- [Narrator] Coming up on "Impact".

Fish are mysteriously dying in several Montana Rivers.

- We just don't have the information to be able to say definitively that's what it is.

- [Narrator] However, experts are getting closer to finding answers and the last, vast unbroken stretches of Western grasslands are in danger of being fragmented.

- [Speaker] If we're not taking good care of the land, we're not gonna be here anymore.

- [Narrator] Now traditional adversaries are coming together to save them.

That's next on "Impact."

- [Narrator] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust, investing in people, places, and opportunities in our region, online at ottobremer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans, and viewers like you, who are friends of Montana PBS, thank you.

- Welcome to the second season of "Impact" on Montana PBS.

I'm Anna Rau.

"Impact" is our news and public affairs series, exploring and investigating issues important to you, our viewers.

Our first story takes us to southwest Montana, where the number of Rainbow and Brown Trout are declining at an alarming rate, and experts aren't exactly sure why.

Montana PBS's Joe Lesar reports.

- [Joe Lesar] For the past 39 summers, Craig Fellin has run the Big Hole Lodge, guiding anglers on southwest Montana's world class rivers.

It's where he passed down his love of fly fishing to his son, Wade.

- I'll never forget my senior year of high school, thinking I was gonna have another summer of mowing the lawn, doing dishes, and fishing every day, and dad said, "You have two weeks to learn the oars you're guiding."

And so for the past 17 years, I've been a guide at Big Hole Lodge and working alongside my father, so.

- [Joe Lesar] Craig and Wade now co-own the Lodge, which sits about eight miles from its namesake, the Big Hole River.

The free flowing, Blue Ribbon Trout fishery is nicknamed, "The Last Best River."

It supports the last naturally producing population of fluvial Arctic Grayling in the lower 48.

- [Wade Fellin] And it's beautiful, it's pristine.

Cows, not condos, with a river running through it with wild Trout.

- [Joe Lesar] Four species of Montana's wild Trout that haven't been stocked since the seventies.

- It's like a whole different sport when you catch a wild Trout as opposed to a hatchery fish.

- So they're sustaining their populations within that beautiful river and it's worked really well until now.

- [Joe Lesar] This spring, Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks released data showing that numbers of Brown and Rainbow Trout are at or near historic lows in certain stretches of the Big Hole, Beaverhead, and Ruby Rivers.

The Fellins and other guides have increasingly seen diseased fish, covered in growths and lesions.

The declines are steepest in the Big Hole, which is now the center point of growing concern over the health of the three rivers that form the Jefferson.

Angling on these rivers accounts for a large chunk of Beaverhead County's $167 million outdoor recreation economy.

Fellin says the fishing is still good, but that the declines have affected business.

- I had a client leave two weeks ago and say, "Good luck with all of this.

I hope you figure it out.

I hope we can come back someday when it fishes better."

- The Fellins believe that they have a responsibility to help preserve these rivers.

Due in part to Craig's experience as a founding member of the Big Hole Watershed Committee and Wade's as Program Director at the Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, the two have been active in representing a conservation-minded contingent of the Big Holes outfitting community.

- [Speaker] We can't just sit on our hands.

We have to do something and we feel that it truly is an all hands on deck moment.

- [Joe Lesar] While this year's data surprised people, Trout numbers have been steadily declining for the past decade.

Brown Trout in the Melrose Section of the Big Hole dropped from over 1800 fish per mile in 2014 to just under 400 this year.

- [Speaker] Eight three.

- FWP fish biologist Jim Olsen says it's strange that the Brown Trout are struggling because they are generally Montana's most resilient Trout species.

- They should be the one that are doing the best and they're the ones that are basically crashing right now.

- [Joe Lesar] They know many factors are at play, but right now, experts are still trying to determine the primary drivers behind the declines.

- [Speaker] We don't have the information to be able to say definitively that's what it is.

- [Joe Lesar] What FWP can say definitively is that the amount of water is playing a major role.

- [Speaker] Historically, flow has been the main driver of our fish population.

When we have really good flow throughout the whole year, we see really good recruitment.

- [Joe Lesar] Recruitment is the process of young small fish becoming older, larger fish.

