A quick follow up on a story I provided earlier this week. Looks like there will be fights to come as Alberta struggles with consumptive industry versus saving their provincial fish, the bull trout. Here’s the story
CALGARY – A decision to allow logging near Hidden Creek, a tributary stream to the Oldman River that’s home to the threatened bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout, is coming under fire from conservationists.
The plan, approved by the province last month, allows Spray Lakes Sawmills to cut trees on 57 hectares of forest this winter near the stream in the Eastern Slopes of the Rockies.
Hidden Creek is home to 75 per cent of the Oldman watershed’s bull trout population, which was declared threatened Monday by a federal committee, as well as the imperilled westslope cutthroat trout.
“The legacy of 60 years of logging and the erosion and sediment from those industrial footprints has meant that populations of both bull trout and westslope cutthroat trout has declined in those systems,” said Lorne Fitch, a retired biologist who lives in southern Alberta. “So we’re at a point where it’s not necessarily the best of the best left, it’s the last of th