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Refuge-farm dispute goes to judge Issue pits row crops, migratory birds By BETH QUINN What's the primary purpose of a wildlife refuge -- to shelter migrating birds or to provide farmland? That's the question a judge in Sacramento, Calif., will be asked to answer on Monday when the nation's oldest conservation group squares off in federal court against the nation's original wildlife refuge, one it helped to create. At issue are the 53,600-acre Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge -- the nation's first, created with the help of the National Audubon Society in 1908 -- and the 30,102-acre Tule Lake refuge. Both offer spring and fall rest stops to millions of birds migrating along the Pacific flyway from Argentina to northern Alaska. And both offer farmland for lease, with crops grown on 28 percent of the Lower Klamath refuge land and 44 percent of the Tule Lake refuge. "We think that agriculture is being allowed over and above and at the expense of refuge purposes," said Ralph Opp, a wildlife biologist and member of the Klamath Basin chapter of the National Audubon Society. "An important function of ours is to feed these birds flying both north and south," he said. "They're growing a lot of crops that have little food value to waterfowl." Crops and birds have coexisted on the Klamath basin refuges for almost a century, with 11 percent of the region's 240,000 agricultural acres in publicly-owned wildlife refuges. Federal law requires that at least 75 percent of the refuge's farmland be planted in grains such as barley, wheat and oats, which provide forage for migrating birds. But in recent years pesticide-dependent row crops such as potatoes, onions and sugar beets have spread to a full 25 percent of the refuge's croplands. Opp and others believe that change has reduced the food and fouled the water that migrating birds depend on. "It's just a real imbalance," he says. The 75 farmers who lease refuge lands include Marshall Staunton of Tule Lake, Calif., who with his father and two brothers works 2,000 acres, including a 600-acre leasehold. "A lot of young farmers get their start on lease land. The rental prices are open bid," Staunton says. "The ability to rent the ground makes the land available to young farmers." Farmers pay $10 to $100 an acre for their five-year leaseholds, with lease payments totaling $1.8 million a year in 1995. Lands planted in grain that year earned an average of $856 an acre while those planted in row crops earned an average of $2,180. Reducing the amount of leased land or requiring more grain production could force some farmers out of business, including five whose sole crop land is leased from refuges. Refuge officials don't think such changes are necessary. "There are lots of birds here on the refuge today and there have been lots of birds here throughout history," said Sam Johnson, a plant pathologist who manages the refuge's pest program. A Nov. 3 census found 810,000 ducks and 22,800 geese at Lower Klamath and 119,000 ducks and 67,500 geese at Tule Lake. Overall numbers of birds visiting the two refuges have declined from a daily peak of 6 million birds in the 1960s to a daily peak of about 1 million birds today. Johnson blames that decline on the loss of habitat in the northern breeding grounds and southern wintering grounds of the Pacific flyway. "It's real easy to oversimplify and fingerpoint to agriculture on the refuges and say, `Aha! That's where the problem is.' But where's the proof?" he asks. Still, refuge managers are experimenting with re-creating natural marshes and with rotating crops and marshland on a two-, three- or five-year cycle. That's not good enough for Wendell Wood of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, who points out that 80 percent of birds migrating along the Pacific flyway visit the Klamath basin each year. "People ask, `Why can't the ducks go someplace else?' The answer is because there's no other place to go," he says. For that reason, conservationists have asked Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr. for a summary judgment that the wildlife comes first in the nation's oldest refuge. "We're asking him to protect the land that the public already thought the Congress had set aside," Wood says. Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA