FEATURE
For Southern California steelhead conservationists, old fishing scrapbooks are more than mere memories—they’re evidence that the now-elusive fish once thrived in the Santa Margarita river. A family shared these photos with the CA Dept. of Fish and Wildlife.
STEELHEAD WERE INTRODUCED ON EVERY CONTINENT EXCEPT ANTARCTICA, CAPELLI TOLD ME. BUT THEY ARE TRULY NATIVE TO SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.
the landscape of Southern California and use every part of the watershed, from the estuary— or the river’s mouth—to the farthest upstream tributaries.” That’s the way it was until California’s settlers lined rivers with concrete and dammed them for drinking water. River habitat has been so destroyed that, though rainbow trout and Southern California steelhead are biologically the same fish, the latter has been on the federal list of endangered species since 1997. And that’s also why, any time I wanted, I could glide my fingers over the embalmed scales of a 34-inch rainbow trout—the inland sister to the steelhead—nailed to my father’s wall. Not because they’re native to the Midwest, but because they adapted to thrive all over the world.
fly fisherwoman who wrote a grant to do genetic surveys for fish trapped behind barriers. “I wanted to know where the native trout were,” she says. As I reported this story, it finally dawned on me that steelhead and trout were being used interchangeably by my sources. Growing up, I thought trout belonged to my native Wisconsin. On the contrary, its progenitors are steelhead, these native Pacific Ocean residents who fight river currents to mate in the cool headwaters of Western rivers. “These fish all began as ocean-dwellers, just as life itself is derived from the ocean,” says Mark Capelli, the South-Central California steelhead recovery coordinator for the National Marine Fisheries Service. “They evolved with
66 SEPTEMBER 2023
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