Sightings of two cutthroats in Rock Creek offers some hope
By Lethbridge Herald on November 9, 2024.
Editor:
When a 2023 midsummer surge of mud and water transformed Rock Creek into a brown, muddy mess, I, living on the stream’s cascading outer edge, was one of the first people to witness the disturbing event.
Days passed before I learned of TC Energy’s ensuing “incident report” defining its role in the muddy outcome of its over-the-Livingstone-Range pipeline construction.
The pipeline, created through critical habitat for cutthroat trout in the headwaters of Rock Creek, transformed the creek into a mucky mess in August of 2023, and did this during a protracted regional drought.
Recently, on Oct. 29, following 14 months of futile, near-daily creekside searches for any surviving trout, I saw what I’d come to believe was impossible: two surviving trout.
Rock Creek, a long year ago, was documented as one of Alberta’s relatively few streams still harbouring pure-strain westslope cutthroat trout.
Whenever I’d take a break from yard work, I’d toss grasshoppers into the creek’s many pools and watch as the “hoppers” were consumed in swirls of competing trout.
Several years ago, my wife and I welcomed fisheries biologists to the creek at our doorstep so they could conduct DNA sampling of the stream’s abundant and conspicuous trout.
These recent pictures of cutthroat abundance no longer exist. But my recent discovery of two trout offers a glimmer of hope that cutthroats may rise to their former numbers.
My wife made the initial discovery of the two trout, almost certainly the same two I saw later that same day.
My observations included a glimpse of one darting trout and an unforgettable face-to-face encounter with the second trout.
I watched the trout with binoculars as it, facing me and the late day sun, finned slowly in clear shallow water. Sunlight showcased the trout’s black-spotted back, its richly spotted flanks, its pelvic fins, its dorsal fin, even its tiny adipose fin.
That moment of discovery, showcased in living colour following a 14-month, labor intensive—no sign of any surviving trout—search, was euphoric … until the sudden gravity of “only two” hit me.
Can the two trout survive predation and the coming winter?
Is there sufficient invertebrate life in the still-mud-covered, oxygen-deprived stream bed to support trout? I don’t know the answers to these questions.
The cutthroats’ future in Rock Creek and the creek’s potential to return to its former biological integrity remain unknown, but as the sun sets on autumn, two trout, each roughly 15 cm in length, offer hope for Alberta’s threatened cutthroats and their future in Rock Creek, a tributary of the Crowsnest River.
David McIntyre
Crowsnest Pass
19-18
That TC Energy was allowed to run roughshod through this sensitive area with impunity is appalling. It just seems to add to the sentiment that things are going to hell in a handbasket.
surely, does not the health and wealth of big oil/mining stand above the health of mere water and natural habitats?
Of course it does! And once we’ve killed the rivers and lakes, desertified the land, and spewed more than our share of benevolent gases into the atmosphere, we can move to Mars with Elon to a better life.
beautiful – amen! (would one mind, though, if we considered being good stewards of this planet, and instead just space-x-ing musk and muskovites off to mars, with the mining gods in tow? it is only that i think i might be susceptible to space sickness, is why)