U.S. ordered to take steps to put golden trout on endangered list

A federal judge has ordered the Bush administration to decide within 90 days on the first step toward adding the California golden trout, the official state fish, to the endangered species list.

A conservation group, Trout Unlimited, sued the government last November, accusing it of failing to protect the golden trout from interbreeding and cattle grazing. The group said the trout, which is native to the South Fork of the Kern River and a stream south of Mount Whitney called Golden Trout Creek, is now secure in only 4 percent of its historic habitat.

The chief threat is breeding with rainbow trout and a rainbow-golden trout hybrid, both planted in adjacent waters for decades by the state Department of Fish and Game, Trout Unlimited said. It said it had requested an endangered species listing from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in October 2000 but that the agency had never replied.

The Fish and Wildlife Service stopped adding species to the endangered list late in the Clinton administration, citing a lack of congressional funding and a backlog of cases. But U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco ruled Friday that federal law required the agency to decide within 90 days whether protection might be needed, and to make a final decision on listing a year later.

"If these deadlines are entirely impracticable, Congress itself must act," Walker wrote in a decision welcomed by Trout Unlimited.

"Golden trout could very well face extinction if they had to wait for the Fish and Wildlife Service to get to our petition," said the group's California policy coordinator, Steve Trafton.

©2002 San Francisco Chronicle. Page A - 15