Robert Behnke - Trout and Salmon of North America

SNAKE RIVER FINESPOTTED CUTTHROAT TROUT

Oncorhynchus clarki behnkei

THE FREE PRESS

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COPYRIGHT 2002 BY CHANTICLEER PRESS, INC.

ILLUSTRATIONS COPYRIGHT JOSEPH R. TOMELLERI

FOREWORD COPYRIGHT THOMAS McGUANE

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED UNDER INTERNATIONAL AND PAN-AMERICAN COPYRIGHT CONVENTIONS.

PREPARED AND PRODUCED

BY CHANTICLEER PRESS, INC., NEW YORK AND CHARLES NIX 8c ASSOCIATES

FIRST EDITION

PUBLISHED OCTOBER 2002

THE FREE PRESS AND COLOPHON ARE TRADEMARKS OF SIMON 8c SCHUSTER, INC.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

CATA LO GING-IN-PUBLIC AT ION DATA

Behnke, Robert J.

Trout and salmon of North America /

Robert J. Behnke ; illustrated by Joseph R. Tomelleri ;

foreword by Thomas McGuane.1st ed.

P. CM.

Includes bibliographical references.

1. TroutNorth America. 2. SalmonNorth America. I. Tomelleri, Joseph R. II. Title.

QL638.S2 B432 2002

597-57097DC21 2002069256

ISBN: 0-7432-2220-2

ISBN: 978-1-4516-0355-2 (eBook)

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OR

Thomas McGuane

Trout and Salmon of North America is as much a celebration as a guidebook. The mystery and particularity of so many members of a great family, brilliantly described and handsomely portrayed, enlarge our capacity for wonder: rainbow trout of the Mexican highlands living on terrestrial insects, rainbows of Kodiak Island gorging on sockeye eggs, brown trout in the suburbs of New York, Atlantic salmon born in Connecticut feeding under the pack ice of Greenland, Pacific salmon returning to natal rivers in a kaleidoscope of physical change, brook trout sipping midges in Appalachia or in the pristine waters of Labrador, steelhead from a chaparral-crowded California creek navigating the Gulf of Alaska, Chinook salmon killing wolf eels in the deep North Pacific are all cousins whether found in boreal forest, tundra, desert, alpine lakes, or mid-ocean. These great and diverse species of fishes with which we live may yet be better understood thanks to this elegant book.

Raising public awareness about fishes is a greater challenge than it is for birds. Fish dont come to the feeder. We cant watch them with binoculars. They dont migrate over our roof or identify themselves through song when they cant be seen. Nevertheless, because most of mankind lives next to seas and rivers, fish subsist in real proximity to us and are, in countless ways, our dependents. Yet they live in great mystery.

Naming, describing, classifying, and, in general, accounting for fish is the business of taxonomy and it is strenuous duty. Driven by such intangibles as philosophy and judgement, taxonomy is not quite, and is more than, a science. Imagine accurately describing fish that, after half a million years in a specific biome, have by the time of the arrival of Europeans in North America been reduced to one or two museum specimens preserved in a jar. Such miracles of resurrection have actually been achieved in this book.

Glaciation, millennial drought, ancestral invasions, tectonic shift, plate migration, ancient isolation of basins, headwater interbasin transfers, ice dams, lava flows, lakes and landslide ponds, interference by well-meaning men with mules and milk cans transporting baby trout to places trout had never beenhistories of separation and combination often involve co-evolution with other species over timescapes of a million years and are only recently beginning to be unwound in the maps of genes. These studies are eternally compromised by the simple fact that even molecular genetics is not a certain predictor of morphologies or life histories.

Evolutionary relationships sometimes contradict external traits. The profusion and placement of spots, numbers of vertebrae, parr marks, bands, colors, fin shapes, run timing, number of scales, and kinds of teeth all can lead the taxonomist toward or away from the truths of a species history. Is this fish lacustrine, fluvial, resident, or sea-run? Is the steelhead a trout or a salmon? Did the cutthroat give rise to the rainbow? Should we view rare stocks as heritage trout? How should we manage a small creek that arises from a spring and vanishes in its own streambed, appearing to the ignorant as an innocuous ditch, but containing a population of trout that has remained uncontaminated for thousands of years? Will we ever thoroughly understand how the magnetite in the noses of trout and salmon supplies geographical data for celestial navigation? How do we quantify the risk of extinction? And where do we place beauty? Or that ghost chorus of departed species?

The very names of our salmonids tie us to other peoples: the Koryak of Kamchatka, the Kootenay, the Inuit. They had the idea of these fish first and deserve consultation in their management. When we built Grand Coulee Dam and disfigured our own heritage by destroying a thousand miles of streambed salmon habitat, consultation with these forebears as to the eternal aspect of wild things might have played to our long-term advantage and led to a real accounting as to our wealth as a people. Weve been thinking about our salmonids for a long time. They were first described by a member of the Coronado expedition; Lewis and Clark first took note of the cutthroat trout; and General Crook chose to angle for them while his colleague Custer fell at Little Big Horn. Its time we embraced them in their bounteous variety.

The rise of mankind has been a calamity for the natural world as there becomes less room for everything but man. Loss of habitat comes first, of course; then, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: livestock grazing, logging, mining, and irrigation. Our attempts to overrule evolutionary isolation through fish culture, while well meaning, have abrogated adaptational strategies and increased vulnerability to disease and event-specific catastrophe. Against a great and stirring timescape in ancestral headwaters, the diversity of fishes has been a cascade of jewels, while indiscriminate hybridization has produced a besetting and assailable uniformity. It is urgent that we place value upon diversity so that its loss can be reckoned as cost. Robert Behnke says it here best: All hereditary changes brought about by artificial selection for more efficient rearing in fish culture are contrary to natural selection, where the sole criterion is survival to reproduction in the wild. In issues of resource management, the expenditure of diversity should appear on the balance sheet as the gravest entry of all.