A6 The BulleTin • Sunday, June 20, 2021
PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT
Tule Lake emptied to improve habitat, fight disease
BY ALEX SCHWARTZ
(Klamath Falls) Herald and News
TULELAKE — Once span-
ning 100,000 acres at the foot
of the Medicine Lake Volcano,
it’s unlikely that Tule Lake has
been as low as it is now for mil-
lions of years.
What used to be a massive
network of open water and
fringe wetlands is now es-
sentially a giant mud puddle,
spelling trouble for migratory
birds that have used it as a rest
stop for thousands of years.
The solution, at least for
now? Dry it up.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service, which manages the
Tule Lake National Wildlife
Refuge and Tulelake Irrigation
District, is working with water-
fowl conservation organization
Ducks Unlimited to move as
much as 12,000 acre-feet of wa-
ter between two large wetland
units on the refuge. Biologists
and irrigators alike hope the
undertaking will give birds a
better chance at surviving this
summer’s historic drought.
After the Bureau of Recla-
mation drained much of Tule
Lake in the early 20th century
to make way for Klamath Proj-
ect farmland, the refuge was
essentially divided into four
quadrants. Sump 1A, in the
northwest, is approximately
9,000 acres of open water and
fringe wetlands at the mouth of
Lost River.
The southwest and northeast
sumps are both made up of
agricultural leaselands, where
farmers operate in cooperation
with refuge goals to provide
habitat and food for migratory
birds. Sump 1B, in the south-
east, comprises a little over
3,000 acres of permanent wet-
lands, connected to Sump 1A
through a large canal known as
the “English Channel.”
Clearly visible along the
road to the north entrance of
Lava Beds National Monu-
ment, Sump 1A is what most
visitors to the area would con-
sider “Tule Lake.” For decades
it was mostly open water, with
a few marshy areas near where
the Lost River enters from the
north.
By mid-June in 2021, almost
all the water was gone in that
area, and the large cracks char-
acteristic of severe drought ran
through the dry lakebed.
“In the last thousand years it
has never looked like that,” said
Tulelake farmer John Craw-
ford.
‘Dead marsh’
Jeff McCreary, director of
operations for Ducks Unlimit-
ed’s western region, said while
the open water of Sump 1A
may have looked like an avian
paradise because of the sheer
number of birds there in past
years, it did not provide them
much by way of habitat or nu-
trition.
“We call it a dead marsh.
It’s not productive,” McCreary
said. “Birds just go there to
land and rest.”
Sump 1B, conversely, had
become veritable wetland Eden
after being drawn down last
year. Food and habitat for a
variety of bird life cycle needs
are growing in abundance this
summer.
Fish and Wildlife has been
trying to achieve similar results
for Sump 1A, which has been
kept chronically wet even in
drought years.
But the project would have
been costly, especially con-
sidering the fact that most of
the Klamath Project’s tailwa-
ter ends up in the sump and
would have to be diverted.
This year, that was the one
thing the Tulelake Irrigation
District and refuge managers
didn’t have to worry about, as
deep drought and Endangered
Species Act considerations
combined to create conditions
necessary to draw down the
massive body of water.
“Sump 1A has never had
that luxury until this year,” Mc-
Creary said. “Unfortunately, it’s
taking a zero allocation out of
Submitted
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which manages the Tule Lake National Wildlife Refuge and Tulelake Irri-
gation District, is working with waterfowl conservation organization Ducks Unlimited to move as much as
12,000 acre-feet of water between two large wetland units on the refuge.
the Project to get to this point.”
The hope is that removing
the water from Sump 1A will
bring new life to that cracked
earth. Despite wetlands’ name,
McCreary said they actually
need some dry years to remain
healthy. Plants like smartweed
and goosefoot, some of ducks’
favorite foods, don’t germinate
when they’re consistently inun-
dated with silty water, as they
have been in Sump 1A.
Brad Kirby, manager of Tu-
lelake Irrigation District, said
he expects the barren land-
scape to look very different in a
month or so.
“It’ll look like a meadow,” he
said.
But the germination of wet-
land plants is only a secondary
goal of the drawdown, which is
being done mainly to mitigate
a botulism outbreak during
what’s expected to be a long,
hot, dry summer.
