Kevin Proescholdt of Wilderness Watch wrongly alleged “errors” in my op-ed (Guest editorial: “Killing fish to save frogs,” May 10-12, Letters: “Ted Williams is wrong about fish-poisoning,” June 14). If he’d read the Wilderness Act, he wouldn’t claim it doesn’t provide for pesticide use to preserve native fish. Federal permits are routinely issued.
Proescholdt writes: “Paiute cutthroat trout occupied pretty much all of its very limited native habitat; the project Wilderness Watch and several allies challenged was aimed at establishing a trout population upstream of its native range and in naturally fishless waters in order to create a new angling opportunity.”
False. Paiutes occupied none of their native habitat. They were eliminated by alien rainbow trout. Rotenone restored them. The Paiute population upstream was already established, and that establishment had nothing to do with “angling opportunity.” It had everything to do with saving this threatened species from extinction as mandated by the Endangered Species Act.
Litigation by Wilderness Watch delayed the project for years, nearly ushering the rarest salmonid in America into extinction.
Proescholdt proclaims that Wilderness Watch doesn’t oppose the use of gillnets to remove alien trout, but its public comments in the environmental review prove otherwise.
Proescholdt wrongly claims that rotenone “kills all organisms that use gills — fish, amphibians, and even macroinvertebrates” and that “these same waterways are then stocked with alien fish predators.”
Amphibian adults are unaffected by rotenone, and rotenone is applied after larvae have metamorphosed. The vast majority of macroinvertebrates survive. The few that succumb are rapidly replaced. Natives, not “alien fish predators,” are then stocked.
Most distressing is Wilderness Watch’s notion that projects to save icons of wilderness like imperiled trout are motivated, in Proescholdt’s words, by “a zeal to promote fishing.”
Throughout the West, Wilderness Watch opposes, impedes and sometimes blocks rotenone projects. It can’t conceive that native fish recovery could be about anything other than sport.
Ted Williams
Grafton, Massachussets