- The last couple years have been okay, recruitment year, still below average, but the three previous years before that have been very, very low.

And now that's led to now the lowest numbers that we have on record.

- [Joe Lesar] Data in the 2017 Montana Climate Assessment shows that historically, yearly snowpacks are declining and then that snow is melting earlier.

That can mean less water that warms up earlier in the year, not ideal for Trout that thrive in strong and cold water.

It can also increase the chance of harmful algae blooms, not uncommon on the Big Hole in recent years.

- When you have a bloom and it begins to die off, you've got the process of decomposition, consumes all the dissolved oxygen around.

- [Joe Lesar] Less dissolved oxygen negatively impacts reproduction and growth of fish.

Brian Wheeler, who heads the Big Hole River Foundation and works as a fishing guide says that these low flow, high temp conditions aren't unique to the Big Hole.

- We look at the Missouri and the Madison, they still struggle with algae blooms.

They still struggle with high water temperatures.

They got three times as much pressure, fishing pressure, as the Big Hole does, and they're not seeing those declines.

- That fact points to the possibility of a new disease.

Wheeler and Fellin say they've been seeing diseased fish since 2014 when an outbreak of Saprolegnia fungus caused a major die off.

- [Speaker] The population declines really started those first couple years of fungus.

- [Joe Lesar] But Wheeler says whatever is killing fish now appears to be different from what caused the die off in 2014.

- [Speaker] And we're seeing things we never saw those years, we're seeing open lesions on the heads, what people have started to call the cheese grater heads.

- [Joe Lesar] Wheeler says it would make sense to see sick fish at the end of the summer when water is low, but that hasn't been the case in recent years.

- We're not just seeing it in October, we're seeing it in June when there's a ton of cold flow in the river, that is really strange, it doesn't add up.

- [Joe Lesar] Healthy fish can fight off fungus.

It's when they're under additional stress like another disease or poor water conditions that they become vulnerable to it.

- It's generally a secondary infection.

And so we're trying to find out if there is a primary infection or if that stressor is environmental that they're experiencing that makes them susceptible.

- [Joe Lesar] In June, FWP announced a concerted effort to find answers about the declines.

A multi-pronged study was launched looking at disease, recruitment, and adult fish survival.

Fish experts did some early sampling in July, electrofishing the Jerry Creek section of the Big Hole.

When the electrode hits the water, it creates an electrical current that the fish are drawn to.

The goal is to find sick fish when they're still alive and collect samples immediately after they're killed.

The quickly preserved samples will be sent to a histopathologist to look for signs of disease at the microscopic level, but conclusions are a ways away.

FWP studies will take four to five years to complete.

In that time though, other groups will also be working to bring answers to light.

- [Speaker] No one organization is responsible for this and no one organization can quickly solve this.

- [Joe Lesar] In June, Fellin announced the formation of Save Wild Trout, a privately funded group of guides, anglers, and businesses.

- And what Save Wild Trout hopes to do is identify what we feel are gaps in data collection and privately fundraise, bring that data together with expert scientists that can wrap it up in a bow and bring it to the state to help inform their management decisions moving forward.

- [Joe Lesar] In August, Save Wild Trout named Dr. Kyle Flynn as their lead scientist.

He's the first of a team of scientists they're planning to form.

Dr. Flynn is gathering water chemistry and dissolved oxygen data at locations where FWP has long-term population data.

- Right over there, the Beaverhead comes in from Twin Bridges and the.

- [Joe Lesar] Save Wild Trout's work will add to the growing dataset already being built by Wheeler who has run the Big Hole River Foundation's water quality program since it began in 2020.

11 times from April to October, Wheeler and volunteers sample 10 sites along the Big Hole and its tributaries, collecting a variety of data and logging hundreds of miles each trip.

One of his key measurements is the levels of excess nutrients, mainly phosphorus and nitrogen.

Excess nutrient pollution fuels harmful algae blooms.

Wheeler is also studying how water quality affects Trout's main food source.

- [Speaker] All these issues that we're seeing are not just impacting Trout population levels, they're impacting the bugs as well.

- [Joe Lesar] This is Wheeler's fourth year collecting bug data and by December, he and a group of entomologists in Manhattan plan to release a report detailing their findings.

