https://www.heraldandnews.com/news/local_news/beating-botulism/article_29fa38c8-fff5-57e1-a823-b83af6b444af.html
Beating
botulism
How Tule Lake Refuge avoided disaster this summer
by
Alex Schwartz, Herald and News 11/16/21
< "Tule Lake Sump 1A is mostly dry after
most of its water was drained to Sump 1B to try and prevent the
spread of botulism." (KBC NOTE:
because The Bureau of Reclamation denied water to the farms and
refuges)
"Eventually, refuge managers will try to refill Sump 1A and
create a better environment for waterfowl."
Heading into
2021’s historically dry summer, the question on Lower
Klamath and Tule Lake national wildlife refuges wasn’t
whether waterbirds would succumb to botulism — it was how
many.
Because the
naturally occurring bacteria spreads like wildfire in warm,
stagnant water, refuge managers needed to take actions to
eliminate as much of that threat as possible.
Stakeholders
decided they needed to do something to avoid a situation
similar to last year, when more than 60,000 molting ducks
died of botulism on Tule Lake Refuge. They consolidated
water and instituted unprecedented operations, at one point
draining an area of open water that hadn’t been dry in
millions of years.
“The thought of
dealing with another summer like we did last summer, it was
terrifying,” said John Vradenburg, supervisory biologist for
the Klamath Basin National Wildlife Refuge Complex.
Even
after draining Tule
Lake’s Sump 1A and putting that water into its smaller Sump
1B, everyone braced for an inevitable outbreak. Evaporation
and irrigation diversions began drying
up the remaining wetland
faster than expected, just as ducks began molting their
feathers and losing their ability to fly. Everyone braced
for impact.
By late July,
the staff of nonprofit Bird Ally X’s Duck Hospital on Lower
Klamath Refuge sat on edge, waiting for the inevitable call
from refuge biologists that the first botulism patient of
the summer had been picked up. January Bill, co-director of
the Bird Ally X Botulism Response, said it was a very
stressful time.
“I was waiting
on pins and needles until night temperatures started
dipping,” Bill said. “If one bird is rescued, we need to be
available to drive to the refuge within hours to provide
treatment. I didn’t let my guard down.”
But as summer
rolled on, Bill and her team continued to wait in suspense,
and refuge crews still hadn’t picked up any sick birds. By
October 8, once nighttime temperatures had dropped low
enough to neutralize the botulism bacteria and the fall
migration had begun, Vradenburg gave the OK to close the
duck hospital for the season. They never had to treat a
single patient.
“We didn’t
receive any birds this year,” Bill said.
Astonishingly,
a botulism outbreak didn’t occur in the Klamath Basin
despite abysmal conditions on the refuges in 2021. Luck
certainly played into it, but the adaptive management
employed by stakeholders could prove a blueprint for
mitigating disease outbreaks in the future.
For Vradenburg,
draining Sump 1A in May and June steered Tule Lake away from
a repeat of last summer’s massive outbreak, which was mainly
concentrated there.
Without water
deliveries from the Klamath Project, the 9,000-acre sump
would have evaporated to mud puddle in no time, attracting
thousands of birds who would contract botulism released from
the lakebed. And because it would’ve been so shallow, refuge
crews wouldn’t be able to access large swaths of the sump to
collect sick and dead birds and contain the outbreak.
By putting the
water contained in Sump 1A into the comparatively lush Sump
1B, stakeholders gave the smaller wetland a leg-up on
evaporation by raising its water level. A dry Sump 1A would,
in turn, jumpstart wetland plant growth to make that unit
more productive once it could be refilled. Beyond that, the
draining and pumping effort was a collaboration between the
Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited and Tulelake
Irrigation District, which physically delivers water to the
refuge.
“That
management action stands out as the best before-outbreak
action that we all took,” Vradenburg said. “That definitely
took a tremendous amount of flexibility out of [TID’s]
operations.”
In July,
above-normal temperatures had accelerated evaporation from
Sump 1B. Irrigators farming on the adjacent refuge
leaselands exacerbated the water loss by diverting some
water out of the sump. The water level dropped
precipitously, stranding grebe nests and exposing mud flats
that would become botulism hotspots. TID placed a limit on
the water its patrons could extract from the sump and began
replacing part of the diversions with well water.
