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Henry's Fork Caldera Project

MVF is teaming up with the Henry's Fork Foundation to do an assessment of one of the most famous trout streams in America - The Harriman Ranch section of the Henry's Fork of the Snake River.  Yes Harriman is the E. H. Harriman - the president of the Union Pacific Railroad who was robbed by Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid time after time in the movie staring Robert Redford and Paul Newmann.    The ranch was donated to the state of Idaho and now is the Harirmann State Park.  More on Harriman in a later post. 

The MVF team will be working with the Foundation to assess the current state of scientific understanding and knowledge, as well as opportunities for future aquatic research and restoration.   MVF will be organizing the education and outreach part of the project and will be broadcasting from the banks of the river starting June 15, 2008 for a week covering fishing conditions and angler experiences along with examining the history of the fish in the river.  

The motivation for this project came from discussions with HFF executive director Steve Trafton about the concerns of the health of the fishery.  The river is a wild trout river and carefully managed as a catch and release fly fishing site.  There is over 30 years of data on the river covering scientific publications, creel surveys, flow conditions and field studies that HFF is organizing to present to the entire Henry's Fork community.  Hopefully we can set a baseline from which conservation progress can be measured in the future.  No organization has ever assembled all the data, talked with all the experts, interviewed the fishermen along the river banks and then published what they find.   Like all environmental issues, getting both the data and community input is tough to do, will always piss some group off and will put pressure on those in charge like Idaho Fish and Game and HFF.  But it needs to be done and we are excited to be participating in this project.  

BUT...  June is not here yet and it is still winter along the river.   Brandon and I left Jackson Hole on Wednesday to survey the river banks and conditions.  What we found was 2-3' of snow on the ground, a blinding snowstorm rolling in and this dog commanding a sweeping view of the river.  it was not pretty.  But we are 6 weeks away from going live. There a dozen interviews to conduct and produce for broadcast prior to June 15th plus train the summer interns.   Plus research on the history of the river, its pioneers and role that the Henry's Fork has played in the fly fishing and conservation culture in the Western US.  

We will be producing content and broadcasting several times each day for the opening week on the Ranch.  Stay tuned to watch a cutting edge conservation effort to educate not just the anglers, Idaho Fish and Game, the massive ranch owners that own the water, the subdivision developers but for each of them to educate each other and the community of the vital role the Henry's Fork plays in their lives and culture.   Stay tuned. 

Tracks and Tags

I have inserted the Google Earth image of some of our tracks and tags during the last expedition.   While we did troll the edge and caught some fish, the majority were found under roaming frigate birds.   Whenever we saw a frigate low on the water we found fish - both dolphin and yellowfin.  The wind was blowing from the South for the first part of the trip and the fish were packed in along the North edge of the bank.  After 3 days of solid 15-20 knot North winds, we found the fish had moved further South along the edge North of Highborne Cay. Our gut feel before we left the dock was all the dolphin would have been pushed South by the high North winds but in fact the fish stayed in the area plus we saw schools of flying fish indicating the dolphin's favorite food was still in the area.  

The point of this post is something I have learned watching the TOPP program in the Pacific (www.topp.org) that is simply put that pelagic fish, birds and marine mammals are congregate around food.  Forget the winds and weather... find the food and the fish will be close by.  And that is something to remember as we continue our pelagic research here at MVF.

Dolphin Tag Expediton

We are just back from our second dolphin tagging expedition in the Bahamas. While the weather was cold, windy and the fish scarce, we did manage to tag 40 fish and recapture one dolphin that was tagged 3 days earlier by us. We started out off Chub Cay and found zero fish... A year ago there were thousands of dolphin there but this year we could not find the fish. We moved about 100 miles to the Southeast to Highborne Cay after a week and found some fish but then another cold front blew in for 3 days and pushed them South.

Probably the most interesting part of the trip was the recapture of a 38" bull dolphin 15.5 miles from where we tagged him 3 days earlier. Fish this size are tagged in the water then released almost always with a circle hook still in the jaw of the fish. The recaptured fish had shed the circle hook and was in great shape. So this is another good indicator for using circle hooks. We were fishing the Eagle Claw circle hook and it seemed to work better than others we have used. We did not miss a lot of fish and we always had corner jaw hook sets even on the yellowfin tuna and billfish caught. It could be just that we are more experienced on feeding the fish and setting the hook. More on that in the future.

I am still upset from the sight of the conch cemetery on the Berry Island flats. I would like to think that we can extract wealth from the sea and do it sustainably. But seeing that pile of conch shells is like seeing an abandoned strip mine somewhere in the West... The idea is to leave no trace of our presence... And maybe the conch and the fish don't care but I do...

Wild Cemetaries

We are in the Bahamas on our second dolphin tagging expedition. Fishing is slow. Last year we were covered up in dolphin. This year - nada so far...

