Documentary film to premiere in Libby

Documentary videographer George Sibley stumbled upon the challenges facing white sturgeon in the Kootenai River while shooting a movie about David Thompson called “Shadows of David Thompson,” which was filmed in the Libby area.

“Just by sniffing around I knew there were a lot of issues related to dams. Not just the Libby Dam, but dams everywhere. So I was looking to see if there was a science-based story rather than a history-driven story to work on in the area,” Sibley said.

On Wednesday, March 25, the premiere screening of Sibley’s movie about white sturgeon called “Fish Between the Falls” will be shown at the Maki Theatre at 7 p.m. The Heritage Museum and Humanities Montana are cosponsoring the presentation.

Sibley has been interested in the underwater world since the days of Jacques Cousteau, so when he learned of the white sturgeon his interest was piqued.

 “I heard of this interesting species that’s not officially a subspecies, but is genetically a subspecies of white sturgeon. And it’s endangered and one of the world’s great river restoration efforts is being done to try and recover this species,” Sibley said.

The story had several other aspects that really satisfied Sibley’s curiosity, including culture, biology, history and environmental issues.

“It’s a small-scale example of big-scale problems. Every river that has a dam on it and sturgeon in it has problems with the sturgeon. They just seem particularly susceptible to some of the things that happen to rivers when you put a dam on them,” Sibley said.

Sibley had planned to work on the movie for two fall and spring seasons to get a good representation of the river and the work being done. However, during the course of filming science showed the fall release of sturgeon hatchlings wasn’t as effective as the spring releases, which caused a change in the delivery of the fish.

“That kind of surprised me, so I ended up needing another filming period because I had to redo some shots and an interview in which a scientist told me something that was accurate at the time that had changed based on the science,” Sibley said. So he ended up completing the filming after an additional session.

The Kootenai Tribe has been relating to sturgeon for thousands of years, with recognizable figures of the fish painted on rocks dating back about 10,000 years.

The impressive fish, the largest and one of the oldest in North America, were an important part of the tribe’s diet and the inspiration for their elegant sturgeon-nosed canoes.

The tribe has been working since before the Environmental Protection Act to protect the species from extinction.

“They didn’t know at first what they were doing. They figured if nobody else is going to do it, we’re going to try and save them,” Sibley said.

Since the Kootenai Tribe started a fish hatchery for the sturgeon, Sibley said they have placed between 11,000 and 14,000 juvenile sturgeon into the Kootenai. But whether the efforts will yield long-term success of the fish is uncertain.

“Sturgeon take a really long time to sexually mature, I think it’s about 20 years for the male and even longer for the female,” said Sibley. “The program hasn’t been going on long enough to know if the hatchery-raised fish are going to successfully reproduce on their own.”

Sibley said it will probably take a few more years to determine how well the project is progressing. “There’s so many wild cards here, it’s really at the cutting edge of science. They’re trying to fine-tune a really delicate operation that might be changing from year-to-year in some ways,” Sibley said.

Sibley sees endangered species as just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to environmental health, which is now at the mercy of the actions of humans.

“Whether it’s reducing their habitat if it’s an animal or reducing the area in which they have to grow if it’s a plant, we’ve impacted them in one way or another,” Sibley said.

He said figuring out what it takes to modify a natural system to bring it back to it’s original state is one of the sub-themes of “Fish Between the Falls.”

Sibley sees the white sturgeon as an early warning sign to the health of the Kootenai River.

“It gives us an opportunity, perhaps, to do things to the river that could prevent worse catastrophes from happening. It’s not just one species, it’s a whole ecosystem.”

Sibley’s movie will be premiering at Nelson and Creston, British Columbia, Canada, Bonners Ferry, Idaho, and Libby on March 25, at 7 p.m. in the Maki Theater.