So critical to Pacific Flyway waterfowl was this region that the Lower Klamath NWR was established by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908 as the first waterfowl refuge in the United States. In the 1950s, more pintails were counted in nearby Tule Lake than exists on earth today, and a surprising amount of Pacific Flyway waterfowl are produced or overwinter here! As reported in EP 154. Understanding the Klamath Water War (link below), times have changed–natural droughts have been exacerbated by “policy drought” and conflicting “single species management” as interests compete over scarce water resources, and waterfowl historically rank last priority. Thanks to win-win collaborative efforts, there may be light at end of the tunnel. Jeff McCreary, Ducks Unlimited’s Director of Operations for Western Region, and Jake Messerli, CEO for California Waterfowl Association, provide vital updates, spelling out changes affecting waterfowl, Pacific Flyway hunters, local communities and conservation throughout the United States.
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EP 154. Understanding the Klamath Water War
Ramsey Russell: Welcome back to MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast where today’s an update about the Klamath Basin, longtime listeners may remember this topic, episode 154 back in August 2021, the Klamath Basin water wars, it is a big freaking deal. I think of this region as being the crown jewelry of the Pacific Flyway. It’s among the many reasons that California, for example, leads the nation in waterfowl harvest, but it’s rife with controversy and it’s all about the water. Joining me to catch me up and catch you all up, catch us up on the Klamath basin is Jeff McCreary, who is Ducks Unlimited director of operations for the whole western region, 9 states worth and Jake Messerli, CEO of California Waterfowl Association. Guys, how are you?
Jeff McCreary: Doing great.
Ramsey Russell: Good.
Jake Messerli: Thanks for having us.
Ramsey Russell: Good. Now look, when does the California season actually open? It’s getting close to opening, isn’t it?
Jake Messerli: The youth hunt actually happened this past weekend.
Ramsey Russell: How did that go?
Jake Messerli: Well, I talked to our VP of advocacy. He was up with his boy at Modoc National Wildlife Refuge and they had a decent hunt, I think he ended up with 6 mallards, a wigeon and a Canada goose on the first day and a few less on Sunday, but I think he was all smiles, he had a good time in the field.
Ramsey Russell: Boy, sounds like a great hunt to me, sounds like a great hunt for this time of year. Well, that’s good to hear. I’m going to kick it off this way, the Klamath Basin is kind of a big deal, what is the significance of Klamath Basin to the Pacific Flyway to the United States?
Jake Messerli: You want to take that, Jeff?
The Klamath Basin: A Vital Link for Pintails and Migratory Birds.
Pintails, for example, that come in out of the Central Valley out of winter, they’ll stage up in the Klamath Basin area and then from there they make a 2000 mile nonstop over the open ocean to Western Alaskan breeding grounds and that’s at roughly 60 miles an hour, a couple wing beats per second, that’s about a million and a half wing beats that a duck makes nonstop, pintail duck makes nonstop to those breeding grounds and then that hen that’s going along there, she’s going to lay somewhere between 9 and 12 eggs.
Jeff McCreary: Sure. I’ll start here, Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge was established in 1905 and it was the nation’s first waterfowl specific national wildlife refuge. So in the wildlife refuge system across the country, there’s refuges for lots of different purposes, most of those are for waterfowl, but there’s a bison range, there’s an elk refuge, but lower Klamath was the nation’s first waterfowl specific refuge and it sits in a key spot of the Pacific Flyway and it serves a lot of different roles for waterfowl, from migration, spring and fall, a little bit of wintering, definitely a major breeding habitat here in California and also importantly a molting ground for birds, you don’t think too much about molting habitat, but Lower Klamath and Klamath Basin plays a major role, so all those important aspects of a life cycle happen in the Klamath Basin. And we’ll see birds that – pintails, for example, that come in out of the Central Valley out of winter, they’ll stage up in the Klamath Basin area and then from there they make a 2000 mile nonstop over the open ocean to Western Alaskan breeding grounds and that’s at roughly 60 miles an hour, a couple wing beats per second, that’s about a million and a half wing beats that a duck makes nonstop, pintail duck makes nonstop to those breeding grounds and then that hen that’s going along there, she’s going to lay somewhere between 9 and 12 eggs. So the Klamath Basin has to fuel all of that energy for that bird to make that migration and then also that bird and that clutch when they come back down through the fall. So, it’s a critical link in the flyway for lots of different birds making some major migrations.