But our observations of nature, wildness and conservation efforts continue. We have been exploring the tidal flats in the Berry Islands and came across a cemetery out in the middle of a large flat. Conch shells empty... harvested by the local Bahamian fishermen, piled up as a reminded of the human effort to extract wealth from our planet. I am not complaining about the local people making a living from the sea nor am I saying that they should not dump empty conch shells out there. It is just a reminder than we kill and eat most of the inhabitants of this planet's oceans and just left the remains behind as a signpost or in this case a cemetery of human impact on the planet. I am deeply affected by this and know more change, more awareness, more effort is required to protect the planet by me.

Why Patagonia?

I have had to consider the question why work and fund conservation projects in South America and in particular Patagonia? I don’t think I knew exactly before we left last month. All I knew were from the pictures, the stories and our research that something big was there... We had to check it out... And it was there..

We do fund conservation work in the US at both major universities like Duke and Stanford, major environmental organizations like WCS and pro-fish organizations like Trout Unlimited. We are satisfied with these groups and their work. But there is a difference down in Patagonia and it is easy to see why. The US is the real leader in environmental stewardship on the planet. The state and federal agencies, fish and game departments, pro-fish NGOs, anti-fishing NGOs plus all the save the planet groups are fully engaged, the barganning tables crowded with every group wanting and getting in most cases a chair and a voice. And it does work in most cases... Well at least everybody gets a seat at the table. Once could speculate for US environmental policies there is another table that is by invitation only. Thats another post...

Patagonia - 800,000 square kilometers of land with 0.8 inhabitants per square kilometer. Three words come to mind - Vast... Untouched... Unmanaged... There is so much opportunity to help the few aware organizations, land owners, university professors and environmental groups protect their land. Consider this: There is not governmental agency with either the mission statement of staff to conduct or enforce environmental rules. Private fisheries research has been conducted on the Rio Grande since 1990, catch records are complete, privately-funded research conducted by well known US university groups and results are in the public domain and on the web for all to view. Yet the first major meeting between research team, land owner and the TDF agency responsible for environmental issues was suppose to take place just last week. Go figure that. makes me think of my favorite question... who cares?

There are both natural and man-made challenges in Patagonia. Population growth has spawned a major demand for more cheap electricity and this has sparked a major dam-building effort in Chile and Patagonia. Wild rivers like the Baker and Futaleufu are under seige by major European power companies teamed up with local governments to build theese dams and flood the river ecosystems. It is worse that the TVA or Corp of Engineers in the US. These are foreign private corporations with no accountability beyond their lobbyst’s bribe budget.

The continued effort for wealth extraction from the rivers, lakes and sea have spawned the $2B/yr Chilean salmon industry with numerous harmful impacts on the ecosystem. The real impact of that has been reported by WWF (see report) in great detail. But there is a more suttle impact creeping into the ecosystem. Escapees from the salmon pens have started to stage their own spawning runs up both pacific and Atlantic rivers. We heard from guides in Cholila, Chubut that salmon started showing up in the Corcovado River starting a few years ago. So what happens to the resident fishery going forward? What should be done if anything? What will be the effect of a major salmon spawning run in a few years? Who owns the salmon? Who can harvest them? They have already started farming rainbow trout on Lago Lemay right outside Bariloche - there are few regulations, no environmental impact assessment and a host of issues about them.

Meetings were held with several university professors at Universidad Nacional del Comahue in Bariloche, Rio Negro. Many of the faculty trained in the US and have active scientific programs, numerous graduate students and publish in international journals about their work in Patagonia. Unfortunately without a government agency or mission on fisheres conservation, there is no budget to fund any research. Research projects are based on what costs the least amount of funds rather than what is a pressing provincial issue.

We had lunch with Professor Pablo Vigliano in Bariloche to talk about the state of conservation in Patagonia. He gave us the summary from an soon to be published research publication that it is time for Patagonia to make some important decisions about how it manages its natural resources yet there is really no scientific data available on which to base any decisionmaking - no baselines, no informed provincial decision makers but rather a rapid period of economic development, subdivisions and resort properties in the area.

While MVF is concerned about conservation of river and ocean ecosystems on the planet not just in our back yard in Jackson Hole, the Chesapeake Bay or Bahamas. Following our venture capital roots to seek out projects with a significant return on investment of conservation progress, Patagonia is a prime place for us to work. We hope to have a plan in place in the next several months to prepare for the 2009 Argentina summer. That is January-April, 2009. More later as always.

Ibera Marsh Video

I compiled a short video from our travels through the Ibera Marsh.   It is the one true wild place we visited during our travels.  Just South of Brazil and bordered by Paraguay and Uraguay,  the marsh is a 3 million acre wetland with no dry land, no homes, no people just its wild and wild self.  So see what you think. 

paste this link into your browser...

http://tommvf.googlepages.com/Pira2.mov