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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Dracon" data-source="post: 1436688" data-attributes="member: 14799"><p>Tiger - I mentioned earlier that the osprey south of Montana had become victim of the law of unintended consequences.  This occurred in Yellowstone Park, Wyoming, beginning in 1988 when catastropic fires swept 50% of the total land mass of the Park.  Approximately 1,800 square miles of timber burned, much of it around Yellowstone Lake which had numerous osprey and bald eagle nests established near the shore line.   Mature lodge pole pine growing near the lake's edge provided excellent nesting sites, and although the lake itself exists at close to 8,000 feet elevation, and the ice does not leave the lake until the end of May, osprey were very common, and many generations of these splendid raptors repeated their life cycle along the lake's pristine shoreline.  Boaters and canoe campers watched the osprey flapping along and then suddenly diving and catching the native cutthroat trout in a never ending ritual which never ceased to amaze the viewers.  It was one of my favorite summer past times for over 60 years when I camped on the shores of Yellowstone Lake.  Today, osprey sightings are relatively rare.  What happened?  The Yellowstone Cutthroat went into a steep decline after the fires for several reasons.  Initially, sensitive spawning grounds of streams flowing into Yellowstone Lake were sediment laden adversely reducing the number of eggs being fertilized and the fingerlings making it back into the Lake.  How many generations of Cutthroat Trout were affected is unknown.  The data does show a steady decline of Cutthroat Trout returning to the spawning beds.  But to compound the problem was the sudden emergence of Lake Trout, which are voracious predators on the Cuts. Biologists are now finding Lake Trout 20 years in age, which coincides with the times of the fires.  Cutthroat Trout feed at many levels of the lake, and when surface feeding they are highly susceptible to the forays of the Osprey.  Lake Trout spawn deep in the Lake and are rarely close to the shallow areas except as fingerlings. What happended? No one really knows for sure but theories abound.  Some claim that a "bucket biologist" planted Lake Trout in Yellowstone Lake.  Some claim that Pelicans transported live fish between Lewis Lake, which has a population of Lake Trout to Yellowstone Lake, over a distance of six miles with a low divide separating the two lakes.  The divide is the Continental Divide with waters flowing into two oceans, the Atlantic and the Pacific.  The latest theory is that while fighting the fires which spread through out the area, helicopters pouring buckets of water scooped up from Lewis Lake accidently dropped its load containing some live Lake Trout into the Yellowstone Lake drainage.  Somehow a male and a female Lake Trout managed to get into the wrong lake, survive to sexual maturity, find each other, and start a family.  Your Agatha Christie could have written a splendid mystery around all this.  The upshot is that the Yellowstone Trout is in danger and the osprey has had to relocate in large numbers to other areas outside Yellowstone Park.  Yellowstone</p></blockquote><p></p>

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