Ramsey Russell: I bet Teddy Roosevelt, smart man as he was in conservation oriented as he was when he set that refuge up as the first waterfowl refuge the United States of America, I bet he didn’t know all that scientific data about how many wing beats or how many eggs or the need for habitat as a continuum, what do you think he and others did see in the Klamath Basin that made them of all the United States of America, designate that property, that region, as the first waterfowl refuge?
Jeff McCreary: It’s a great question and I can indirectly answer that question, but I don’t – There’s not a lot of records about counts and numbers of birds that were there, but it was truly an oasis in the desert down in that part of the world. Before it was developed, there was 300,000 acres of wetlands, we know that in the 50s, so this is 50 years later on Tule Lake, which was established just a few years after Lower Klamath and its sister refuge, at Tule Lake on Sump 1A, which is a 9,000 acre unit, they counted over 3 million pintails alone, on Sump 1A.
Ramsey Russell: Golly, 3 million –
Jeff McCreary: Okay, I don’t think there’s 3 million pintails alive in North America right now.
Ramsey Russell: There might be not 3 million worldwide.
Jeff McCreary: That was one unit and that was just pintails, that’s not all the other ducks that might have been out there too. So we know that that was a count from the 50s, from the early 50s. So, you can just backtrack from there to see what it would have been like in more pristine landscape and when the flyway was in more pristine situation back then in 1905.
Ramsey Russell: It is a breeding ground for the Pacific Flyway, it’s a staging ground for some of the birds that are flying back north, it does produce birth for birds that may be going south and then it’s also molting properties, it sounds like this amazing wetland serves a lot of life cycle requirements, various life cycle requirements of Pacific Flyway waterfowl.
Jake Messerli: No, I mean, from my perspective, it is currently the most important breeding habitat in California and in our flyway. I mean, if you look at the California mallard population, it is absolutely plummeted and fortunately this year, there were tens of thousands of ducks produced up there from the water that was that was received at the Lower Klamath Refuge and Tule Lake, but when that area is dry, we see the impacts to our local birds from a duck production standpoint and also from a molting standpoint. So it is an absolute critical piece to especially the mallard equation here in California.
Ramsey Russell: More pintail were counted there in 1958 than exist on Earth today. What are some of the other very important or critical waterfowl species that use Klamath Basin? All of them?
Jake Messerli: Our banding crew is up there this summer and working with the US Fish & Wildlife Service and they banded and they go over 7,000 birds, and I’m going to have you guess the top 3, mallards is one of them, give me the other 2.
Ramsey Russell: Green wing –
Jeff McCreary: I know.
Ramsey Russell: And gadwall.
Jake Messerli: Gadwall’s one of them and then –
Jeff McCreary: Of course, redheads –
Jake Messerli: Redheads, believe it or not.
Ramsey Russell: Really?
Jeff McCreary: Redheads.
Jake Messerli: Yeah, they responded big time to the refugees getting water this year and a lot of redheads, which was a little bit of a surprise for me too.
Jeff McCreary: Yeah.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeff McCreary: Well, it was interesting, Jake, because I was up there in April, early April, driving around, looking at just more water on the landscape than we’ve seen in a decade and you could see the pairs of redheads then and there was buffleheads and ruddy ducks and scaups and redheads, all these kind of traditional, non kind of dabbling duck pairs hanging out there and you knew something was different, something was very special, so it’s really interesting to hear that redheads were such a dominant waterfowl production species this year up there.
Jake Messerli: Yeah, I was up there a couple weeks ago just to see that landscape flooded up and I saw a lot of redheads, it was beautiful, 1000s of acres of flooded ground, ducks everywhere, coots, galore and grebes. I mean, the place was just absolutely alive with birds, ducks and geese going out into grain fields, coming back to roost on the wetlands. It was impressive, hadn’t seen that in a while, so really good to see.
