12/19/2023 0 Comments Circuli desrt pupfishHe thought of the Owens pupfish and wondered if anyone would care that he had saved them. In the dark, with a heavy, sloshing bucket in each hand, he trudged across the flotsam of cow country - barbed wire, crumpled fences, rodent burrows - and under the white smear of the Milky Way. He scooped water and the remaining fish into the buckets, and drove to another spring to release the pupfish there. By accident, he had placed the cages away from the oxygenated current, leaving the last Owens pupfish in the world to choke to death on air.ĭistraught, he ran to his truck, grabbed the buckets and raced back. But when he returned to the edge of the pool, he saw that the caged pupfish were dying, some already belly-up. Afterward, he shooed his colleagues into town for dinner he would finish up. He parked in a cloud of dust, then he and a small crew hurriedly corralled 800 or so pupfish into mesh cages in the dregs of the pond. The drive from his office in Bishop normally took 15 minutes he did it in 10. So he grabbed the buckets, jumped in his pickup truck and sped through ranch land toward water. The marsh, he knew, held the world’s last population of Owens pupfish. Pister, a state wildlife biologist, had heard that a marsh called Fish Slough, one of the few natural oases in the arid Owens Valley, was on the verge of drying up. The Owens pupfish, a small blue fish native to the springs in the California desert, was spared from extinction on an August afternoon in 1969 by Phil Pister and his two buckets.
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