2: Adventures in Waterfowl Protection

Tule Geese
by Tupper Blake

Audubon's experience in waterfowl protection throughout the Pacific Flyway goes back ninety years or more. In the early 1900s, a serious threat loomed in the omnipresence of hunters who supplied wild birds to hotels, restaurants, and wholesale suppliers of meat. A center of what can be described only as "slaughter" was Lower Klamath Lake in southern Oregon and northern California. The lake was a critical breeding and resting area for Canada Geese and many kinds of ducks. Reports reaching Audubon president William Dutcher in New York indicated that gunners had shipped 120 tons of waterfowl from that region to urban markets in a single year.

Dutcher asked William L. Finley, who served as Audubon's field representative in the West, to investigate the impact of market hunting on waterfowl populations in the area. Finley's photographs and written reports described the heavy losses of birds at Klamath. Through his ties to President Theodore Roosevelt, Dutcher had the material sent on to the White House to impress on TR the urgency of the situation.

Roosevelt had already created several small bird refuges -- the first National Wildlife Refuges -- by executive order. On August 8, 1908, Roosevelt acted again, setting aside Lower Klamath Lake and nearby Malheur Lake as the first large waterfowl refuges. Because there were no federal funds yet authorized by Congress for those refuges, Audubon paid for a warden and a patrol boat. (A half century later another important haven for migratory waterfowl in Oregon was dedicated as the William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge.)

Audubon has monitored the passage of birds -- Mallards, Northern Pintails, American Wigeons, Greater White-fronted Geese, and Tundra Swans, as well as the Bald Eagles that prey upon their weaker brethren -- on and around Lower Klamath Lake in all the years since Finley's day. Whether viewed in a golden sunset or blanketed in snow or fog, the region holds a special fascination for anyone who admires waterfowl and their habitats. But the health of both birds and refuges has also been sapped by the demands of agriculture. Water, Lower Klamath's life blood, has often been drained away.

Now, almost exactly 90 years since Theodore Roosevelt acted to save the marshes in Klamath Basin, Audubon has stepped in once more to restore some balance to the environment. The tool this time is not executive orders but a petition. Joined by other conservation organizations in the region, plus the Society's Klamath Basin, Golden Gates Portland, Rogue Valley, and Umpqua Valley chapters, the National Audubon Society has petitioned the Secretary of the Interior to correct violations of federal law that are undermining the very purpose of wildlife refuges in the area. They argue that excessive draining and the failure to deliver sufficient water for the autumn "flood-up" of marshes used by waterfowl during peak migration contravenes the Kuchel Act, as passed by Congress "to preserve intact the necessary existing habitat for migratory waterfowl in this vital area of the Pacific flyway." They pointed out "mismanagement" by both the Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Reclamation.

Redhead
by Tupper Blake

"The needs of agriculture and wildlife in the Klamath Basin can be balanced successfully," an Audubon spokesman commented, "but under current management, the needs of wildlife have been neglected, while agricultural interests have been the big winners."

Audubon's far-flung staff and chapter network measure up against the reality of flyway dynamics. The Klamath Basin is just one indispensable link in the great north-south axis along which waterfowl move in their annual life cycles.

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union, the National Audubon Society has vigorously pursued its Beringia strategy, trying to bind both the United States and Russia to the task of undoing the apparent degradation of natural systems around the Bering Sea. Steller's Eider and Spectacled Eider are two species that have experienced catastrophic declines in the area. On Audubon's initiative, early contacts were made with wildlife officials in the Russian Far East and these contacts played an appreciable role in the endorsement at a 1990 summit meeting between Presidents George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev for the creation of a Beringian Heritage National Park.

Audubon staff has worked for years on waterfowl protection on this side of the sea. Well-publicized projects are their fight against oil exploration on the rich coastal plain of the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, their informed objections to a leasing arrangement for oil and gas extraction on the vast Teshepuk Lake Special Management Area, and their monitoring of wildlife habitat on the Yukon Flats Delta.

But the Bush-Gorbachev agreement also strengthened ties between American biologists and their Russian counterparts. Wrangel Island is the site of a Russian Nature Reserve where the Chukchi Sea grades into the Arctic Ocean. When U.S. biologists went there to study Black Brant and Polar Bears, they discovered that the only vehicles available were large trucks and tracked personnel carriers that were costly to operate and devastating to the fragile tundra. Through a bit of complex international wheeler-dealing, Audubon officials found a couple of all-terrain vehicles in Anchorage and shipped them air freight via the Russian Far East to Wrangel Island.

But the connections between these two worlds are a lot older than that. Wrangel Island's population of Snow Geese, breeding at the top of the world, winters in California's Central Valley.