- [Speaker] One of the first of its kind on the Big Hole, to try and establish what does baseline bug health look like?

- [Joe Lesar] Like the Trout, certain aquatic insect species are also in decline.

- [Speaker] And so when you start to see these declines and shifts, it affects everything from there on up.

- Save Wild Trout and the Big Whole River Foundation share the same goal of helping to inform the state as they make decisions.

- [Speaker] The whole project is designed to be complimentary to agency work.

- [Joe Lesar] According to Region Three Fisheries Manager, Mike Duncan, FWP does plan to use this outside data moving forward.

In the short term, one question is whether this year's good water conditions will have a positive effect on Trout numbers.

- [Speaker] So when conditions are favorable, we see really fast population expansion.

- [Joe Lesar] Fish born this year won't be big enough to show up in population sampling until next year or the year after.

But long term, larger questions about water use, recreation, and climate change will be more difficult to answer.

- [Speaker] I think what makes it so compelling in the Big Hole is that we are at the Headwaters of the Missouri and one of the great river systems on earth.

The Headwaters are supposed to be clean, they're supposed to be pristine and pure.

- [Joe Lesar] Craig's love of the outdoors and his will to protect it are alive and well and weighed.

- There's a fish.

- [Joe Lesar] They believe that quick action is required to reverse these declines.

- So pooling resources and bringing people together now while we know the resource is on its knees, but it's not dead.

- [Joe Lesar] So that his son can have the same sort of retirement that he'll have.

- Wade is gonna take over here and I'll be able to go fishing a little more.

- For "Impact", I'm Joe Lesar.

- Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks has imposed emergency fishing restrictions on some stretches of the Big Hole, Beaverhead, and Ruby Rivers starting September 30th.

For more information on the restrictions, go to FWP'S website.

The grasslands of the northern Great Plains that stretch from Nebraska to Alberta are one of the last remaining intact prairies on the planet and also among the least protected.

Montana PBS's Stan Parker takes us to Winnett to meet an unlikely group of allies working to preserve the grasslands and rural economies.

- [Speaker] This is one of the last, really great intact grasslands left in the world.

- [Speaker] Grasslands provide habitat for hundreds of wildlife species that need this particular ecosystem to survive.

- [Stan Parker] Family ranchers are stepping up to protect the grasslands and their rural way of life.

- [Speaker] To have a vibrant community, you have to have kind of a vibrant economy.

- [Speaker] I think we all have all come to realize that to be economically successful, we have to be ecologically successful first.

- [Speaker] What it comes down to is, if we're not taking good care of the land, we're not gonna be here anymore.

- [Stan Parker] With this movement, comes some unexpected alliances.

- [Speaker] For years we've pretty much viewed those groups as the other guys, they weren't on our side.

- [Speaker] Those were organizations definitely that we feared before we got to know more about them.

- [Stan Parker] Now aligned with the same goal.

- [Speaker] They want family ranchers to be successful.

- [Stan Parker] Family ranchers like the Nowlins.

- My family's been in Petroleum County for over a hundred years and on this place since the fifties.

My husband and I moved back a little over 10 years ago and we have a lease operation from my parents.

- [Stan Parker] On a hot day in August, Laura Nowlin and her kids, Jack and Anna, are tearing out some old fence on her family ranch.

- This is what we call a sheep wire fence, this woven wire, it works really well for a fence, but it keeps the wildlife from going through.

So we're taking this out and then we will replace it with, in this place we'll probably use four wires, but in other places we'll use three wires.

So the bottom wire is high enough for an antelope to go under and then the top wire is low enough for the deer and the elk to go over.

And then there's a space between the first and second wires so that the Sage Grouse can go through.

- [Stan Parker] There is some finesse to this task.

- That my great uncle could walk along, basically jog along, rolling his roll of wire and he was a chain smoker, so he'd be rolling his cigarette while he was rolling his roll of wire.

- [Stan Parker] The Nowlins are getting help for this work from the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a unit of the US Department of Agriculture.

- It's pretty expensive and it's a lot of labor and so without those incentives from NRCS, we probably wouldn't do it or we would do it, but real slow over a lot of time and now we're gonna do several miles in about four years.

