An aerial view depicting the Lake County Land Trust's Big Valley Wetlands project. The project area is outlined in red, with tributary streams and wetlands identified in blue. Photo courtesy of the Lake County Land Trust.

LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Two of Lake County’s most active and visible conservation groups – the Lake County Land Trust and the Chi Council for the Clear Lake Hitch – are working toward complementary goals in an effort to protect the natural beauty and wildlife of Clear Lake.

Longtime Lake County conservationist Peter Windrem – instrumental in the 2004 passing of the Northern California Coastal Wild Heritage Wilderness Act, the 1984 creation of the Snow Mountain Wilderness Area in the Mendocino National Forest, and president of the Chi Council for the Clear Lake Hitch – spoke last week about the historical and environmental importance of the hitch, also known as the chi, a large minnow endemic to Clear Lake.

“It’s as spectacular as any salmon run,” Windrem said to the Hidden Valley Lake Rotary Club about the yearly upstream migration of the hitch to spawn, which typically occurs in March.

“I’ve been giving talks about the hitch for several years,” Windrem continued, noting its precipitous decline in Clear Lake in the last 20 years, in an attempt to raise awareness of its plight and save the species from extinction.

That goal dovetails conspicuously with the land trust's recently-identified No. 1 priority, the Big Valley Wetlands project, an effort to protect a nearly five-mile stretch of largely undeveloped shoreline extending south of Lakeport to just west of Clear Lake State Park.

According to Lake County Land Trust President Peter McGee, part of the goal of the Big Valley Wetland project is the protection of Adobe Creek and Kelsey Creek, two tributaries that feed into Clear Lake and still experience significant yearly chi migration.

“The acquisition of these lands is like a pipe dream,” McGee said, adding, “It’s going to be a piece-by-piece deal that’s going to take 150 years.”

The land trust, which manages the 123-acre Rodman Slough Preserve at the north end of Clear Lake, identified the Big Valley Wetlands project as their No. 1 priority after facilitating the Bureau of Land Management’s purchase of the Black Forest on the northeast side of Mt. Konocti.

The group also owns and operates Rabbit Hill, a seven-acre preserve located in Middletown and acquired in 1999.

McGee, who said the land trust has some 400 members, noted his organization has just finished a biological assessment survey of the Big Valley Wetlands project area, and recently finalized a priority list for the property involved in the conservation site.

“We’re still at step one,” McGee said, “but we’re making progress.”

Noting the cooperative nature of the land trust in working with landowners and stakeholders to achieve common goals, “You don’t want people to be frightened; you want people to buy into the goals,” McGee said.

“It’s not a conservative/liberal thing,” McGee said about county conservation efforts, adding, “It cuts across the political spectrum.”

Both McGee and Windrem cite the extinction of the splittail – another fish endemic to Clear Lake – in the 1970s as cause for concern about the plight of the chi, with Windrem adding, “the hitch is on an extinction trajectory.”

In his talk, Windrem mentioned six potential causes for the steep decline in the hitch population: creek levees built in the 1950s which caused gravel backup in the streams; gravel mining in the 1950s and 1960s; weirs built in Clear Lake tributaries to protect bridge footings and inhibit chi from swimming upstream to spawning grounds; the introduction in the 1960s of the non-native silversides, which eat

zooplankton, a primary chi food source; the introduction, also in the 1960s, of Florida largemouth bass, which eat chi during their spring migration; and the introduction in the 1980s of threadfin shad, which also eat zooplankton.

Windrem noted that, unlike salmon, chi cannot jump over barriers to travel upstream, and need clean, plentiful gravel beds to lay their eggs.

“Everything that harmed the hitch was introduced because of economic gain,” Windrem said, calling it “a death sentence.”

In addition to removing or modifying barriers in creeks that would allow the hitch to reach historic spawning grounds, Windrem cited completion of the Middle Creek Restoration Project as a goal beneficial to the chi, saying it “could be extremely helpful because it would give more area for protection of the young hitch and protect them better against those predators.”

He also noted local American Indian tribal involvement in protecting this natural resource. “The tribes have been aggressively seeking some grant funding through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” he said, adding “that has happened just recently, within the last three or four years, so that’s encouraging.”

Windrem called the plight of the hitch urgent. “We will lose something terribly important about Clear Lake and our history if we lose the hitch.”

“The hitch are, in many respects, like lots of other species that are under assault,” Windrem said, “and how we try to deal with that and save them is what we as humans are having to do around the globe, and this is ours. This is ours.”

For more information about the hitch and the Chi Council for the Clear Lake Hitch, visit http://lakelive.info/chicouncil/index.html, where you can sign up to receive email updates about the spring chi migration.

For more information about the Lake County Land Trust, go to www.lakecountylandtrust.org/index.htm, where you can obtain volunteer information or donate online.

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