Jeff McCreary: The redhead factor is an interesting one that I think gets overlooked by a lot of biologists. So Klamath is in this Great Basin habitat, right? So, it’s this wetland basin surrounded by sagebrush and kind of deserty grasslands, high elevation, arid, very similar to the rest of the Great Basin, Great Salt Lake, Malheur Refuge, lots of areas in Nevada and in that Great Basin landscape, redheads have just declined massively from their numbers probably in the 50s and the 70s. You don’t talk about that too much.
Ramsey Russell: Are redheads very important species? Are they a very important species to California, Oregon up in that area, is that like a primary species?
Jeff McCreary: Not anymore.
Jake Messerli: And not from a hunter harvest standpoint.
Jeff McCreary: Back in the day, Malheur Refuge, Great Salt Lake was a massive redhead production area, Malheur Refuge would get thousands upon thousands of redheads staging on the refuge when it had water and I think that that decline is, you hear it anecdotally, but it’s never really been documented, so it’s really fascinating and somewhat not surprising to hear that redheads were back in force this year in a part of the world where they haven’t been for a long time.
Ramsey Russell: How far back do production numbers go or if ever? I mean, has there ever been an estimate of production now versus then at any point on a timeline?
Jake Messerli: Probably not for US Fish & Wildlife Service.
Jeff McCreary: Yeah.
Jake Messerli: I’d have to do some research.
Ramsey Russell: I’m just curious what it must have been like back in the day versus what it is now, when did the water war start? Obviously, there weren’t water wars going on when President Roosevelt designated this our nation’s first waterfowl refuge, when did that start? When did all that problem start? Why did it start?
Klamath Water Wars: Origins in the 1920s.
That’s when the Klamath Project was initiated, I think 1921, when the first dams were being built, when the first diversions were happening. But back in that period of time, there was a period of 30, 40 years there where the US government was really encouraging a lot of settlement and quote, unquote, development of the western United States.
Jeff McCreary: Well, it started in the 20s. That’s when the Klamath Project was initiated, I think 1921, when the first dams were being built, when the first diversions were happening. But back in that period of time, there was a period of 30, 40 years there where the US government was really encouraging a lot of settlement and quote, unquote, development of the western United States. We Saw big projects, the Columbia Basin project, Colorado River, Klamath, Central Valley, all of these big irrigation projects all started in that period of time and part of the incentives that the government was giving to veterans who were returning from World War I, World War II were essentially given land and promises of water if they would move to these areas and start farming and that’s really when the so called development of these areas started happening. Dams, water control structures, canals, pump stations, all those kinds of things are starting to be built. And the irony where we are now is why the water wars are happening is because we’re seeing this weird shift in the Klamath Basin where The Klamath was 300,000 acres of wetlands, that project was designed to drain those wetlands and to get rid of that water so you could farm these areas, you could reclaim this land and farm it. Well, the irony now is that there’s not enough water in this one landscape that was designed to get rid of water. And that’s really where the water wars are coming from, is because it’s gone from this overabundance of water to a deficiency of water over that 100 years of time.
Ramsey Russell: We drained the wetlands to plant crops. Now there’s not enough water to irrigate crops and what you described previously as a high desert environment.
Jeff McCreary: Yep. And part of the challenges thinking about the system of – there’s questions about whether there is enough water or not, there’s not enough water for how it’s currently being used, how it’s currently being allocated. If that system of allocation was different and you could still recover fish, endangered fish species which are driving these water allocations decisions, if you could still have a productive and sustainable farm economy, if you could still have vibrant wetlands and abundant bird populations, if you could still have those 3 things, if you decided to allocate water a little bit differently, it might be more of a balance, but right now the allocation is such that everybody seems to be suffering at the same time.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. How is it presently allocated? Let’s just say that first off, 300,000 acres, how much water is left? We start off 300,000 some odd acres, we drained a bunch, how much presently left? Maximum pool, let’s call it.
Jeff McCreary: Well, let’s see, so Klamath Lower – Tule lake is about 12,000 acres of wetlands and Lower Klamath is bigger than that, I’m not sure on the exact acreage, if it’s 17,000 or 27,000 seems to stick in my mind, but significant decline, 80% decline.