Though she
bemoaned irrigators drawing down one of the only remaining
wetland strongholds in the basin, California Waterfowl
Association Waterfowl Programs Supervisor Caroline Brady
said that infusion of cooler, fresher groundwater ultimately
kept Sump 1B from turning into a botulism breeding ground by
maintaining circulation and lowering water temperatures.
“If no one had
ever drained the sump for irrigation, there definitely
would’ve been an outbreak,” Brady said.
Vradenburg said
the diversions ramped down at the perfect time to dry up the
exposed mud flats, which eliminated botulism risk in those
areas but also further reduced the amount of available
habitat on Sump 1B. Additionally, he said the benefit of the
added well water was “a tough pill to swallow” given that
the Klamath Basin — and the Tulelake area in particular — is
in a serious groundwater deficit.
“It’s hard to
balance groundwater reductions with the benefits, but
without a doubt that definitely played into us avoiding an
outbreak,” Vradenburg said.
Right as TID
began stabilizing the sump level, thick smoke from the
Bootleg Fire and other wildfires in California descended on
the Tule Lake Basin. TID Manager Brad Kirby said the smoke’s
arrival put an additional damper on evaporation at exactly
the right time. Under orange skies, he watched the sump
level slow its decline even before the district began adding
additional water.
“That was
significant enough to show an effect that you wouldn’t even
think you’d be able to notice,” Kirby said.
By
mid-August, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, DU and TID
were able to ‘borrow‘
roughly 10,000 acre-feet of water from the PacifiCorp
reservoirs on the Klamath River to send to Sump 1B. It
didn’t change the water level much, but it may have also
kept the wetland circulating as adjacent farmers continued
diverting water. In the roughly three weeks between the
rapid decline of the sump level and the arrival of that
water, Kirby remembers trying to “make water out of
nothing.”
“I was holding
on by a string here operationally,” he said. “I found myself
saying and doing and directing things — I would’ve thought I
was crazy two years ago.”
Jeff McCreary,
director of operations for DU’s Western Region, said the
creative solutions devised to solve the botulism problem
this summer are proof that stakeholders can continue
adaptively managing the system in the future to benefit both
farmers and wildlife.
“It also sets
the table for all parties involved to continue sharing their
logistical and scientific expertise as we work toward a more
permanent solution for the Klamath Basin Refuge Complex’s
water woes going forward,” he said.
But Brady is
skeptical of relying on that same flow-through setup in
future years when botulism risk is high. While their actions
actually helped the situation, she felt it was selfish of
irrigators to take Sump 1B’s water after making a big deal
of their commitments to saving waterfowl. Either way, she
said it’s a management action the refuge can keep in its
back pocket for the future.
“I think it’s
hard to say you want to give TID an inch, because they’ll
take 10 miles,” Brady said. “In drought years like this,
maybe it does benefit both parties if you irrigate X number
of acres using X number of acre-feet of water, and you put
groundwater back in so you can prevent those big disease
outbreaks. I think that’s something you could do in the
future, but I don’t think anyone wants to have that
conversation with TID, because they’re not trustworthy.”
In a general
sense, Vradenburg said collaboration was crucial to saving
refuge birds this summer. Because they all made avoiding a
botulism outbreak a priority, stakeholders were able to
devise creative ways to change operations and mitigate the
risk as best they could.
“Everybody
finally started to understand that botulism is related, in
some way, to how we manage this system, and everybody took
it serious,” he said. “We’re going to have botulism
outbreaks again, and there are going to be big ones and
small ones, but we learned a lot on how to tip the scale in
our favor to minimize those this year.”
Ultimately,
human actions had only delayed the onset of a disease
outbreak — Mother Nature picked up the baton from there.
Vradenburg said signs of botulism eventually started to
appear on the refuge, but a somewhat early start to autumn
brought frost and wetter weather much sooner than last year,
when summer never seemed to end. The change in weather
effectively ended the threat of an outbreak.
“An outbreak
was starting. It was prime to go, and we started to see
affected birds at the end of September and early October. We
got lucky,” Vradenburg said. “There’s a big part of nature
that plays into the likelihood of these outbreaks.”
But the
relative success around botulism in the Klamath masks an
even more pressing problem for the refuges and for all avian
travelers along the Pacific Flyway: There’s a chronic lack
of birds in the basin, stemming from a chronic lack of
wetland habitat.
