The Klamath Basin’s Water Crisis Is a Growing Disaster for Waterfowl

The late winter sky over the Klamath Basin is cold, and painfully blue, and empty. I’m standing at the edge of Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge on the California-Oregon border. It’s a spot where I’ve been coming for years to be awestruck by clamorous hordes of thousands of Snow and White-fronted Geese. This time of year, the refuge should be teeming. On my visit, however, not only are there no geese, but there is no lake, only an expanse of dry, cracked mud extending to the horizon.

In a normal year—ah, there is that word: normal. If the year chosen as normal was, say, 1905, then the sky would have been filled with uncountable millions of Snow, Ross’s, Canada, and Greater White-fronted Geese, Tundra Swans, Northern Pintails and Shovelers, American Wigeons, Gadwalls, Mallards, Canvasbacks, Redheads, Ring-necked and Ruddy Ducks. In that year, the pioneering Oregon ornithologist William Finley described the region as “the greatest feeding and breeding ground for waterfowl on the Pacific coast.”

At Finley’s urging, President Theodore Roosevelt established the “Klamath Lake Reservation” in 1908.  Today known as the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, this was the first federal refuge created to protect waterfowl. Over the next 20 years, three additional national wildlife refuges were established in the basin: Clear Lake, Tule Lake, and Upper Klamath. An estimated 80 percent of the waterfowl traveling the Pacific Flyway rely on these Klamath Basin refuges as stopover sites in spring and fall migration. Later designation of the Klamath Marsh (1958) and Bear Valley (1978) National Wildlife Refuges completed today’s Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex.

If the “normal” year was half a century later, then the numbers of ducks and geese would have been impressive still, but no longer uncountable. In 1958, migrating waterfowl numbers in the Klamath Basin peaked at 5.8 million birds, as estimated through aerial surveys by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). Such abundance has never been seen again. Waterfowl numbers have never exceeded 1 million birds in the past 50 years, or half a million in the past 20 years. This year, the peak waterfowl estimate was around 93,000. This is the lowest peak ever recorded—a tiny fraction of the plenitude that the Klamath refuges were established to protect.

It’s not just the Klamath Basin that’s in trouble. The same story—relentless decline culminating in a shocking crash in winter waterfowl—is playing out across the refuges strung like pearls along the Pacific Flyway, places sacred to Indigenous groups, conservationists, waterfowl hunters, and birders: Oregon’s Malheur, Utah’s Bear River, Nevada’s Stillwater, California’s Sacramento. Everywhere, the fear is growing that this emptiness, this winter silence, is normal now.

W

hat happened? It is a complicated history, in which human enterprise and human greed, expansive dreams and short-sighted actions, promises both well-meaning and cynical, disease and drought and suckers and salmon all play a part. But really, it all comes down to one word: water.

From time immemorial to the late 1800s, the vast wetlands of the Klamath Basin were a wildlife wonderland that can scarcely be imagined. Upper Klamath Lake—the largest in Oregon—was filled with c’waam and koptu, the sucker fish that formed a dietary staple of the native Klamath and Modoc peoples. Downstream, Lower Klamath Lake fully deserved its common description as “the Everglades of the West,” with floating islands of tule reeds that formed the platforms for great nesting colonies of American White Pelicans, Double-crested Cormorants, gulls, terns, and grebes.

After meandering through the basin’s landscape of marshes and lakes, the Klamath River flowed south across the California border and on to the Pacific, where swarming chinook and coho salmon entered to begin their journey of hundreds of miles to prime spawning habitat. These salmon were central to the diet and culture of Native peoples along the lower river, including the Karuk, Yurok, and Hupa. The river’s year-round flow was sustained by the slow melt of deep snowpack in the mountains forming the headwaters of the Klamath and its tributaries.

The first wave of destruction began in the 1890s, when commercial hunters descended on the basin. Some were hunting waterfowl to satisfy the demand for meat in San Francisco; others were plume hunters targeting egrets and the warm, lustrous feathers of grebes. The scale of the slaughter was staggering, but given time and protection—and preservation of their habitat—the populations of these birds might have eventually returned to their former abundance. 

But a more irrevocable change came to the Klamath Basin in 1905, when Oregon and California ceded the lands under Lower Klamath and Tule Lakes to the federal government. The U.S. Secretary of the Interior promptly directed the U.S. Reclamation Service (now the Bureau of Reclamation) to reclaim the lands beneath both lakes for the primary purpose of homesteading. To reclaim the land meant to drain the lakes and marshes, exposing the lakebeds for grazing and farming.

Despite Roosevelt’s 1908 declaration that the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge was to be protected “as a preserve and breeding-ground for native birds,” the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR) initiated the construction of levees to control the flow of water throughout the basin. The draining of Tule Lake began in 1912, and of Lower Klamath Lake in 1917. During this same period, utility companies built a series of major dams on the Klamath River downstream from the basin, cutting salmon off from hundreds of miles of spawning habitat. The whole vast Klamath watershed became an engineered system.

Today there is no lake at Lower Klamath Lake, and recent spatial imaging analysis by refuge staff indicates that close to 95 percent of the basin’s wetlands have been lost, most converted to pastureland and irrigated agriculture. There is currently so little water that, of the 90,000 acres of protected “wetland” habitat in the Lower Klamath and Tule Lake refuges, a grand total of 3,500 acres at Tule Lake remain viable for waterfowl. At Lower Klamath there are no wetlands whatsoever. The Everglades of the West looks like something out of the Dust Bowl. 

This is partly the result of the megadrought gripping the West, which scientists believe is the most severe in 1,200 years. But it is also a problem of water policy. In the complicated and contentious assignment of “water rights”—legal access to a specified yearly amount of water—the Klamath Basin wildlife refuges are guaranteed precisely nothing. Instead, they receive whatever is left after other users get their promised allocation. And in most recent years, there are no leftovers at all.  

There have been years of litigation over the basin’s water, between BOR, the Klamath Water Users Association (representing farmers), the tribes in the Upper Klamath trying to preserve the sucker fish, the tribes along the Klamath River trying to preserve salmon, and various environmental groups trying to assure a water supply for the refuges. Conflicts have steadily increased as