Conservationists threaten to sue if supplies allotted a few farmers aren't diverted to benefit the national symbol

Thursday, May 24, 2001

Conservation groups say a trickle of water going to a few farmers in the parched Klamath Project of Southern Oregon should be going to help imperiled bald eagles on national wildlife refuges instead, and on Wednesday they promised to go to court to make sure it does.

Because the bald eagle is a threatened species protected by the Endangered Species Act, conservation groups said that federal managers must protect them on a par with the threatened salmon and endangered suckers that already have taken priority over farms for the Klamath's scarce water.

Federal biologists have said 950 bald eagles that depend on wildlife refuges in the Klamath Basin may die of starvation, be displaced or be weakened if the refuges go dry, as many of the basin's farms will in this drought year.

When wet, the refuges host millions of waterfowl that migrate along the Pacific Flyway and provide prey for the eagles.

The Oregon Natural Resources Council, Northcoast Environmental Center and Golden Gate Audubon Society said they would sue to make the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation provide water for eagles if it does not do so on its own within 60 days.

More than 1,000 farms that normally draw their water from Upper Klamath Lake will get none this summer because officials are holding what little water there is in the lake and the Klamath River to assist salmon and suckers. Two irrigation districts that depend on Clear Lake and Gerber Reservoir, which lie in a drainage east of Klamath Falls, have been allowed to take 70,000 acre-feet of water for irrigation.

The water should not be flooding fields while America's first national wildlife refuges and the home to the largest population of wintering bald eagles in the lower 48 states dries out, said Wendell Wood of the Oregon Natural Resources Council.

"The national symbol has to take priority over irrigating cattle pasture," he said. "We're not asking for extra water for eagles; we're asking for water already promised to eagles through the Endangered Species Act. You can write a check to farmers to help them, and that's being done. You can't write a check to bald eagles."

But the possibility of diverting water from Clear Lake and Gerber Reservoir more than 40 miles to the wildlife refuges along the Oregon-California line raises new questions: How far must the government move water to help a protected species? And must farmers in one basin sacrifice water for a species in a different basin?

"Physically it's possible, but there's a question of whether you should compel diversions between basins in the kind of species balancing act we have here," said Karl Wirkus, manager of the Bureau of Reclamation's Klamath Project.