Drought, cholera kill 10,000 birds at vital refuge
By JEFF BARNARD
8 April 2012 TULELAKE, California – Dave Mauser walked the edge of a mudflat, peering underneath the dried brown rushes where one coot after another had gone to hide and then die. “Now the coots are getting the worst of it,” said Mauser, head biologist on the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s first large marshland preserved for waterfowl habitat. “Prior to that it was the snow geese and the white-fronted geese.” Standing in line for scarce water behind both endangered fish and agriculture, Lower Klamath Lake has watched one marsh after another dry up in recent years. Now migratory geese, ducks and other waterfowl that come here by the millions, following the Pacific Flyway, are so closely packed together that an outbreak of avian cholera has killed more than 10,000 birds, mostly pintail ducks, Ross’ geese, snow geese and now coots. First reported in the United States in the 1940s, the disease is not new to the refuge. Bald eagles that congregate here in winter depend on the deadly bacteria to provide them easy food. But what is different about this year is that only half the refuge’s 31,000 acres of marsh are flooded, creating perfect conditions for a broader kill off. Lying on the east side of the Cascade Range along the Oregon-California border, the shallow lakes and marshes of the Upper Klamath Basin were once known as the Everglades of the West, providing a place to rest and eat for untold millions of birds on the Pacific Flyway. More than 260 species — ruddy ducks, cinnamon teal, white-faced ibis, sandhill cranes, white pelicans, snowy egrets and bald eagles — pass through in the spring. Some stay the summer to breed, but most fly north to the Arctic to nest, returning here in the fall. Some spend the winter, and others continue south to California’s Central Valley and the Salton Sea. […] In the 1950s the refuge would see 5 million to 7 million birds annually. Now numbers have dropped to about 2 million, primarily due to the loss of nesting habitat in the far north. But it still “may be the most important real estate for migratory birds in North America,'” said refuge manager Ron Cole. The problem is that it is at the end of a long line for water, legally and literally. When it comes to water in the West, first in time is first in right. Three years earlier, in 1905, Congress created the Klamath Reclamation Project, which created a vast complex of pumps and canals that drained lakes and marshes and fed water to farmlands. The refuge started receiving water from the project in the 1940s, when a tunnel was cut to pump excess water out of Tule Lake, the end of the line for the water running through the irrigation project. Tule Lake remained the primary source of the refuge’s water until 2006, when farmers lost a subsidized electric rate that made it cheap to pump water. Now most of the water for the refuge comes from the Klamath River, through the Ady Canal. No matter the source, the refuge does not get water until the fish and the farms are satisfied. The last full delivery was in 2006. “It worked well for decades,” said Cole, until more water had to be allocated to the river for endangered salmon, and to Upper Klamath Lake for endangered suckers. Now it is the refuge that suffers from drought. […] Record rains in March allowed the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to start delivering all the water the refuge could take through the Ady Canal, but that will only be enough to flood 4,000 acres more before it runs out, said Cole. Prospects for this summer are not looking good. […]
