Redemption in wetlands

With the Klamath Basin ecosystem in decline, its water quality failing, and its fish and wildlife under federal protections that have sparked conflicts during droughts, wetlands are no longer a nuisance. Scientists and others now see them as an essential tool for repairing the ecosystem by storing and cleaning the water.

KLAMATH FALLS -- They called it "the swamp": hundreds of acres of boggy muck and reeds that made herding cattle across Louie Randall's sprawling Circle 5 Ranch a mighty hassle.

Its value hinged mainly on how fast it could be drained, plowed and planted, converting it from useless marsh to useful cropland.

"All that time we felt we had to feed the world," Randall recalls.

He spent the summer of 1944 on a tractor, reclaiming the spring-fed marsh about 30 miles east of Klamath Falls. It was The American Way: On early maps, the federal Bureau of Reclamation had labeled many of the Klamath Basin's largest lakes and marshes "TO BE RECLAIMED."

About three-quarters of the wide basin's 350,000 acres of shallow wetlands vanished that way.

But with the Klamath Basin ecosystem in decline, its water quality failing, and its fish and wildlife under federal protections that left some farmers little water during last summer's drought, wetlands are no longer a nuisance. Now scientists and others such as Randall see them as an essential tool for repairing the ecosystem by storing and cleaning the water.

Randall's swamp is again a wetland, home to thousands of ducks and geese, and it's more profitable -- through paid hunting -- than when he farmed its poor soils. It has won national awards as wildlife habitat. It also stores and filters untold millions of gallons of water that flows to farmers and fish downstream.

"In the last count, we had 30,000 ducks here," Randall says, waving across the nearly 2,000 acres of cattails and marsh grass. "Besides creating habitat for thousands of waterfowl and mammals, it also cleans up the water and fills the aquifer so there's cool water in the summer when we need it most."

All the plans for solving the water struggles that reached a crisis point last summer in Klamath Basin call for resurrecting thousands of acres more of such wetlands, at a cost that probably will reach many millions of dollars. It's not simple, especially in a region where many cast a suspicious eye on conservation initiatives that involve private lands. But most scientists now agree that it's the only way the Klamath Basin can supply enough clean water to meet the overlapping demands of farms, wildlife, tribes and others.

Much of the $175 million in a Klamath Basin amendment before Congress would go toward wetlands restoration, while another amendment calls for $1.5 billion in conservation funding nationally, including the purchase of water rights for wildlife.

"It's a huge piece, if not the main piece, of the solution," says Mark Stern, a wetlands biologist who oversees two large Klamath Basin wetlands restoration projects for The Nature Conservancy. "With wetlands, we get habitat, water quality and natural water storage, so we can improve the situation and get out of the box we're in."

It's already working. Once The Nature Conservancy tore out 4,000 feet of levee that had dried up one-time wetlands along Upper Klamath Lake, new marsh took hold and soon offered vital shelter to endangered suckers, the imperiled fish that triggered irrigation cutbacks last summer.

Other wetlands projects undertaken by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and other agencies have kept thousands of tons of nutrients from cattle manure out of the lake, where they feeds massive algae blooms that can kill suckers and other wildlife. More and more private landowners such as Randall are protecting and restoring wetlands on their own. They're often assisted by state and federal grants, and tax incentives, making their land more attractive to fish and wildlife.

"We're not as dumb as the big city people may think we are," says Kenneth Tuttle, a Klamath Falls surgeon who plans to reroute water across his 600-acre ranch north of Klamath Falls to create new wetlands. "We realize society wants us to do something, and I want this place to be better when I die than when I bought it."

A new local group of farmers, public officials, biologists and conservationists called the Klamath Basin Ecosystem Foundation aims to help landowners such as Tuttle navigate the permits required for such projects and find supplemental funding if they need it. Some projects may be as simple as fencing willows that hold up river banks so cattle don't nibble them, while others may rebuild streams and wetlands.

Tuttle's plan, for instance, would use an old river bend as a kind of septic system that slowly filters water through wetlands. Biologists would measure the water quality where it enters and where it leaves, he figures, proving that landowners can put the Klamath Basin back on track with minimal work and cost.

"That little cliche about landowners caring for the land really holds true," says Karl Wenner, a founder of the group. "But it has to pencil out. No landowner is going to say I don't want to do a better job, but they have to see how and why it can work."

