Refuges are last in line for water       

March 6, 2010

   The Lower Klamath and Tule Lake National Wildlife refuges are last in line when water is delivered to the Klamath Reclamation Project. If there is just a little water available, it won’t go to the refuges, said Ron Cole, refuge manager.

   “If we are to get water this summer it would be in the form of return flow,” Cole said. “We’ll be and we already have kicked on our wells and have been using them throughout most of the winter time. They don’t produce much, but they have been giving us a little bit of water.”

   To help the lease lands that are part of the Tule Lake refuge, the land was pre-irrigated last year, Cole said.

   “Those soils have been saturated on numerous fields. If no water is delivered, it’s possible farmers in those leases would be able to grow small grain crops,” Cole said.

   The pre-irrigation also provided attractive habitat to migrating waterfowl this winter, he said.

   Should drought occur in the refuges, Cole said, some marshes would be protected from drying out as long as possible.

   “Hopefully most will hold up the majority of summer. They’ll get very shallow and some will go dry,” he said. “That may be hard for a lot of folks to understand. We’re not going to have enough water to maintain those permanent marshes through the summer if no water is delivered.”

   No water means less habitat for birds that use the refuge for nesting, but they would return as long as water became available again in 2011, Cole said.  

   The upside is that the refuges may be able to get to some projects that haven’t been done because staffers couldn’t access the areas.

   “We’ll try to do some things we normally don’t get a chance to do,” Cole said.