Would a shift toward wild rice as an agricultural commodity be more helpful than cattle grazing or other uses?
I think so. Things that provide food for wildlife [will help]. This is sort of Wildlife Management 101 … I hear the farmers announce the geese are in their field and how wonderful it is … Wildlife Management 101 is food, water, and shelter. You’ve provided the food, what about the other two? All these things have potential provided that it’s looked at in terms of what the greater need is–you just can’t say that I’m providing food for a certain part of the year. The eagles, for example, right now in the Klamath Basin … there are three major eagle wintering feeding areas, but two of the three really have dropped off in the last few years. The three areas were, in addition to the Lower Klamath refuge–which is still the most viable and important area–are the farm fields north of the Lower Klamath refuge and Tule Lake. Tule Lake has lost eagles because of the dominance of agriculture, where the numbers of waterfowl have drastically declined and so that much less eagle use. They were getting lots of eagle use north of Lower Klamath refuge because the practice had been to flood those lands right at the time the eagles were here, which was in January. Now they’re flooding them earlier for various reasons. The flooding flushes out small mammals–rodents– that the eagles would grab. [The flooding] also makes it attractive to waterfowl, which are the eagles’ main food source in the wintertime. You still have that food being provided by the flooding in October and November, but the problem is that eagles aren’t here. It’s a case where agriculture is always ready to take credit where there’s a picture of the swans sitting in the field with Weyerhaeser’s mill in the background. The Herald and News loves those kind of pictures. It [the provision of food] has to be done in conformity with what the wildlife’s needs really are, rather than the way, in our opinion, its been [with] what’s good for agriculture. Sometimes, yes, it happens that it still works for wildlife. Where that [agriculture coming first] offends us the most is when that seems to be the philosophy that’s governing the management of the national wildlife refuges. The emphasis should be [on] what’s good for wildlife first and that’s what we think the law says.
