm, rallying anglers and the conservation community to save the bull trout. They hosted conferences and printed public awareness posters in an effort to pressure policy makers to enact regulations that would protect bull trout from overharvesting and habitat degradation These advocates even mounted a campaign to convince the provincial government to name the bull trout as Alberta’s official fish. But despite all this momentum, it still took almost three more decades for regulators to designate the bull trout as a threatened species under Canada’s Species At Risk Act. Why did this take so long? Peter Rodger is a Senior Species At Risk biologist with Fisheries and Oceans Canada. Peter picked up the bull trout file when he moved to the department’s Winnipeg office in 2014. Turns out, designating a species as threatened is an arduous, complex process that requires patience and cooperation between both federal and provincial regulators. Journalist Cheryl Croucher spoke with Peter Rodger about the long slow battle to protect bull trout.

(Duration: 53:33)

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WEBSITE: www.RestoryingBullTrout.ca

WHERE TO LISTEN: Buzz Sprout, Apple, Spotify, Overcast, Castro, Castbox, Pocket Cast, Goodpods and Podfriend

FUNDING CREDIT: Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada New Frontiers in Research Fund.

The project is called: Plural perspectives on Bighorn Country: Restor(y)ing land use, governance, and bull trout population health in Alberta.