Ramsey Russell: 80% decline. So, if I’ve got a full glass of water representing the last remaining 20%, how’s that glass of water allocated among waterfowl, fish and farms? Is there a percent, is there magic to it?
Jeff McCreary: Well, there’s no percentage, there’s a couple things called biological opinions and these are developed because of the Endangered Species Act and the endangered species, the listed species are salmon in the river and 2 species of suckerfish in the upper lake and the biological opinions dictate how much and when water is used or allocated for those species. So one biological opinion for the c’waam and koptu, which are the traditional words for the shortnose and lost river sucker in the Klamath, Upper Klamath Lake, those biological opinions say that water needs to be in the upper lake at a certain water surface elevation over a certain period of time and the biological opinion for salmon, which are in the Klamath river, which used to spawn up above the lake in the tributaries but now the dams were in there, that biological opinion says so much water has to flow down the river in certain quantities at certain times and the law, what one person in the west told me some time ago that water flows were legally mandated to flow western United States. Right now, the law says the Endangered Species Act takes priority over all other uses of that water.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jeff McCreary: So the water has to fulfill these biological requirements, these biological opinion requirements first, then what’s left over, it goes to the Klamath Irrigation Project. So, the project has a certain pool of water that was reserved for it, somewhere around 400,000 acre feet of water and they have to do careful, complicated math to figure out how much water is available. And this year, for example, there was, I think 230,000 acre feet roughly that was allocated to the project, so a little bit more than 50% of the allocation. The refuges sit below that, they don’t have an allocation, so to speak from the project supply. They get a little bit out of that, but they basically would get everything that was left and drain water and excess water that would flow through and when there’s extra water, that was never any problem, they never needed a water, but now they do, now there’s not enough water and so they don’t get hardly anything because there’s nothing left to come through the project. So they struggle to get any kind of drop of water. Lower Klamath in particular, they get some water outside of the irrigation season, but for the most part, that’s it.
Ramsey Russell: 80% of the original Klamath Basin wetlands have been drained, up the 20% allocations, endangered species take priority, agriculture gets the second slug, maybe 50% of the allocation. How much of it ends up in the refuge committed to waterfowl now would you get 20%? As much as that or less?
Jake Messerli: Up until this year, the refuges were dry then last couple years.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jake Messerli: So you got a glass of water, none of it’s making the refuges in.
Ramsey Russell: What’s conditions like this year? Because last time we talked, it was dry, last time we talked 3 years ago, it was dry, it was a crisis mode. I mean, there were pictures all over the Internet, throughout you all’s platforms and others of just absolute mud flat and people were freaking out.
Jake Messerli: Yeah, well, unfortunately this year it rained a bit and natural hydrology delivered a fair amount of water to the refuges. Unfortunately, there wasn’t enough to maintain it and that created the current situation that we have with botulism, which is all over the news. I got an article in San Francisco Gate just a few minutes ago talking about the tens of thousands of birds that are dying up there right now from botulism.
Ramsey Russell: It must be daunting for Fish & Wildlife Service because on one hand they’ve got refuges and endangered species and migratory waterfowl, migratory birds in general are a top priority. But on the other hand, they’ve got the regulatory branch with endangered species. It’s almost like the right hand, the left hand, it’s who wins out, sounds like endangered species.
Jeff McCreary: That’s a great observation because I think that’s not just here in the Klamath Basin, that’s an issue across the country because there’s kind of 2 competing mandates by in the agency and how are they balancing doing this thing on refuges, but then also doing this thing from a regulatory stand.
Ramsey Russell: I’m always politically correct and diplomatic in these conversations, but I’ll just say that I was shocked to learn that endangered species, budget wise, endangered species represents 5 times the US Fish & Wildlife Service what migratory birds does and of that migratory birds, only a small portion is committed to waterfowl nationwide, that concerns me as a duck hunter. But anyway, that’s all I’ll say about that. We got problems to fix, other problems right now, I want to talk more about this Klamath Basin and Jake did you all harvest records in the state of California and surrounding areas, when it was dry 3 years ago, so dry 3 years ago, was it reflected in harvest or in winter surveys in the state of California when it was so dry and had it rebounded any, now that it’s wetter again?
