Retrieved from: High on Adventures
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.
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.
Meanwhile, a deal that raises the refuge’s water priority on a par with farms, while laying out how water is divided in drought years, has been stymied in Congress.
Read more: Mercury News
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