Although the picture is brightening, no one knows how many more acres of wetlands will heal the Klamath Basin enough to ease water clashes such as last summer's or how much it will cost and how long it will take. People have reworked the basin's elaborate web of water and wildlife for decades.

"It took 50 to 60 years to convert wetlands to farmland," Stern says. "You can't just flip a switch and have it go back the way it was."

Hidden assets

The environmental value of wetlands hides in the soggy ground that makes them nearly impossible to farm and graze. As water slowly percolates through the reeds and grasses that form a kind of watery carpet as much as 15 feet deep, debris settles out and vegetation soaks up impurities, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, from livestock manure and natural sources in the soils.

In essence, the same wetlands that developers long saw as a nuisance form giant natural sponges that not only hold huge volumes of water but also clean the water as effectively as any treatment plant.

While Louie Randall was draining his swamp more than 50 years ago, others were doing the same elsewhere in Klamath Basin, often on a much larger scale. Encouraged by federal incentives that awarded people the marshland they drained and put to use, developers built levees around wetlands and pumped them dry, straightening nearby rivers so they took up less space.

Around Upper Klamath Lake, centerpiece of the basin's clash over water, about 23,000 acres of wetlands went dry from 1940 to 1990, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. Most was used as cattle pasture.

Water that once trickled through the vast rivers of grass soon rushed through the streamlined rivers and ditches straight into the shallow lake --depositing nitrogen, phosphorus and all.

Exposed to the air, the former wetlands around the lake dried out like a sponge and broke down, releasing much of the nitrogen and phosphorus they had absorbed in the centuries before. They also gradually sank below the lake surface, turning into inadvertent collecting ponds as winter snows passed through.

Each spring, landowners pumped them dry, flushing the collected water -- laden with nitrogen, phosphorus and cattle manure -- directly into the lake. A 1997 federal study estimated that such pumps spill nearly 100 tons of nitrogen and phosphorus into Upper Klamath Lake each year. In the lake, that adds to the nutrients from rivers, sometimes fueling runaway algae blooms that turn its waters into a toxic stew and kill fish the Endangered Species Act says must be saved.

Battling blooms

About 15,000 acres around the lake is undergoing some form of restoration, and there are signs it is slowing the algae blooms. A leading example is 3,200 acres of onetime-wetland-turned-cattle-pasture that the BLM bought about five years ago with money from Congress, federal agencies, the Klamath Tribes and conservation groups such as Ducks Unlimited and Oregon Trout.

BLM staff stopped pumping water off the land in the spring, reducing by thousands of pounds the amount of nitrogen and phosphorus that enters the lake. They also rerouted the Wood River from a dredged channel 200 feet wide and 2 feet deep to its original, sinewy course snaking through a revived marsh and delta.

The river now averages 50 feet wide and 6 to 8 feet deep. Its water is cooler, making it more alluring to native fish -- and fishermen. Weedy plants have declined, wetland sedges and rushes have expanded, and the number of newborn ducks increased from 875 in 1998 to more than 3,000 in 2000.

"You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you have a pasture full of cows with a few ditches, you're not going to have many birds," said Wedge Watkins, a BLM wildlife biologist who oversees the Wood River project. "If you've got 3,000 acres flooded with marsh, you will."

Nearby wetlands where the Williamson River enters Upper Klamath Lake also emerged from a restoration project, carried out by The Nature Conservancy. And the Bureau of Reclamation bought a large ranch where it will store additional water and which also may give wetlands a broader foothold.

Although studies have reached conflicting conclusions about whether less nitrogen and phosphorus now enter the lake overall, some who live along its shores say the lake never grew as rank with decaying algae this year as it has in some years past. Scientists say that if ducks, frogs and fish can be viewed as barometers of the ecosystem's health, the wetlands undoubtedly are improving its health.

That means less pressure from the Endangered Species Act and less likelihood that farmers will lose their water to fish.

"It's news in the right direction; it's where we want to go; it's what we want to hear," said Curt Mullis, who heads the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's wetlands branch in Klamath Falls. "We have a lot of water here, but all the things we want to do with it require that we manage it differently, and wetlands are a big part of that."

You can reach Michael Milstein at 503-294-7689 or by e-mail at michaelmilstein@news.oregonian.com.