- [Stan Parker] This project is just one example of a conservation trend that's been gaining steam in recent years.

Major environmental nonprofits and government agencies are expanding financial incentives to help family ranches do business in a way that better protects this vast grassland ecosystem.

Winnett may be a no traffic light town in the least populated county in Montana, but it happens to be playing an outsize role in this work, thanks in large part to a local group called ACES that Laura helped start.

- ACES stands for Agricultural Community Enhancement and Sustainability, so in a nutshell, ACES is a group of people who care about Winnett specifically, but central Montana more broadly and rural communities even more broadly.

- [Speaker] ACES makes conservation projects like this stream restoration work happen by linking local ranchers with the funding and sometimes even the volunteer labor to make it happen.

- Everything that ACES does is partnership private, non-profit, and governmental agencies all coming together to improve these landscapes.

- [Stan Parker] Kendall Wojcik works for ACEs as a land health specialist.

Healthy soil she says, makes for healthy communities.

- When ranchers can focus on soil health, it benefits them in a lot of ways, but it's not one size fits all.

It's not even one size fits all for every pasture that ranchers have.

So we're all trying to figure out this puzzle together.

- [Stan Parker] Bill Milton is an ACES member who ranches between Winnett and Roundup.

He does things a little differently than most ranchers.

- Bill is a Buddhist and a very liberal person that lives in the center of a very conservative, mostly Christian community.

So he's just a little bit different to begin with, you know?

- [Stan Parker] Bill moves his cattle a lot, needing temporary electric fence reconfigured almost daily, but he does have help and doesn't mind the walking.

- Well, now I gotta build the other half, (laughs) not done yet.

- [Speaker] And I think that we are all the better for that, for Bill being different and challenging us to think about things in a different way.

- [Stan Parker] Bill was a key part of the ACES' origin story.

He and another rancher, Diane Ahlgren, called a neighborhood meeting a few years back to discuss some touchy issues.

At that time, mostly wildlife concerns around elk and Sage Grouse.

- And so I was just saying, "Okay, let's go around and talk about what's working and what's not working.

And all the older ranchers were typically, like often the ranching community does, is they're complaining about regulations and about environmental stuff and about politics and basically they're just kind of angry.

- And it kind of started out too of a like much more defensive, "We're doing a good job.

The reason people are looking at us is because we are intact grassland and we do have good Sage Grouse population.

Maybe they should just leave us alone and let us keep doing a good job."

And, but kind of the realization of like, "Well that's not gonna happen."

So instead how do we live with that, I guess?

Kind of accept that and go forward.

- But it was just interesting to see the dynamic in the room shift between how to defend ourselves and how to create something.

- [Stan Parker] Their first project, getting local beef into the school cafeteria and the ideas didn't stop there.

- The other big project that came outta that meeting was the grassbank idea, although we didn't know to call it a grassbank idea.

- [Stan Parker] Seeing ranch prices driven up by non-locals buying for recreation, the group saw how it kept young would-be ranchers from getting into the business.

- [Speaker] Then agriculture is disappearing or that was the fear anyway.

- [Stan Parker] They started researching how to buy land as a group and make it available for grazing as a grassbank.

From there they met other groups aligned with the same goals.

- We've met a lot of traditional and non-traditional partners in this adventure that we're on of all of the possibilities that we're chasing down.

- I've heard this word said quite a few times, non-traditional partners, yeah, it's great.

I was thinking about it today I said, "We keep using that fricking word."

So a non-traditional partner to a rancher is usually working with a community that historically is seen either not in your community or in opposition to your community.

And so 20, 30 years ago, a group like the Nature Conservancy or World Wildlife Fund or Ottoman, these were traditionally perceived by ranchers as the enemy.

That was pretty much the mantra back in the eighties and nineties.

Over time, the sort of mainstream environmental groups realized, "Most of this ground that supports this wildlife is privately owned."

So if you're in a conflict with a person who's providing most of the habitat for what you think is important, you either gotta beat 'em, put 'em out of business, turn it all into a park, or you have to form an alliance with 'em.

