S2E2: Remembering Phil Pister
Edwin P. (Phil) Pister, who died January 17, was a fisheries biologist long employed by the California Department of Fish and Game (now Fish and Wildlife.) He was involved in working to protect numerous fish in Eastern California and beyond, including the golden trout and the Devils Hole pupfish. We here republish an excerpt of Episode 7 from Season 1 that featured Phil talking about the moment when he literally, with his own two hands, saved the Owens pupfish from extinction.
Phil was also a founding member of the Desert Fishes Council, which you can join here. Thanks to the DFC for putting Phil's photo where we could swipe it. (Edited to add: Photo taken by John Wullschleger.) And thanks to Phil for everything.
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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT
0:00:18 - (Alicia Pike): It's time for 90 miles from needles, the Desert Protection podcast, with your hosts, Chris Clarke and Alicia Pike.
0:00:28 - (Chris Clarke): Hey, welcome to a special episode of 90 miles from Needles the Desert Protection podcast. This is Chris Clarke.
0:00:37 - (Chris Clarke): There was an announcement yesterday, January 17, 2023, on the email list of the Desert Fishes Council that renowned fisheries biologist Phil Peter had died a few days ago. Phil lived to a ripe old age, and that long life was filled with study of many different species of fish in the desert, including the Owens pupfish, which wouldn't be around today if it wasn't for him. Phil is responsible for inculcating appreciation of desert fishes in quite a few generations of people, not only fisheries biologists or biologists in general, but just people who are infatuated with the natural world as he was.
0:01:21 - (Chris Clarke): We featured a brief segment of an interview with Phil Pister in our episode last year, put out on April 1 of 2022, in which we interviewed Susan Sorrells of Shoshone, California, and Mason Vale of Las Vegas, Nevada, about the Shoshone Pupfish and its history. And in that episode we shared Phil talking about one of my favorite moments in the entire history of conservation of the deserts, in which he, faced with an emergency situation, responded in rather heroic fashion with a couple of buckets. I thought it was appropriate to excerpt that section of that episode and bring It to you again.
0:02:01 - (Chris Clarke): So here from our episode seven of season one, entitled this Desert Fish was declared extinct. Now it thrives, a sort of parenthetical at the time. Excerpt from a Bancroft library at UC Berkeley interview with fisheries biologist Phil Pister, who passed this month in January 2023.
0:02:36 - (Chris Clarke): Let's break away for just a minute here and talk about Phil Pister, who worked as a fisheries biologist for the agency then known as the California Department of Fish and Game. It is now the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Peer is still around, still active in the Desert Fishes Council, which he founded back half a century ago, 1969, when Pister was 40. He was working with some colleagues on the last remaining population of a related pupfish, Cyprinodon radiosus.
0:03:09 - (Chris Clarke): The Owens pupfish, which is endemic to the Owens river and its associated wetlands, found only there and nowhere else. He and his colleagues had placed the pupfish in a holding pond where they would be safe from predation by introduced bass. And then this one particular day in August 1969 was especially hot, and there was a lot of vegetation wringing the pond. It had been a wet winter, and the vegetation had grown abundantly, with lots of roots sucking lots of water out of the ground.
0:03:40 - (Chris Clarke): And they realized that that pond that they'd put the Owens pupfish in, was likely to dry out. So they raced to the pond, and indeed the pond was very low. They caught all the fish, moved them to a second pond nearby that had deeper water in it. And then Pister suggested that his friends go into town, grab something to eat, said he'd meet them there later, was getting ready to go. But it turned out that second pond had extremely low levels of dissolved oxygen, which fish need to survive.
0:04:10 - (Chris Clarke): And we'll let peer take the storytelling from here. From an interview with the oral history project of the Bancroft library at UC Berkeley.
0:04:19 - (Phil Pister): Well, just by some lucky circumstance, I thought, you know, we put a lot of effort into it. Better check and make sure the fish are okay. So I went over and checked the cages where you had these fish in, and they were starting to die in this last group of the entire remaining species. So I got my buckets from the truck, came back and got the live fish, and they were stressed, you can tell, but his fish is not in good shape. It turns over on his back.
0:04:54 - (Phil Pister): And so the truck was probably about a quarter mile anyway, and the buckets is in the dark and no lights or anything. This was a traumatic thing, really, because I was keenly aware of the fact that these fish were nearly gone. I knew this was the only place that they existed anywhere, and I had the only fish in these buckets. And if something had gone wrong, if I tripped, and these fish species would be extinct now. Just that ragged edge of it.
0:05:23 - (Chris Clarke): ##Inc the story of peer, as a relatively young man carrying buckets full of every last individual of an entire species across uneven terrain in the dark, terrified that if he slipped or stepped in a gopher hole or had some other mishap, that there would be an extinction on his conscience. And nonetheless, making it to the truck, saving the fish, which still survive to this day, is a story of the kind of quiet heroism that I think a lot of us can emulate. It's one of my favorite stories that comes out of the California conservation movement, and I'm glad to share it here again with thanks to the Bancroft library.
0:06:01 - (Chris Clarke): For the use of the material.
0:06:14 - (Chris Clarke): So here we are in January 2023, and we have lost Phill. But I gotta say, may we all.
0:06:20 - (Chris Clarke): Live lives that are that full of purpose and that effective and that closely.
0:06:29 - (Chris Clarke): Intertwined with the natural world.
0:06:30 - (Chris Clarke): Thank you, Phil, for everything you've done.
0:06:34 - (Chris Clarke): And thanks to the desert fishes council for letting us know.