Snow Geese flying over fields in the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge, Feb 2018
courtesy David Hoffmann
The Upper Klamath Basin has been in what some call “an almost continual period of drought” for more than 20 years. Wetlands have dried up, and populations of migratory water birds have plummeted, and not just in the last two decades. In the 1960s there were 6 million waterfowl. Now there are more like 120,000. Jami Dennis is a natural resources graduate student at Oregon State University. Her research led her to investigate the continued plight of migratory waterbirds and how it’s tied to water, wetlands and human intervention. Her story uses photos and data visualization to draw readers into a history that sheds light not only on this region but on the broader ecological landscape as well. Dennis presented her research at the recent Winter Wings Festival in Klamath Falls, and she joins us to share her story of “Wetlands, Waterbirds, and Water.”
The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. The Klamath Basin is in a serious drought. It has been for most of the last 20 years. Wetlands have dried up and populations of migratory waterbirds have plummeted, and not just in the last two decades. In the 1960s, there were six million waterfowl. Now there are more like 120,000. Jami Dennis is a natural resources graduate student at Oregon State University. Her research led her to investigate the dramatic decline of these water birds and how that decline is tied to wetlands and human intervention. Dennis did so using photos and data visualization. She presented her research that the recent [Winter] Wings Festival in Klamath Falls and she joins us now. Jami Dennis, welcome.
Jami Dennis: Hi, thank you. Thanks for having me on, Dave.
Miller: Thanks for joining us. How does focusing on birds change the really simplified basin narrative of fish versus farms?
Dennis: That’s a great question. Well, I think my graduate advisor, Dr. Hannah Gosnell, actually said it best when she suggested that … If I could back up a little bit, originally my idea was to try to do something to communicate climate change, and I was trying to find a way to do that that would appeal to a broad audience. Dr. Gosnell said, ‘you know, why don’t you focus on birds, because everybody likes birds,’ and it kind of evolved from there. And you know, she’s right. You’ve got to find some common denominator that people can identify with and that they can care. So, telling the story through the birds, and as I learned more about it just really became quite interesting. There’s so much to the story I couldn’t even tell it all in my project.
Miller: What are the birds that we’re talking about here? The migratory water birds and waterfowl?
Dennis: Yeah, what are the birds?
Miller: Exactly.
Dennis: So these are waterfowl, so ducks, geese, but there’s also herons, egrets, grebes, loons, any bird that’s a migratory bird that depends on water for their habitat.
Miller: Hmm.
Dennis: That’s basically what it is.
Miller:You were very much inspired by the work that started almost 120 years ago and went on for awhile of a man named William Finley. Who was he and what did he do?
Dennis: Oh Finley, yes, very inspired by him. He’s a biologist by education. I believe he was the Oregon state biologist back in the early 1900s at one point. Anyways, he and his friend, Herman Bohlman, were very interested in the birds. They heard about the great wetlands and all the great millions of birds in the Upper Klamath Basin, so they visited Klamath in 1905. They wanted to photograph … They were studying birds. They’re avid birders also, and you know, 1900s, [they] had these huge cameras, and they took all their camera gear up there to the Klamath and searched. They actually wanted to get a photograph of what they called the ‘white heron,’ which is really a great egret. They searched for it in 1905. Unfortunately, they didn’t find it because they were being hunted almost to extinction. The good news is they did find one about four years later. But during that first visit, he really saw the damage that was being done to the birds then, and they were just being hunted almost to extinction. So, hunting early on was the problem for the birds.
Miller: He actually mounted a national tour, you note in your project, and he would speak to audiences to try to talk about what was happening to birds and to get women to stop liking having hats with these fancy feathers in them. And it seems like he was pretty successful.
Dennis: Exactly. So he went on a lecture circuit with the photographs he took of the birds. He used these in his lectures, showing people all these amazing birds. One of the things that he did was, in his lectures, he was showing pictures of the birds. The women are seeing these and they have their beautiful hats with all their feathers in there. And some of them seriously had taxidermy birds on their hats and they think that these are all beautiful and they can have all this. But then he showed them the horrors of it. He also showed them the birds killed and being slaughtered and the birds lying dead, next to their nest with their chick with a dead parent. And so they were, you know … it worked. The women were horrified and it started a movement. A lot of the women formed Audubon societies and they they swore off wearing any kind of bird plumage. So that worked. He built awareness by spreading the word and showing pictures. He was a real advocate for conserving it, and that worked to help save the birds from overhunting. But then of course they had another problem.
