Wilderness Watch is opposing a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) plan to manipulate habitat in the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in southwestern Montana, 32,350 acres of which is the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness. The USFWS released an Environmental Assessment (EA) and Minimum Requirements Analysis Framework for notching beaver dams in Red Rock Creek, some of which runs through the Wilderness, in a supposed attempt to artificially manufacture better Arctic grayling habitat. Even the agency’s environmental assessment acknowledges that “notching of beaver dams would be considered a trammeling” and would result in “disturbance to the Wilderness natural character.”
Unfortunately, this is not the first time the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has attempted to trammel the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness with a habitat manipulation scheme. Last year, the agency proposed a project that would have involved digging a six-foot deep, mile-long trench and installing a 14-inch pipeline to connect Upper Red Rock Lake to a manmade pond just outside the Wilderness boundary. Then, the agency would have added oxygenated water to the lake during the wintertime in an attempt to artificially manufacture better Arctic grayling habitat.
Thankfully, because of your public comments and a successful lawsuit filed by Wilderness Watch and our allies, the USFWS withdrew that wrong-headed habitat modifying project and instead pledged to focus on efforts to conserve Arctic grayling that don’t undermine the Wilderness Act or compromise Wilderness character within the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness.
Red Rock Lakes is the largest wetland complex in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem, which is why Congress designated the 32,350-acre Red Rock Lakes Wilderness in 1976. This requires the USFWS to preserve the area’s wilderness character and to allow the area to be “untrammeled” (unmanipulated) by modern civilization.
This unique protected Wilderness and natural wetland complex in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem is not the appropriate place for managers to be cycling through a series of habitat manipulation experiments by constantly altering the environment in pursuit of arbitrarily chosen conditions for one species. Even if grayling are imperiled and breaching the dams might help, all other actions that can benefit grayling and not compromise the Red Rock Lakes Wilderness, and/or the Wilderness Act, must be pursued first. Such options to benefit grayling that don’t denigrate wilderness character could include closing occupied grayling streams to angling, finding alternatives to electroshocking to census fish, reducing livestock grazing impacts, and restoring habitat connectivity in tributary streams both above and below Upper Red Rock Lake.
In our comments, we also noted that beaver dams trap sediment and likely prevent the sediments from moving downstream into Upper Red Rock Lake. The Environmental Assessment (EA) needs to address how much sediment is released, or not captured at all, by breaching beaver dams.
Read our comments (February 20, 2024)
Photo: Andrew Hursh