Jake Messerli: Well, it was dry, so there wasn’t much to count.
Ramsey Russell: Could you see it just waterfowl harvested in the state of California that hunt year? If so, was it appreciable decline in bag?
Klamath Basin’s Decline in Mallard Numbers.
And I’d say that our hunters have observed, I personally observed the lack of mallards in the fall flight throughout the season and it is noticeable. Our breeding counts, just this last year, we had hoped that with a couple wet years and a little water at Lower Klamath and Tule, we’d start to see an increase in our mallard breeding count, we didn’t.
Jake Messerli: Yeah, I don’t have the harvest numbers in front of me, I can tell you last year was probably one of the worst years, talking to duck hunters around the state. Last year was just God awful for most and I do think that going back to say, 2020, the dry years compounded with some ill time botulism events, had a significant impact on our local breeding mallards. And I’d say that our hunters have observed, I personally observed the lack of mallards in the fall flight throughout the season and it is noticeable. Our breeding counts, just this last year, we had hoped that with a couple wet years and a little water at lower Klamath and tule, we’d start to see an increase in our mallard breeding count, we didn’t. Now that’s not indicative of the production that we actually will realize this year because you’re counting adult birds. But the number of adult birds that are breeding in our system has continued to decline, which again, I believe is primarily because of the missing link right there in the Klamath Basin where our birds are breeding and molting in masse. And fortunately this year, talking to the refuge biologists, duck production was the highest it’s been in 3 decades. And fortunately, the botulism outbreak that we’re experiencing right now started late in the year. So a lot of those resident birds were able to fledge and moult and get out of there before botulism really started taking birds. So a little bit of a silver lining to the mess that we have right now. I just reiterate that the Klamath refuges is absolutely critical for duck production, molting and also hunter harvest, as Jeff pointed out, it’s feeling birds going both ways in the flyway and it is – if anybody asked me, it’s the most important wetland that we can work on in the state.
Ramsey Russell: Let’s take a little sidebar and talk about botulism because here in the Deep South, I’m not familiar with botulism, I’m sure it’s happened, but I’m not aware of any. What is botulism and how does it work and what conditions throw gas on the fire, so to speak. And just how bad is it? I’ve never been around –
Jeff McCreary: I can start a little bit on that. So, botulism is a common bacteria, if you don’t can your food, right, it gets contaminated with botulism. So it exists all around us, everywhere, like most bacterias do. Botulism outbreaks in a wetland occur when conditions all line up and they often do in hot arid climates like anything in a kind of in this Great Basin system, Klamath, Malheur, Great Salt Lake, but it’s not just restricted to those areas. Those areas are hot, the water gets stagnant and relatively low and when that happens, that’s when you start to get these outbreaks. And to work against that outbreak, well, you have to have cooler water, you have to have more water, you have to have moving water and those are really hard to – Those conditions are really hard to achieve in these places where it’s water scarce in the Great Basin.
Ramsey Russell: When you’re just catching the leftover, I get it. When you’re just catching leftover water or when you’ve got last year’s water and it’s just sitting there and there’s no freshwater inputs, conditions are right for outbreak during the summer, botulism. And again, that’s what’s so crazy, this isn’t just a stopover that migratory birds coming out of the Arctic stopover and use, this produces birds in the Pacific Flyway. How significant can some of those botulism outbreaks be?
Jeff McCreary: Well, I recall that there was an outbreak on Great Salt Lake some decades ago and I want to say it was a million birds that died out there. Because the Great Salt Lake, you get these vast sheets of really shallow, stagnant water, so in some cases they can be super significant, 100, a million birds, that’s a big number. From a population standpoint, 10,000 birds, that’s not going to affect the population, certain species it might, let’s say, like pintails are probably the number 2 bird that are dying up there right now and so they’re in a sensitive population level, I’d say California mallards at the same time, if they were part of this outbreak, we would be very concerned about that population, but at relatively higher number, shovelers are also the probably the top bird green winged teal, wigeon, so these are all northern birds that are coming down that are get sick. So, from a population standpoint, not overly concerned, but 80,000 birds is still a big number and that’s a big impact, that’s bigger than what it was in 2020.
