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Description
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.
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.
7 Episodes
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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 th...
The forest reserve along Alberta’s eastern slopes was established over a century ago, in part to protect the watersheds that provide water for drinking and agricultural activity further downstream. Yes, it is a human-centric perspective, but one that seemed to work until recent years. In the 21st century, gone is the true wilderness of Bighorn Country, marred by countless intrusions allowing human access for industry and recreation that have led to landscape degradation. Am...
Would you know a bull trout if you saw one? Most anglers fishing the streams of Alberta’s eastern slopes have never seen or caught a bull trout. Yet this now rare and threatened species once populated the streams of Bighorn Country by the thousands. The culprit behind this extirpation since the 1950’s is human interference, including overfishing, introduction of non-native species, draining of wetlands for agriculture, industrial development in the forest reserve, and recrea...
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 ...
You’ll find Bighorn Country along the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. Bull trout flourished in the rivers and streams of the Bighorn from the last ice age until the mid-twentieth century. That’s when bull trout succumbed to the impact of increased human access to the forested wildlands and the industrial and tourist development that followed. Recent mitigation and conservation efforts are focused on recovering bull trout and other native salmonid species.&n...
This week on the Bull Trout Show, independent journalist Cheryl Croucher interviews Métis scholar, Associate Professor, and 'Fish Philosopher' Dr. Zoe Todd about her research and protection work for the Alberta bull trout.
Dummy test for distribution on various podcast feeds. This is the first 38 seconds of the first episode.
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