Seeking Refuge: Birds and Landscapes of the Pacific Flyway

5. Refuges in Conflict

132 By the mid -1960s, the Fish and Wildlife Service had secured a place for refuges amid the Far West’s irrigated landscapes and had successfully fended off attempts to open its premier refuges in the Klamath Basin to homesteading. The splendor of the West’s marshes, which had once cloaked many of the region’s larger valleys and basins, was long gone. But amid this destruction, the agency had constructed a network of refuges to sustain migratory birds within an otherwise forbidding landscape for waterfowl. Such gains came at a cost that became all too apparent in later decades. Refuges needed water to function, and for the most part, the FWS relied to a large degree on agricultural drain water flowing from nearby farms. The agency proved adept at turning this waste from agriculture into verdant fields to feed waterfowl and into marshes and ponds for loafing birds. Trouble loomed, however, if the drain water was toxic or if other groups sought to divert irrigation water for other purposes. The FWS and its supporters were more or less united in their conviction that the primary function of these refuges was to support the millions of waterfowl that migrated through the Far West and 5 Refuges in Conflict Refuges in Conflict 133 to ensure that West Coast duck and goose hunters could continue to enjoy their sport. In her book Where Land and Water Meet, a study of the management of riparian areas and wildlife refuges in the Malheur Basin of eastern Oregon, Nancy Langston writes that refuge officials in the 1940s and 1950s sought to build “an empire of nature, a world aimed at increasing waterfowl production.”1 Refuge officials elsewhere along the flyway shared this attitude. Langston does not see this as a consequence of blind faith in engineering, but as a response to crashing waterfowl populations during the 1930s. In the midst of this disaster , refuge staff needed to devise creative ways to supply refuges with water. The numbers of ducks and geese increased in the 1940s, and this seemed to confirm that the FWS’s management approach was effective (the FWS counted over 3.5 million waterfowl during the 1950s and 1960s).2 This consensus began unraveling in the 1970s. Like other federal areas in the western United States, wildlife refuges became contentious sites that were drawn into the wider debate over the purpose of public lands.3 Disputes between refuge officials and their supporters on the one hand and irrigators on the other became multifaceted conflicts among the FWS, the Bureau of Reclamation, farmers, environmentalists, and Indian tribes. The environmental movement fractured the consensus over the purpose of the wildlife refuges and challenged the heavy-handed approach that had characterized refuge management for decades. Native groups such as the Klamath Tribes— whom the Bureau of Reclamation and the FWS had never consulted when managing the lakes and marshes within their territory—now used their growing legal power to pressure the federal government to manage water in the Klamath Basin with their interests in mind. The claims made on the refuges by these various groups forced the FWS to reconsider its practices as management became more challenging and contentious. Refuges existed within the physical context of the irrigated landscape . They also existed within political and cultural contexts, and as those contexts changed, so did the refuges. The 1970s witnessed the growth of the environmental movement and a new set of laws, such as the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act, which had serious repercussions for refuges in the Far West and the Pacific Flyway. 134 Refuges in Conflict Environmentalists and hunters, the FWS’s primary constituencies, saw the refuges differently. Unlike hunters, who expected refuges to produce or sustain high numbers of waterfowl, environmentalists wanted the FWS to protect other species, even at the expense of raising feed for ducks and geese. Refuge managers, too, came to value other aspects of the refuges that had received scant attention from earlier generations of agency officials. The rise of broader interests in the refuges occurred during a time when there were fewer hunters each year. The number of hunters in California dwindled from a postwar high of more than 200,000 to 72,000 in 2003, even though the population of the state rose dramatically from 11 million to 35 million. The number of waterfowl hunters in Oregon also dropped by half during the same...