Feds deny protection for Clear Lake hitch fish, prompting outcry

A federal agency’s decision Wednesday denying protection for a large silvery minnow found only in Clear Lake triggered protests by environmentalists who said the action was based on misinformation and contradicted a state determination six years ago.

Culminating a long-delayed study, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service determined that a host of conditions — habitat degradation, predation and competition from invasive fish, drought and climate change — are “not likely to adversely affect the overall vitality of the Clear Lake hitch in a biologically meaningful way.”

Six years ago, the California Fish and Game Commission reached the opposite conclusion, unanimously granting state-threatened species status to the hitch, making it the first and only fish to gain state or federal protection in the Clear Lake basin.

The very same conditions “threaten the continued existence of the species,” Charlton Bonham, state Department of Fish and Wildlife director, said in a 2014 letter asserting the hitch would become endangered “in the foreseeable future” without state protection.

The federal finding this week was “based on misinformation, nonsense and climate change denial,” said Jeff Miller of the Center for Biological Diversity, an endangered species advocacy group that requested state and federal action in 2012.

“It’s infuriating but not surprising that Trump’s Interior Department is denying protection for one of California’s most threatened native fish,” he said in a prepared statement.

One example of misinformation in the federal finding was the assertion that hitch, which grow up to a foot long, can spawn in the lake and do not need tributary streams for reproduction, the biological diversity center said.

That appeared to be based on anecdotal reports of large numbers of hitch “purportedly spawning in the lake, which turned out to be schools of misidentified nonnative fish,” the center said.

Miller said the center is considering a request to the Biden administration to reconsider the denial of protection for the hitch under the Endangered Species Act, or a legal challenge to that decision.

The federal agency’s 31-page report said that “after a thorough review of the best available scientific and commercial information” protecting the hitch and 10 other species under federal law “is not warranted at this time.”

“Even under a projection of a slight decrease in future condition, the Clear Lake hitch was not projected to be in danger of extinction in the next 50 years,” according to the report.

The federal agency said its report “constitutes the 12-month finding” on the center’s 2012 petition to list the hitch as a protected species.

Endangered Species Act decisions have long been delayed for years, Miller said, violating the timelines prescribed by the law.

Four Native American tribes and California native fish expert Peter Moyle of UC Davis backed the center’s proposal to safeguard the fish described as struggling for survival after decades of dam building, water diversion, gravel mining and pollution have damaged or isolated most of its spawning grounds.

Hitch once numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the ancient lake and surged every spring up all or most of its 17 tributary stream systems to spawn in shallow water.

Most spawning is now limited to Adobe and Kelsey creeks, which flow into the west side of the lake.

A California Department of Fish and Wildlife survey this year counted 1,672 hitch in Kelsey Creek, Miller said, noting that residents reported seeing thousands of fish in numerous creeks in the 1980s.

Sarah Ryan, deputy tribal administrator and environmental director for the Big Valley Band of Pomo Indians, said she was surprised by the federal agency’s decision.

“We made a strong case that the (endangered species) listing is warranted,” she said. The 1,200-member tribe with a rancheria near Lakeport was one of the backers of the original petition.

A federal listing would have included a hitch recovery plan that could include protections like minimum flows in spawning streams and screens on water intake pipes to prevent them from drawing out fish, she said.

The tribe will continue working with state and local agencies on measures to protect the hitch, which helped sustain Indigenous people around the lake for millenniums, Ryan said.

You can reach Staff Writer Guy Kovner at 707-521-5457 or guy.kovner@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @guykovner.