Gunsight Lake bull trout project in Glacier lands in federal court in Montana

Gunsight Lake in Glacier National Park. (Keila Szpaller/The Daily Montanan)

A couple of conservation groups are asking a federal court to stop a Glacier National Park plan to put endangered bull trout in Gunsight Lake, where they have never lived.

The plan is called the Westslope Cutthroat and Bull Trout Preservation in Gunsight Lake Project. The lake is in the mountains of the St. Mary drainage in Glacier.

In a lawsuit filed this week, the two groups allege the project ignores a separate $100 million plan to rebuild the St. Mary Diversion Dam, which is projected to help bull trout; it added a third species of fish after public comment; and will illegally “take” bull trout from donor streams.

In fact, the organizations allege the plan that aims to create a “refugia” for bull trout could backfire altogether.

“The park is creating an artificial ‘resident’ population of bull trout isolated by waterfalls that risks inbreeding and environmental events that could wipe out the entire population,” the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court of Montana in Missoula by Friends of the Wild Swan and the Council on Wildlife and Fish.

Friends of the Wild Swan was one of the groups that filed the 1992 Endangered Species Act petition that led to the classification of bull trout as threatened. The lawsuit said the group feels “responsible for overseeing agencies’ compliance with the ESA to protect bull trout.”

The groups are suing the regional director of the National Park Service, the superintendent of Glacier National Park, the head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the federal agencies themselves.

The nonprofits allege the Park Service sent a “vague plan” for comment to the public, then worked on it afterward with the Fish and Wildlife Service, outside of the public eye and in violation of federal law.

“Glacier Park is keeping the public in the dark and planning this experiment in secret,” said Arlene Montgomery, of Friends of the Wild Swan, in a statement. “They are tinkering with a threatened species to create an isolated population of bull trout in a place they never lived before.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it does not comment on pending litigation, and the other agencies could not be reached for comment early Tuesday by email. However, a Glacier scientist earlier said the project aims to help protect bull trout and give them a fighting chance by placing them in a cold lake as the climate warms.

The project would remove rainbow trout from the lake, also stocked there and the only fish present, the lawsuit said. It would also pull bull trout or gametes from streams outside Glacier, propagate them in a hatchery, and stock them and westslope cutthroat trout in Gunsight.

“(But) the environmental document never analyzes or discloses key questions on how many bull trout it will take from streams, from what particular streams it will take them, at what hatchery it will propagate them, or how many it will introduce into Gunsight Lake,” said a memo from the groups about the lawsuit.

And the conservation groups said the plan is flawed on other fronts. For one thing, no recovery plan showed any need for the project at Gunsight Lake, which “historically had no fish because none could swim up the waterfalls to reach it.”

The groups also said the Park Service plans to introduce fish into a habitat where the species hasn’t ever lived. They said the agency prohibits introducing fish for sport fishing, but nonetheless, the project “intended to increase sport fishing at Gunsight Lake.”

It also failed to consider cumulative effects on bull trout of the Gunsight and St. Mary dam project, a violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, the lawsuit said.

“Second, it failed to obtain public comments when it decided to introduce mountain whitefish as a third exotic species in historically fishless Gunsight Lake and change the whole ecology,” the groups allege.

They said no commenter could have foreseen the addition of a third species, which “far exceeds the spectrum of alternatives the Park Service presented to the public.” And adding mountain whitefish creates “unexpected impacts.”

“Mountain whitefish might eat insects that bird species or amphibian species would otherwise eat, so they may disrupt the food web,” the lawsuit alleges. “Public comment could have pointed out gaps in that new analysis before the Park Service approved the Gunsight Project. Now, the public has no more options to comment.”

The groups are asking the court to declare the project violates the Endangered Species Act by taking bull trout and to stop its implementation.

They said the Park Service “put the cart before the horse” by issuing a finding of no significant impact before the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a permit, and in doing so, the project illegally calls for actions the permit doesn’t authorize.

In a statement, Steve Kelly with the Council on Wildlife and Fish said the Fish and Wildlife Service is falling down on the job with the project.

“The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is out of control, neglecting its primary duty to recover the threatened St. Mary bull trout population,” Kelly said. “All this dithering and speculative experimentation detracts from the basic immediate needs of bull trout.”