Ramsey Russell: Yep. You got some rainfall refuge habitat in 2024 is better than it was last time we talked. How much better is it and is it purely a function of rainfall and precipitation or I know both of you guys, California Waterfowl Association and Ducks Unlimited have been working extensively since time immemorial to fix habitat up in this part of the world. Was there any conditions besides just rainfall that contributed to it? And then let’s talk about just how solid the habitat is this year.
Jeff McCreary: Yeah, I’d said, I’d add on to what Jake said is 2 good years of rain really helped, but what also happened was that there’s 4 dams on the Klamath river and those all came out this year, the 4 big dams, they’re totally out. So when they were removing these dams out of the river, they couldn’t, they had to minimize how much water was going down the river so they could do this construction. So the lake was filling up to the point that it was going to go over the spillway of the dam, which is not an unusual thing. But they couldn’t do that because then that water would be going down the river, so they had to find a place to stick this water. Well, I mean, think about it.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah.
Jeff McCreary: The 2 places that are desperate for water that don’t have water, the refuges, so they finally figured out that they could put water on these refuges and there was so much water, in fact, that lower at Tule Lake, that they had to turn on D plant, which hadn’t been turned on for several years.
Ramsey Russell: And what is that?
Jeff McCreary: So D plant is a big pumping, so the Klamath project was designed to get rid of water, well, Tule Lake is a terminal basin. The water will just fill up there until it spills out into the lava fields. In order to prevent that from happening and to maintain the agricultural lands that are out there, they have a giant pumping plant called Pumping Plant D, which tunnels through a ridge, a mountain ridge called Sheepy Ridge and supplies water or takes that drain water, moves it over to the Lower Klamath side. And back in the day, about 80% of Lower Klamath’s water actually came through D Plant because there was so much water in the system. Well, then that water works through the refuge and goes out through the Klamath drainage district and then gets pumped back out into the river.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff McCreary: So Tule Lake was filling up so much that they had to turn this pumping plant on, otherwise they would have flooded out all the acres, until 1000s of acres at Lower Klamath got flooded.
Ramsey Russell: When they turn on those pumps, are they able to capture the water somehow that’s being pumped out, like put it back into agriculture or something like that?
Jeff McCreary: It goes into the Lower Klamath refuge.
Ramsey Russell: Okay.
Jeff McCreary: So there were 1000s of acres of Lower Klamath that were flooded this year because they had to keep water out of the river for the dams.
Ramsey Russell: Besides just a wet year, let me ask this question first. You said that these dams got pulled out. Did they get pulled out forever? They just being rebuilt?
Jeff McCreary: Oh, they’re out, completely out.
Ramsey Russell: And how’s that going to change the ecosystem and the water over there? Now what happened?
Jeff McCreary: That’s a great question.
Ramsey Russell: What are their plans? Why did they pull for, they built 4 dams, why did they pull them out?
Jake Messerli: For fish, I mean –
Jeff McCreary: Fish, for salmon.
Jake Messerli: Hopefully it helps to recover salmon populations and if we have healthy fish populations salmon suckers, then one would hope that there would be a little better balance in our water system, that we could get some water for ducks.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah. So it could be a real good thing.
Jake Messerli: And that’s why Jeff and I are Spending so much time on fish projects these days as duck biologists, it seems like the world whether you’re in the Sacramento Valley or the Klamath Basin, most of the things we’re doing these days are Suisun marsh, there’s a fish component to it because of the Endangered Species Act and all these species are struggling and they’re driving the system.
Ramsey Russell: While we’re talking about fish, let me go ahead and ask this question. What the heck is a sucker? I can’t be the only person wondering what a suckerfish is, because when you talk to a boy from the deep south about suckers, I’m thinking of bass and carps sucking mud on the bottom, I mean rough fish, what are we talking about here?
