Saved by a bucket, but can the Owens pupfish survive?
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. That day Mr. 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 marsh, he knew, held the world’s last population of Owens pupfish. So he grabbed the buckets, jumped in his pickup truck and sped through ranch land toward water.