Miller: Right, which was the gigantic infrastructure of dams and irrigation canals following the Klamath Project, the reclamation project. Can you give us a sense for the scale of that work, and what it meant for birds?
Dennis: Well, originally before the Klamath Project came in, there were about 350,000 acres of wetlands, shallow lakes and marshes in Upper Klamath Basin when the white settlers came in and the hunters in the 1800s and came in. It was just this whole massive amounts of water there. They thought it was swamplands. What happened was the U.S. wanted to settle the western lands and so they thought, wow, what if we get underneath all this water? What if we drained some of this water out there, and we would have ag [agricultural] land and people could come out here and settle it and homestead it and raise their families, have some farms,...
Miller: …and have it be productive and useful. Reclaim it for humans as opposed to its state now, which is not helping anybody or anything. That was the basic thinking, right?
Dennis: Right. That was the basic thinking as to provide a means for people to come out and settle the land and reclaim the land. So, that’s how the Klamath Project got started. The original intent was to fully drain Lower Klamath Lake and Tule Lake and luckily, they did. They did drain a lot of it. Now the original 350,000 acres of wetlands, there’s now only 75,000, which is about 20-25% of what it once was.
Miller: There’s actually a really powerful visual tool on your site. It’s two images that are right next to each other, and there’s a slider between them and you can drag it all the way to the left or all the way to the right. And basically it lets you look at a map of the area from 1892 or an aerial image of the same place in 2021. And you can, you can just back and forth and look at the two differences. Can you describe what the differences are?
Dennis: Well, the main difference is, Tule Lake was a lake. that was something that William Finley and Bohlman actually rode their boat around in there looking for the herons. So, there was this huge lake and it was drained with the Klamath Project to develop irrigation and irrigate crops. Now it’s all farmland. It’s irrigated agriculture farmland, basically, on there. Part of it does have the refuge on there, the wildlife refuge, where there is farming also on parts of the refuge.
Miller: You end this visual presentation with a discussion of some of the restoration work that’s been done in the Klamath Basin that’s being done right now. A lot of these are actually public-private partnerships. Can you give us a sense for what’s happening?
Dennis: So you know, my story there, it gets kind of depressing, so I wanted to make sure I ended it on some hope. There [are] some good things going on there. The public-private partnership, one of the biggest ones is the Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program through the Fish and Wildlife Service, where they provide financial and technical assistance to private landowners for habitat restoration on their land. One of the really cool ones, if I can mention one ‒ Lakeside Farms, which Karl Wenner is one of the owners, and he presented at the Winter Wings Festival about his farm. But it’s pretty cool. It’s up along Upper Klamath Lake and it was designed to provide habitat for the migratory birds along with other wildlife, to also aid in the recovery of the endangered suckerfish and to improve water quality in the lake, plus have a viable farm. They just finished all the technical work on this and it was pretty cool because they’ve already seen several thousand waterfowl on their property. He showed a video of that and that was pretty cool. They worked with the US Fish and Wildlife Service to do this project and there [are] funds available that are coming into the Basin right now to do these sorts of projects.
One of the hold backs from these private landowners is that they need to be able to make a living, so they can’t just stop everything, stop their farming, because they’re going to lose money. So having these resources available and seeing these other projects that have been done and can be successful where they can still farm and have habitat for the water birds. Plus if they have riparian areas, they can help with the suckerfish. So it can be a win-win if they can work together and there’s more money coming in. The National Resource Conservation Service just got 3.8 million last year for habitat restoration on private lands, and then another, I think, 160 million is coming in from the infrastructure legislation that was just passed to help restore ecosystems in the Klamath Basin. So, it’d be great if people can get involved in that sort of thing and come together and help to find ways to make the best use of these funds that are coming in.
Miller: Jami Dennis, thanks very much.
Dennis: Thank you for having me.
Miller: Jami Dennis is a Master’s student in the Natural Resources Program at Oregon State University. Her final project for her Master’s Degree is a Visual Representation of the Decline of Water Birds in the Klamath Basin. There’s a link to that project, I really recommend checking out. The link is on our website.
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