Jeff McCreary: Yeah, it’s pretty close, it’s like a combination between a carp and a sturgeon type of thing. Like if you have a fish tank, they have these fish called the Plecostomus and they eat the algae and they suck on the side of the tank, it’s kind of like that. So these are bottom feeding fish, they live on the bottom, but they’re much better for the system than a carp is. A carp is terrible for a wetland system.
Ramsey Russell: Yeah, they are.
Jeff McCreary: These are native fish, they’re called desert sucker fish, there’s a group of them all across the west, they’re in a lot of these different landscapes, but this is – the sucker fish are a cultural icon for the indigenous people that live there. So the Klamath tribes, that’s one of their cultural icons, that was a primary food source for them back in the day. Salmon is a cultural icon for the river tribes, for the Karuk, for the Yurok tribes that live on the river, their culture revolves around salmon and suckers, the rite of passage for the Karuk young men were to catch, the adult men would catch these fish out of these long nets that, out off of a 10 foot pole and they would lift a 25 pound salmon out of the water, so really hard work, give that salmon to the young boys, the young boys would have to hike up to the top of the hill and deliver the fish to the women for processing. So the rite of passage was, you’re doing that all day long in the middle of summer while your fish slime is going all down your back and right, that was your rite of passage and so with no salmon, you have no right of Passage to become a man in that culture. So taking these dams down was really important to recover and re-establish these salmon runs in the Klamath River. So there, the downstream tribes were very strong advocates for taking out these dams.
Ramsey Russell: Were there any conservation organizations that were lobbying or politicking to get those dams removed in the interest of endangered species, which could also be beneficial to waterfowl? Were you all active supporting that kind of stuff or did the federal government bring down the hives on there.
Jeff McCreary: We weren’t, I mean, the dam removal is a little far out of the duck world, but groups like Trout Unlimited and Caltrout and other fish organizations were very supportive.
Ramsey Russell: Other NGOs.
Jeff McCreary: Yeah, I mean and it’s not without controversy. Dam removal is a sensitive topic out in the west because of water scarcity. These dams provided some hydropower, I don’t think they provided much irrigation water, but just that concept of removing the dams is a sensitive topic in a lot of places.
Ramsey Russell: So there were people opposed to it, I’m guessing, there were people opposed to this. Oh, wow. Everybody’s fighting over this water, aren’t they?
Integrating Fish and Waterfowl Recovery Strategies.
So how can we rethink how we use our wetlands, how we use our nation’s first waterfowl refuge to help recover an endangered fish? And maybe by doing so, you get a long term water supply for that refuge and those birds that need.
Jeff McCreary: That’s right. And you raised a good question, so what happens now? And I think there’s a lot of uncertainty. So do we still need – Does the amount of water that the biological opinion said had to go down the river for fish because of the dams, does it still have to do that with the dams coming out? Well, what happens, did the fish need the same kind of flows that they used before? Could that water be used differently in the system? Could it be reallocated? Could it be used on the refuges? Can the refuges help support salmon? So part of what Jake talked about, why we’re involved in all this fish work, is the people, as we’ve moved into the west and developed the west, we’ve done a great job of separating rivers from wetlands, the floodplains are now occupied, there’s a levee there. Well, salmon need a floodplain to survive, that’s where the young grow up and grow big and suckers need wetlands to survive, that’s where the young grow up and grow big. And so we’ve done a great job of separating all these areas out that are important to these fish. So how can we rethink how we use our wetlands, how we use our nation’s first waterfowl refuge to help recover an endangered fish? And maybe by doing so, you get a long term water supply for that refuge and those birds that need.
Ramsey Russell: Makes me think of an old Aldo Leopold passage about all the cogs of the wheel being in place for an ecosystem to work, to function properly, I mean, that just the simple act of tearing down the dams, now maybe we need to have some weirs or have something in the levee to let, to feed that water, to start feeding this an unlikely foe fish and then fowl, they could symbiotically work together.
Jake Messerli: Yeah, one of our biologists, he said people drive up and down the highway all the time, but they don’t eat and sleep there. So you look at fish and that’s what we’re trying to do, we’re trying to reconnect them to the places where they can flourish out on that floodplain. And that’s happening all across the state and really the Klamath Basin is no different than that.
