A few days ago I spotted a bald eagle about 200 yards away, his white head practically screaming “I am NOT a turkey vulture!”

He was flying north up Kelsey Creek, when he got closer he turned west and silently glided on a thermal straight towards me.

As I tried to stand perfectly still, the magnificent bird watched me as I watched him float by less than 30 feet directly over my head, once past me he kept heading west towards McGaugh Slough.

It was a routine I had witnessed many times over the years, a bald eagle searching the streams for the hitch run, after he went to McGaugh Slough it would be Adobe Creek, then Manning Creek or one of the other small tributaries of the lake.

There has been a fair amount of discussion lately about the hitch being added to the endangered species list, and whether or not it was warranted.

What oftentimes gets lost in the debate is the fact that in many cases the affected species is not simply the specific animal in question, but is actually an entire food chain, as is the case with the hitch.

This amazing fish has survived here for thousands of years but now is teetering on the brink of extinction, the fate that its cousin the Clear Lake splittail has already met. No hitch means fewer bald eagles, and a shock up and down the whole food chain.

It is unclear exactly what is responsible for the the current condition of the hitch population, though one thing we do know is that they need to have water in the creeks for a successful spawning season. Too much water can be a problem too, as untimely storms can erase a week’s worth of hard upstream travel, sometimes more than once or twice.

We know that our climate is changing faster than at any time before, and this fish will likely have to find a way to adapt if it is to survive.

The dry spring weather we have been seeing in recent years could be a feature of this change, water can be too low for the hitch to get to the prime spawning grounds, a problem sometimes made worse by drafting from the creeks at this critical time for frost protecting vineyards.

Then there is the quagga threat, if any of the non-native mussels get into the lake the biology of that environment will change so drastically that the extinction of the hitch is virtually assured, since they both feed on plankton.

The current population of the hitch is likely in the 20,000 to 30,000 range, which may sound like an impressive number but it must be remembered that this fish has a short lifespan and a few bad years of spawning conditions in a row could potentially bring the population down into the hundreds.

We also know that the hitch numbered in the hundreds of thousands in the not-too-distant past, so what is left is just a tiny fraction of that, and its extinct cousin the splittail went from a healthy population to oblivion in just a few short years.

There are many things we cannot control that may influence the survival of this species, but certainly we can find another way to frost protect vineyards – wells, wind machines, spray materials – and certainly we can take meaningful steps to keep the quagga out of our lake.

The Board of Supervisors has known for years that the hitch fry are being sucked up the intakes of the massive pipes, as their habitat is radically altered every night that frost protection is needed while they are in the creeks. Currently the quagga program consists mostly of stickers, pamphlets and signs.

So far the main complaint about listing the hitch is that the “citizen science” involved with the counting process is questionable, since it wasn’t done by professionals using strict scientific methods.

This is a very weak point for several reasons, the first is that every year the entire adult hitch population leaves the deep parts of the lake and tries to spawn far up the creeks, where the fish can easily be tracked day-by-day as the schools slowly move upstream. The water is clear and shallow when they do this, and frequently observations are made multiple times each day at the same spot by different people,  a process which has confirmed that the variations in the counts is fairly small.

The overall numbers change dramatically year to year due to the weather, but we do have enough data from good years to know what the rough average is, and even if you doubled it this fish would still be in serious jeopardy.

So the doubts about “citizen science” are pretty questionable themselves, and if scientific disciplines were employed in the count the outcome is unlikely to change significantly, either in the numbers or the conclusion that the hitch need to be listed.

Maybe the hitch is doomed to exist only in photographs, but that does not mean we should not make the effort to do the obvious things that may be helpful to it’s survival, especially in the case of the quagga, where there are so many other reasons to take action.

Now is the time for making the effort, and to begin planning for the probable listing of the species in order to keep that status from becoming an unnecessarily burdensome set of regulations to follow, to a large extent the outcome here is what we make it.

Philip Murphy lives in Finley, Calif.