Angkor Wat, Shinto Shrines and the Big Hole River

One month after the US Fish and Wildlife Service denied protection the fluvial arctic grayling, a species of fish restricted in the US to an 80-mile stretch of Montana's Big Hole River, environmentalists are taking the Bush administration to court.

At times like this, people are bound to say, "Too bad about the fish, but aren't there bigger problems in the world?" To them I recommend David Quammen's "Jeremy Bentham, the Pieta, and a Precious Few Grayling":

I had some strong personal feelings toward the grayling of the Big Hole -- proprietary is not the right word, too presumptuous; rather, feelings somewhere between cherishing and reliance. I had come to count on the fact, for cheer and solace in a very slight way, that they were there, that they existed -- beautiful, dumb, and useless -- in the upper reaches of that particular river. It happened because I had gone up there each year for a number of years -- usually in late August, which is the start of autumn in the upper Big Hole Valley, or in early September -- with two hulking Irishmen, brothers. Each year, stealing two days for this pilgrimage just as the first cottonwoods were taking on patches of yellow; we three visited the grayling.

At that time of year the Big Hole grayling are feeding, mainly in the mornings, on a plague of tiny dark mayflies known as Tricorythodes, for convenience, trikes. One of these creatures is roughly the size of a caraway seed, black-bodied with pale milky wings; but they appear on the water by the millions, and the grayling line up in certain areas to sip at them. The trike hatch happens every August and September, beginning each morning when the sun begins warming the water, continuing daily for more than a month, and it is one of the reasons thirty-one grayling can be caught in a few hours. The trike hatch was built into my understanding with the Irishmen, an integral part of the yearly ritual. Trike time, time to visit the Big Hole grayling.

Not stalk, not confront, certainly not kill and eat; visit. No great angling thrills attach to catching grayling. You don't fish at them for the satisfaction of fooling a crafty animal on its own terms, or fighting a wild little teakettle battle handicapped across a fine leader, as you do with trout. The whole context of expectations and rewards is different. You catch grayling to visit them:to hold one carefully in the water, hook freed, dorsal flaring, and gape at the colors and then watch as it dashes away. This is good for a person, though it could never be the greatest good for the greatest number. I had visited them regularly at trike time with the two Irishmen, including the autumn of the younger brother's divorce, and during the days just before the birth of the older brother's first daughter, and through some weather of my own. So I did not want to hear about a Big
Hole River that was empty of grayling.

Choosing a few paragraphs to excerpt from Quammen's masterpiece was arguably the hardest thing I've had to do yet at Wired Science. The article is not simply about fish; it's about art and beauty, utilitarianism and transcendence, Angor Wat and Henry Stimson's refusal to drop an atomic bomb on Kyoto. Please, read it.

Group Seeks Protection for Rare Fish [Washington Post]

Jeremy Bentham, the Pieta, and a Precious Few Grayling [Audobon]
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Image: *Robert Hines