Lehi, Utah – Elray Morrill, 70, former steel worker and now night-crawler salesman, grower of pumpkins and raiser of calves, doesn’t much like the government. Never voted but once in his life, as he put it. That was in 1960, for John F. Kennedy.
“Other than that, it’s just one crook out, another crook in,” he said, and he leaned back in his broken chair on the porch of his home that’s surrounded by rusted car parts and bent farm tools, a vast collection of things that are broken. Then he snorted. And spit. “I have no use for our damn government,” he said.
And so, if you’re looking for someone to blast away at a new environmental plan in these parts, a government program that has handed over $1.3 million of our money – of Elray’s money – to protect a sucker fish that few people have ever heard of, well, you figure you couldn’t do much better than a quick interview with crusty ol’ anti-government Elray.
And then you get a surprise.
“Oh, you got to protect that sucker,” he said from outside his home, near the shore of sprawling Utah Lake, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. “This is the only damn lake in the world that has ’em. Gotta protect ’em. One of the few times the damn government can do something right.”
A blink from extinction
The object of Morrill’s impassioned speech is the June sucker. Utah Lake, as he pointed out, is indeed the only place in the world where they swim. Biologists believe there are as few as 300 wild June suckers remaining. They are a blink away from extinction.
Earlier this month, the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program got a $500,000 federal grant, capping off the $1.3 million in state and federal funds it has gathered to keep the sucker around. The money will be used to buy land along the Provo River, the sucker’s most crucial spawning habitat, and to lessen the impact of makeshift irrigation dams on the river.
The June sucker has been on the Endangered Species list since 1986. Biologists believe the fish, which can live for 40 years and reach 10 pounds, once swam in massive Bonneville Lake, which covered about half of what is now Utah. When Bonneville Lake disappeared between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, the June sucker retreated. The few survivors made it into what is Utah Lake and once again began to thrive.
But irrigation in the early 1900s cut off the sucker’s main spawning grounds, the Provo River. A 10-year study that ended in the early 1980s discovered the few remaining. A hatchery program was started, with wild suckers being stripped of eggs, the young raised in tanks and reintroduced into the lake. No one’s sure how many hatchery-reared suckers survived. Biologists fear it’s not many.
Unlike other suckers
“The June sucker is in trouble,” said Utah Department of Natural Resources biologist Chris Keleher, “because it lives here and nowhere else. One lake.”
Utah Lake stretches some 24 miles from the town of Lehi on the north shore, past Provo and Orem, and dies in the meadows of hay near Santaquin. It averages just 8 or 9 feet in depth and is filled with non-native fish such as walleye, catfish, white bass and carp – all introduced for sport fishing – which compete with the June sucker for food.
The June sucker is unlike nearly all other suckers. It doesn’t feed on the bottom, cruising instead at mid-depths, much like trout, devouring plankton and insects.
Chris Buelow, program coordinator for the June sucker recovery program, said nearly all of the fish’s spawning grounds have been lost to agriculture.
“Starting in the 1920s and ’30s, people built diversion dams in the Provo and American Fork rivers, the June sucker’s spawning areas,” he said. “We didn’t know it then, but those little dams were the beginning of the end for the June sucker. We may be just in time to save it.”
All of which pleases Elray.
“I’ve been here since I was 17,” he said. “Back then people caught the suckers. Snagged them with big treble hooks, then took ’em home and smoked ’em. People didn’t know better. Now I guess we might lose them. Imagine that.
“Maybe the government can do something right for a change. Maybe they can bring ’em back.”
Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
