This story is adapted from the MT Lowdown, a weekly newsletter digest containing original reporting and analysis published every Friday.
The long-running, oft-litigated saga of the Arctic grayling population in the upper Missouri River basin took another step forward last week after a federal judge ordered the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take a closer look at grayling population dynamics in the Ruby River and consider what will happen to grayling in the Big Hole river if a voluntary conservation agreement there isn’t renewed.
The ruling is the latest in a four-decade legal back-and-forth between environmentalists and wildlife agencies. While environmentalists have pushed for protecting the fish under the Endangered Species Act the USFWS hasn’t expressed consistent willingness to take that step.
Grayling advocates filed the most recent lawsuit last year, arguing that USFWS erred in its 2020 finding that the Upper Missouri basin Arctic grayling doesn’t meet a listing threshold. In part, the agency had argued the Big Hole population “is demographically and genetically stable and appear[s] to be responding favorably to conservation actions that have been implemented over the past several decades.”
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The average number of breeding arctic grayling that live in the Big Hole River has increased slightly since a 2006 CCAA went into effect. Matt Jaeger, a Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries biologist, calls the program “unquestionably a success.” But as climate change increases the frequency of drought, shrinks summer river flows, and raises water temperatures, that viability isn’t guaranteed.
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By October 2021, all of Montana was in severe drought — the worst the state had seen in decades. But Montana has seen bad dry spells before, forcing ranchers, farmers, conservationists and recreators to confront a collective dilemma: when water is in short supply, how can there be enough for everyone?
The largest of the conservation efforts referenced is the Big Hole River Candidate Conservation Agreement with Assurances, a group of property owners who’ve agreed to reduce their water withdrawals from the river to stave off a grayling ESA listing. In return for their voluntary participation in the group, the landowners are protected from stricter regulation in the event that grayling are listed as threatened or endangered in the future.
One of the claims the environmentalists made in the lawsuit is that the current water conservation agreement is set to expire in 2026 and won’t necessarily be renewed. U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen agreed in last week’s 53-page ruling, writing that USFWS “failed to consider the impacts of the agreement ceasing to exist in the foreseeable future.”
Pedro Marques, executive director of the Big Hole Watershed Committee, which supports the conservation group, said that piece of the ruling suggests that the agreement has been successful and should be broadened to other drainages in the basin where streamflows and grayling could use more support.
“What that says to me is ‘let’s renew this program and get these landowners signed on for another 10 years,’” Marquez said. “Then that issue goes away.”
Christensen also questioned whether the Ruby River, a couple of drainages to the east of the Big Hole, has a viable grayling population. He wrote that state biologists have demonstrated stocked fish are reproducing in the Ruby, but not that reproduction is happening among river-born fish.
He gave USFWS one year to further analyze that issue and the impact of the conservation agreement’s pending expiration.
Patrick Kelly with the Western Watersheds project described the ruling as “welcome news” for a fish “whose last native population in the lower 48 states barely hangs on in a small part of our state.”
Christensen dismissed the plaintiffs’ other claims regarding the adequacy of the government’s analysis on genetic diversity and the influence of declining streamflows and rising temperatures on grayling recovery.
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