State, federal rules frustrate fish rescuers

Dan Hubacker put on his waders and got permission to excuse two students at Casa Grande High School to accompany him on a steelhead rescue. They filled up their special holding unit with water, which slowly leaked onto the concrete as they waited for the final piece of their operation: a go-ahead from the Department of Fish and Wildlife that never came.

“This would’ve been my first Steelhead rescue,” said Dakota Iribarne, a senior at Casa Grande High School. “I’ve done chinook rescues before. I’m really into the program and I want to do it for a living. I wish we could just go right now.”

Junior Ellie Slick agreed.

“This is my first time to a rescue. I love animals and I want to do everything I can to help them,” she said.

The operation earlier this month to enter private property and investigate the possibility of extracting the lone female salmon trapped by the drought turned from a “Free Willy” rescue into a story more common among fisherman: the one that got away. It also demonstrated the frustrating bureaucracy and red tape involved with working with sensitive species.

“It’s really hard to just sit around and do nothing when we know we can rescue this fish,” Hubacker said. “If it’s isolated, it can’t spawn. If we can get to it and confirm it is a female steelhead, we can take it and get it to a new spot, most likely the river.”

After two days of rain, however, the steelhead seems to have moved on, Hubacker said.

“Very best case scenario? More steelhead came in with the rain and it was able to spawn and leave,” he said. “But I won’t know for sure until I find it again. Anything could’ve happened to it.”

A science teacher at Casa Grande, Hubacker is the faculty leader of the United Anglers of Casa Grande High School, a community group dedicated to the maintenance and restoration of Adobe Creek, which dried up in the 19th century due to water diversions by the city.

Founded in 1983 by Tom Furrer, another science teacher at Casa Grande, United Anglers started the Adobe Creek Restoration Project by cleaning the dry riverbed of trash and hauling 30 truckloads of waste out of the area. The Anglers then planted redwood saplings along the creekside to create a natural habitat for creek life.

The United Anglers gained national attention in 1990 when ESPN Outdoors CEO Jerry McKinnis produced four documentaries about the “Miracle of Adobe Creek.” World famous primatologist Jane Goodall visited Casa Grande to tour the hatchery in 1998.

Through water restoration acts from the city, Adobe Creek flows again. The United Anglers group observes chinook and steelhead salmon returning to the river to spawn, and operates a $500,000 fish hatchery on the high school campus, complete with its own well for water pumping. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife works with United Anglers when observing and investigating wild salmon movements in the creek.

“Would we like to rescue every fish that’s stranded and get them to safety? We would, but it’s more complicated than that,” said Ryan Watanabe, environmental scientist, coho recovery specialist and liaison for the state agency. “It’s not just a single act of relocation. In the short term, we don’t want to integrate new bacteria and insects when we take a fish from a creek and deposit it to the river, where it wouldn’t be able to access the river naturally. Second, if we replace a fish into a stable area with, say, 10 other fish, that addition could create competition and an imbalance of resources, which could jeopardize all the fish in that area.”

Watanabe added that while severe this year, drought conditions are natural to the history of steelhead.

“The stark reality is, natural selection will kill off the fish that can’t survive in droughts,” he said. “That way, fish who survive now propagate their genes, and future generations of steelhead can live in these conditions.”

(Contact William Rohrs at william.rohrs@arguscouri er.com.)