Ramsey Russell: Wow.
Jake Messerli: So, reconnecting the rivers with the wetlands is an important part of that ecosystem that’s been severed off for quite some time and I think we’re seeing the impacts with all the species salmon, sucker fish, got to figure out how to fix that.
Ramsey Russell: That’s fantastic. What now? More research, more management? What do we do now, guys?
Jeff McCreary: Well, I’d say that every drop of water to the refuge is important. Some drops are harder to get than others, but everything that you can do to get more water to the refuges is what’s important and finding that way to get those drops, that’s the work ahead.
Ramsey Russell: What are some of the other wetlands issues you all are dealing with in association or separate in that same part of the world? In Klamath, what are some of the other keystone areas in the Pacific Flyway? I know you cover 9 states, you’re bound to be over the Great Salt Lake and aware of all that stuff going on out there.
Jeff McCreary: Well, I’d say there’s 3 key landscapes that we talk about in the lower 48 states and 2 of them are in California. So Central Valley, the heart of the Pacific Flyway, if you lose in any one of these 3 landscapes, you’re going to have a hard time with maintaining waterfowl populations. Central Valley is key, wetlands rise, if we lose here, man, we’re game over, the second one is Klamath Basin and the larger landscape, which we call Southern Oregon, Northeast California. So there’s a lot of wildlife areas in Northeast California, a lot of rangeland. Those are those migration stopovers for those birds making flight to Alaska, then that 3rd one would be Great Salt Lake. And within these 3 landscapes, some of our science tells us that 70% of Pacific Flyway waterfowl use one or more of these 3 landscapes and sometimes multiple landscapes throughout the year. And 70%, so those are the big 3, if you lose in those 3, you’ve lost, you failed at conservation if you lose in those 3. And interestingly, 80% of the habitats within those 3 landscapes are managed in some way, so somebody delivers water to that habitat, whether it’s a managed wetland, duck club, wildlife area, refuge or an important agricultural habitat, somebody makes a decision to put water there. So, people are really important to help maintain and to solve some of these problems, because people are making decisions whether habitat exists. Does that duck club turn on the pump or does it cost too much? Did they repair their levee or their water control structure? Does it cost too much? So maintaining these habitats, the people side of things, of conservation, is really critical.
Ramsey Russell: How does California Waterfowl Association and Ducks Unlimited work together on all these projects?
Jake Messerli: Well, a recent example Jeff and I put our logos and our name on letterhead and sent it off to the Department of Interior asking for some water and you’ll find our logos on letter, on a number of issues. Our policy teams work together pretty well on a lot of things.
Ramsey Russell: Takes a village to raise a child or to grow a duck, doesn’t it?
Jeff McCreary: Grow a duck, that’s right.
Ramsey Russell: You talked about Sac Valley being one of those 3rd resources, it’s a lot of rice, so much flooded rice at times, I’ve heard it referred to as lake, was it Lake Sacramento? Is that what they called it? It’s millions of acres of perfectly flooded habitat for waterfowl, especially during the winter area, it’s pretty incredible. Well, guys, I appreciate you coming on and talking about this, so let’s meet again one day when something’s changed and talk more about the update of the Klamath Basin. It seems to be some good news on the horizon for ducks and for duck hunters in the Pacific Flyway.
Jake Messerli: Like to think so.
Jeff McCreary: Yeah, there’s a lot of work that needs to get done. I’m always cautiously optimistic, but I think, if Jake and I and DU and CWA are still pulling in the same direction, which we’re doing, we could make a difference up there. And you’re right, it takes a village, it takes a community, it takes all of us working together. Seeing 80,000 birds die doesn’t make anybody feel good about that and what it makes us do is redouble our efforts to try and make a difference up there.
Jake Messerli: Well said.
Ramsey Russell: Thank you all very much for coming on. Folks, thank you all for this episode of MOJO’s Duck Season Somewhere podcast, where you’ve been listening to Jeff McCreary with Ducks Unlimited and Jake Messerli, I’m saying your name right, Jake, Messerli?
Jake Messerli: Sounds good.
Ramsey Russell: All right, with California Waterfowl Association. See you next time.
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