It seemed like it would take almost a miracle for a Bitterroot River trout to navigate over seven irrigation diversion structures in order to make its way into the spawning grounds at the headwaters of the creek.
One fish changed all that.
The effort got its start a few years back with a study by Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks fisheries biologist Chris Clancy assessing which Bitterroot River tributaries were most important as spawning grounds for native westslope cutthroat, and to a lesser extent, bull trout.
“We didn't have a good handle back then on where they were spawning,” Clancy said. “Cutthroat spawn in the spring and it can be hard to find them in the high water.”
So Clancy placed radio transmitters in a number of westslope cutthroat and then tracked them during their spawning run. Most of the fish went into tributaries that really weren't much of a surprise for the biologist.
But one took an unexpected turn.
No. 551 swam into Skalkaho Creek and initially stopped right below the first big irrigation diversion dam.
Clancy figured that was probably the end of its journey.
Still, a couple of days later, he came back to check one more time.
“I was trying to be a good scientist,” he said. “You just never know.”
And to his surprise, the trout had somehow managed to struggle over the first diversion and was stuck below the second. Over the next few days, it continued to move upstream - much to the surprise of Clancy and a growing number of others.
“I had people asking me where it was,” he said. “The irrigators and other folks were really interested.”
The fish managed to make its way clear up into the headwaters where there was already a good population of genetically pure westslope cutthroat.
That run opened a lot of eyes. People began to wonder how many others were making the same journey. And how many of the spawning trout and their prodigy were ending up taking the wrong turn back to the river and dying in irrigation ditches.
A Montana State University graduate student named Steven Burton Gale put together a study that showed most of the older fish that migrated upstream weren't making it back to the river.
In 2003, FWP worked with the Daly Ditches Irrigation Co. to install three fish screens on the Hi-Line, Ward and Hughes ditches that helped keep young and old trout from making a fatal wrong turn.
Gale's study showed the screens worked, but fish were still being lost in two unscreened downstream ditches.
This winter, Clancy and the irrigators went to work to address that issue by installing a pair of large pipes underneath Skalkaho Creek to carry ditch water diverted upstream from the Bitterroot River.
The Republican and Hedge ditches intersect with Skalkaho Creek. The water from the river and creek mix together. Some goes downstream and the rest is diverted for irrigation in the two ditches.
Fish migrating downstream on Skalkaho Creek had plenty of opportunities to make a mistake and end up in the ditch.
The large plastic pipe siphons currently being installed underneath the creek will solve that issue.
Restoring a spawning tributary as important as Skalkaho Creek isn't cheap.
The two siphons currently being installed will cost about $522,000.
“It's certainly up there as far as costs go,” said Mark Lere, FWP's fisheries habitat restoration officer. “The costs for the siphons actually came in under budget. We thought it would be higher.”
The project is funded by the federal Fish Restoration Irrigation Mitigation Act, and matching monies from the Montana Future Fisheries Improvement Program. The federal funds can be used to reconnect native fish habitat and increase fish survival. The funding is only available for use west of the Continental Divide.
The federal funding, which pays 65 percent of the cost, was also used to help fund the $250,000 Skalkaho Creek fish screen project.
“We probably couldn't have done these projects without that federal funding,” Lere said.
And it certainly wouldn't have happened without the goodwill of the Daly Ditches Irrigation Co., Clancy said.
“We've had to shut their ditches down a couple of times when we've needed to do some work on our fish screens,” Clancy said. “None of these projects offer any direct benefit to them. They've been truly exceptional to work with.”
Clancy said it's taken an incredible convergence of funding, graduate student studies and a willingness of landowners and others to step forward and help that's made this entire project feasible.
“When you put all of those things together, it really was serendipitous,” he said.
And it all began with a single trout.
Reporter Perry Backus can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at pbackus@missoulian.com.
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