On the south end of the
sump, conditions are a lit-
tle more concerning. Tiny
amounts of water still remain
across a wide area, forming
what’s essentially muck that
only a bird could stand in with-
out sinking. Once tempera-
tures increase later this month,
conditions there will be ripe
for a botulism outbreak if more
water isn’t removed.
Botulism lies dormant in
wetland soils and lakebeds but
awakens when water is low and
calm, and temperatures are
hot. Birds contract the bacteria
through maggots and become
paralyzed to varying degrees.
Once they’re unable to move
their heads, they’ll flop over in
the shallow water and eventu-
ally drown.
Refuge managers have two
options to mitigate botulism
outbreaks: Give the area an in-
fusion of cool, clear water or
drain it completely to dry out
the bacteria’s habitat. In 2021,
the former would be a literal
pipe dream.
“We’re trying to eliminate as
much of this as we can,” Craw-
ford said. “Unfortunately, the
birds love this. They love to be
able to stand instead of swim.
And that is a recipe for botu-
lism.”
Last year, Tule Lake and
Lower Klamath National Wild-
life Refuges experienced one of
their worst botulism outbreaks
in history, which killed at least
60,000 ducks and sent thou-
sands of waterfowl to Bird Ally
X’s duck hospital in Arcata, Ca-
lif., which struggled to handle
the influx of patients with lim-
ited funding and staff.
In addition to assisting with
the Sump 1A drawdown, Mc-
Creary said Ducks Unlimited
is also working with Fish and
Wildlife to provide more fund-
ing to the duck hospital in ad-
vance of this year’s botulism
season. Bird Ally X is also seek-
ing donations for this year’s
botulism response.
But he said the drawdown
should give refuge managers a
serious head start in combat-
ting outbreaks this summer.
In May, after the English
Channel had been opened
and the two sumps reached
equilibrium, Tulelake Irriga-
tion District began using one
of its existing pumps to trans-
fer more water from 1A to 1B.
About 150 C’waam (Lost River
suckers) were also moved from
Sump 1A to Sump 1B prior to
the drawdown to comply with
Endangered Species Act re-
quirements.
Having been dried out last
year, 1B’s lakebed was more
compacted and, therefore, able
to be filled deeper than 1A,
Kirby said.
Challenges remain
Kirby said it was tough to
figure out exactly how much
water he was working with in
Sump 1A, given how much silt
was in it. It got to a point where
he couldn’t really tell where the
water stopped and the lakebed
began. The only tool he had
to estimate the lake’s volume
was a 1986 area capacity curve,
which likely didn’t take into
account how much silt would
have accumulated in the lake
over so many decades.
“Nobody knows what the
bottom of this thing really looks
like,” Kirby said.
He and refuge biologists have
since settled on about 12,000
acre-feet, and there’s actually a
concern that will not even be
enough water to fill Sump 1B.
McCreary said Fish and
Wildlife may use a “floating ex-
cavator” to dig channels in the
muddy lakebed and allow the
thin, puddled water still remain-
ing to flow to the pump’s intake
and on to Sump 1B.
It turns out that even amid
one of the Klamath Basin’s
worst droughts in recorded
history, it’s proving difficult to
get the very last drops of water
out of Sump 1A. “We’re down
to the point of where we have
to get creative,” Kirby said.
Crawford said some of Sump
1A still has the ability to fill a
ditch delivering water to the
Southwest Sump, allowing more
bird food to be grown on those
leaselands. Farmers there have
contracts with the refuge to
leave behind a certain percent-
age of grain in their fields after
harvest for the express purpose
of migratory bird snacks.
Still, the district and the ref-
uge are in a race against time.
Their goal is to have Sump 1A
as dry as possible by July 1,
when biologists typically go on
alert for botulism outbreaks.
“We still expect that there
will be some level of a botulism
outbreak, but the amount of
shallow water will be less,” Mc-
Creary said.
SIZZLING SUMMER SALE
Hot Prices Throughout Both Stores!
Swivel Glider
$699
FREE Foundation or FREE Pillows
with mattress purchase
FREE DELIVERY
& SPECIAL
FINANCING
AVAILABLE*
*Subject to credit approval. See store for details
2071 S. Hwy 97, Redmond 541-548-2066 • www.wilsonsofredmond.net • 63485 N. Hwy 97, Bend 541-330-5084