Still Whirling
heleinIR.com
13 July 2006
Peggy O'Neill

It's a beautiful evening on the Missouri River. Rainbows are rising to tricos, caddis and hoppers. The water is warm enough to wet wade and every riffle and pocket is packed with anglers casting toward swirling dimples, hoping to land one of the legendary fish. Locals and tourists alike try their luck, but more often than not the discerning rainbows and browns turn their noses at the imitations and slurp the naturals. An occasional unsuspecting whitefish may try to score an easy meal; if he does he finds himself in a net with a pair of forceps tugging at a hook from his fat lips. Seconds later he's back where he started - in the river.

Around the state - on the Madison, the Yellowstone, the Big Hole, almost every river and stream - it's a similar scene. Anglers vying for a perfect hole. Trout snubbing their offerings. It's a battle of the wits, which the fish usually win. Unfortunately for anglers, the fish don't win every battle they face. Habitat loss, invasive species, drought and fish diseases take their toll. One fish disease, known as whirling disease, is a particular threat to Montana's wild trout.

This is not breaking news. Whirling disease has been in the United States since at least the 1950s. And it was more than ten years ago when the Madison River made a splash in national headlines, when it was announced that 90 percent of the river's rainbow trout fishery had been decimated and the media predicted the demise of the Montana fishing tradition. Since that time, whirling disease has fallen off the radar and anglers are out in record numbers. It's as if whirling disease never happened or had been miraculously cured. But that's not necessarily the case.

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Crow Tests Positive for West Nile
The Leader-Post
12 July 2006
Pamela Cowan

It's official -- West Nile virus is here.

A dead crow collected in Regina on July 4 tested positive for the virus -- the first concrete indication that West Nile virus is starting to appear again in the province, said provincial West Nile virus co-ordinator Phil Curry.

"The dead crow was part of a research project that we're doing with the city, but we're not doing dead-crow testing and surveillance throughout the province," said Curry, who added that if bird testing was done at other Saskatchewan sites, West Nile virus would probably be found in other birds.

"We don't want to give the impression that Regina is a hot spot because we've only been testing here," he said. The main species of mosquito carrying the West Nile virus -- Culex tarsalis -- thrives in hot weather. This year's heat wave is affecting a wider area of the province, Curry said.

"In other years, the virus didn't develop and the mosquitoes didn't develop as quickly in the parkland areas or in western Saskatchewan or Alberta simply because the temperatures were cooler," he said. "This year it's more like 2003, where we had lots of heat from southern Manitoba right through to Alberta."

Factors that contribute to an outbreak include lots of virus cycling in birds, the right kind of mosquito to carry the virus from a bird to a human, prolonged periods of hot weather and a susceptible population, Curry said.

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