Sucker hooks unlikely ally

LEHI — Elray Morrill, 70, former steel worker and now night-crawler salesman, grower of pumpkins and raiser of calves, doesn't much like the government. Never voted but once in his life, as he put it. That was in 1960, for John F. Kennedy.

"Other than that, it's just one crook out, another crook in," he said, and he leaned back in his broken chair on the porch of his home that's surrounded by rusted car parts and bent farm tools, a vast collection of things that are broken. Then he snorted. And spit. "I have no use for our damn government," he said.

And so, if you're looking for someone to blast away at a new environmental plan in these parts, a government program that has handed over $1.3 million of our money — of Elray's money — to protect a sucker fish that few people have ever heard of, well, you figure you couldn't do much better than a quick interview with crusty ol' anti-government Elray.

And then you get a surprise.

"Oh, you got to protect that sucker," he said from outside his home, near the shore of sprawling Utah Lake, 40 miles south of Salt Lake City. "This is the only damn lake in the world that has 'em. Gotta protect 'em. One of the few times the damn government can do something right."

The object of Morrill's impassioned speech is the June sucker. Utah Lake, as he pointed out, is indeed the only place in the world where they swim. Today, biologists believe there are as few as 300 wild June suckers remaining. They are a blink away from extinction.

Earlier this month, the June Sucker Recovery Implementation Program got a $500,000 federal grant, capping off the $1.3 million in state and federal funds it has gathered to keep the sucker around. The money will be used to buy land along the Provo River, the sucker's most crucial spawning habitat, and to lessen the impact of makeshift irrigation dams on the river.

The June sucker has been on the endangered species list since 1986. Biologists believe the fish, which can live for 40 years and reach 10 pounds, once swam in massive Bonneville Lake, which covered about half of what is now Utah. When Bonneville Lake disappeared between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago, the June sucker retreated. The few survivors made it into what is Utah Lake and once again began to thrive.