And there's just been this slow movement that has become more pronounced of late where you have a group like Ottoman that has a bird friendly program and they bring resources to the rancher for infrastructure or marketing if they meet certain criteria to protect native habitat for birds.

And then you have the RSV program with World Wildlife Fund in which they literally bring pretty serious dollars for like water development, fencing.

- I think people sometimes are surprised that World Wildlife Fund has a program that works with ranchers.

- [Stan Parker] Alexis Bonogofsky raises sheep near Billings and she manages the Sustainable Ranching Initiative for World Wildlife Fund.

Laura and Bill both participate in the non-profits Ranch Systems Viability Planning program.

- If a rancher wants to change their grazing practices to, for example, give more rest to a certain area on their ranch every year, then World Wildlife Fund is able to help them with infrastructure costs to make that possible.

- [Stan Parker] One of the program's biggest goals is to prevent grasslands from getting plowed up.

- [Alexis] Every year we lose millions of acres just to conversion for commodity crops.

- The reason you don't want to break it into pieces is because the animals that depend on that biome migrate.

And I'm not saying farms are bad, but when everybody's acting, doing their own thing, all of a sudden you find out that, "Gee, half the Northern Plains is farms."

- [Alexis] The current intact grasslands, 87% of them are poor or marginal quality soils for cropping.

And so we're trying to keep that in grass.

- [Stan Parker] The World Wildlife Fund recently held its inaugural RSVP gathering in Montana.

The Winnett ACES played host to this group of ranchers for one of those days in Winnett.

They got a chance to show off some of the conservation work they've done and also the community enhancement work.

- That was a way for the ranchers and the RSVP network to see the work that Winnett ACES is doing, that the conservation work isn't separate from the community work.

- Our main focus is agriculture, but we depend upon the town just as the town depends upon the Ag producers in the area.

So we want to do what we can to keep the town intact too.

- [Stan Parker] ACES helped along an effort to build a brand new community center and now they're planning a courthouse renovation and revitalizing an old building into a new space called 55 Main.

- It was gonna be demolished to make way for the new community center, but there were several of us that didn't wanna see another old building in town disappear.

So we did a little fundraising and moved it up here, set it on a new foundation, and are now in the process of remodeling it.

- [Stan Parker] This will soon be a place for coffee, ice cream, breakfast, and socializing.

Also showers for hunters and cyclists passing through, upstairs, a two bedroom apartment.

- We all know that rural America in many places has been struggling and I think we're finding that, don't wait for some white horse to come galloping over the ridge to help you.

If you want to create something better, you're gonna have to take a role in creating that.

- Groups like Winnett ACES really show that the only durable conservation that we will ever have is when this work is being done in local communities.

- One thing that I think is really neat is that World Wildlife Fund is open to investing money into projects like 55 Main and kind of some of these less concrete ideas.

- It demonstrates to people who are still, I think in the ranch community, a little bit of scant like, "Well, I don't trust these guys.

In the end, they're really coming out to get us."

And I just don't believe that anymore.

- [Speaker] I mean, we had to sit across the table for a year or two to establish that trust, that their goals didn't conflict with our goals, that we actually did want the same things for the range.

- [Alexis] And part of that too is we have to not always be so defensive as ranchers and landowners too, and like there are, we can improve what we're doing and we should improve where we can and being okay with that kind of critique, also, that we're all kind of meeting in the middle here because we do have these common goals.

- [Stan Parker] For "Impact", I'm Stan Parker.

- The group hopes to have the 55 Main project done by next summer.

That's all the time we have for this episode.

On the next "Impact", heavy tourism has pushed the sewer systems in some small Montana towns past the breaking point.

And beef is one of Montana's biggest exports, yet only a fraction is processed in the state.

We talk with ranchers who are looking to change that.

We'll see you for those stories next time, I'm Anna Rau.

Thanks for joining us.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music) (dramatic music) - [Narrator] Production of "Impact" is made possible with support from the Otto Bremer Trust, investing in people, places, and opportunities in our region, online at ottobremer.org.

The Greater Montana Foundation, encouraging communication on issues, trends, and values of importance to Montanans and viewers like you, who are friends of Montana PBS, thank you.

(piano music)