Depending on
the year, Tule Lake Refuge can support as many as 200,000
molting birds. Though biologists couldn’t conduct an aerial
survey, Vradenburg said recapture rates during duck banding
in August suggested there were between 20,000 and 30,000
birds molting on the sump. Last year, biologists estimated
between 150,000 and 200,000 birds had been molting there
when botulism broke out.
“We killed more
birds with botulism last year than we had on the refuge this
year,” Vradenburg said. “The bird numbers are that bad.”
Because so
little wetland habitat existed in the Klamath Basin, many
birds simply skipped it altogether. Some stopped elsewhere
in Southern Oregon, like Summer Lake, but others just kept
going into the Central Valley.
Vradenburg said
this year has seen the refuge’s lowest number of molting
birds, lowest amount of food production and even the lowest
fall migration counts. Just two decades ago, it supported
85% of the Pacific Flyway population. Now, to those who
study and manage the flyway, the Klamath has been all but
wiped off the map. That, he said, should be much scarier to
people than the yearly threat of botulism.
“The number of
birds we’re supporting is insignificant to continental
management now,” Vradenburg said. “What we’re seeing now is
far more catastrophic than the loss of 60,000 birds last
year. The fact that this singularly most important wetland
complex in the Pacific Flyway is completely offline this
year and was 95% offline last year — it’s continentally the
most significant wetland complex in North America, and it’s
not functioning. There’s no birds, and nobody knows what
that’s going to mean.”
What happens in
the Klamath has ripple effects up and down the flyway. Brady
said she’s observed abnormal behavior in birds who’ve
arrived to the Central Valley for the winter, many of whom
would typically stop at Lower Klamath or Tule Lake to rest
and refuel before continuing their migrations.
“The birds
showed up early simply because Klamath was offline,” she
said. “And when they got here, they were really hungry.”
That spells
concern for what the spring migration will look like,
especially if the Klamath refuges don’t get water in time to
grow invertebrate food and inundate crucial wetland habitat.
Birds migrating back north from the Central Valley will
likely be underfed when they return to the Klamath,
emphasizing the need for plenty of food on the refuges.
If the Klamath
refuges remain offline in the spring and more birds skip the
basin a second time, no one really knows what will happen to
the Pacific Flyway.
“We’ve never in
the historical record seen a year where there’s this much
wetland loss for both spring and fall migrating waterfowl,”
Vradenburg said. “This is uncharted waters for continental
waterbird management.”
Refuge
advocates have requested that the Bureau of Reclamation
deliver a surplus of 11,000 acre-feet of surface water in
Upper Klamath Lake to Lower Klamath Refuge this fall to
jumpstart invertebrate production, but the agency has said
they plan to act conservatively heading into Water Year
2022, intending to keep as much water in the lake as
possible. The water may show up in December, but Vradenburg
said that’s a little late to get the wetlands producing
enough invertebrates to feed birds in the spring.
There are also
no current plans to deliver water to Tule Lake, and
Vradenburg said refuge managers are operating under the
assumption that Sump 1A will remain dry into next year
unless hydrologic conditions drastically improve.
“It’s just
scary, because the ball’s starting to unravel,” Vradenburg
said.
As it did for
every other piece of the Klamath puzzle, this summer
demonstrated the need for a reliable water supply for Lower
Klamath and Tule Lake Refuges. Stakeholders agree that while
they learned a lot from an operations standpoint about how
to collaboratively and adaptively manage the system in a
critically dry year, it’s not sustainable to rely on
groundwater or consistently running water uphill and
backwards in future years.
“We can do
everything we can operationally and come up with as many
creative ideas as possible to move water effectively and
efficiently, but when you have zero in the pot, there’s not
much to work with,” Kirby said.
Though the
threat of botulism has waned for 2021, birds in the Klamath
Basin are far from out of the woods. Waterfowl numbers on
the refuges are already less than 1% of what they were at
their peak in the mid-20th Century. The last remaining
wetlands in the basin remain under a near-constant threat of
drying up for good.
“The birds are
the canary in the mineshaft,” Vradenburg said. “If this
basin can’t support waterfowl, when it was historically the
most important place for waterfowl in North America, how can
we expect to maintain a viable and sustainable agricultural
program or viable and sustainable fisheries? They’re all
linked to wetlands.”
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