Wildlife Refuge to Make Comeback : Wetlands: U.S. will buy water from farmers to replenish Stillwater in a pact ending 120-year-old feud.

Miles of sand and a few ponds are all that remain of Nevada’s biggest wetland marsh, a key stopover for migrating birds in the West. As Ron Anglin nudges his Jeep over the unnatural desert, white flashes are glimpsed through the brush--Alaskan tundra swans.

“The first year I was here there were 15,000 swans,” said Anglin, manager of Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge. “This year we might get 3,000.”

Despite the scene of devastation, it appears that Stillwater is the big winner in the formal end to a 120-year feud between California and Nevada over water in Lake Tahoe and nearby Carson River, which begins in the Sierra Nevada and flows into the marsh.

Without ceremony, President Bush has signed a law that puts to rest the bistate brouhaha that began in 1870 when Alexis von Schmidt, a civil engineer and entrepreneur, threw up a dam to divert outflow from Lake Tahoe to far-off San Francisco.

Of chagrin to Nevada was that Von Schmidt’s renegade dam blocked the Truckee River, then and now the main source of water for Reno. Not a drop of Lake Tahoe water ever reached San Francisco, but other schemes kept the two states feuding. Armed Nevadans faced off with angry Californians along the lake’s shore during a 1930 drought.

Rights to the water in Lake Tahoe and the two rivers--Carson and Truckee--remained in legal limbo until a settlement was reached in the final hours of this year’s congressional session. Century-old Paiute Indian claims and concern about two species of endangered fish complicated efforts to reach a settlement.

“It’s the Middle East of Western water wars,” said David Livermore, director of The Nature Conservancy office in Salt Lake City.

The feud was nearly ended once before when, under prodding by then-Govs. Ronald Reagan and Paul Laxalt, California and Nevada signed what amounted to a peace treaty in 1971--after 13 years of negotiations--that divvied up the water. The side issues were so thorny that Congress would not ratify the compact.

This year’s settlement--sponsored by Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.)--creates a fund of about $100 million for the Paiutes and settles other claims. In a step hailed by environmental groups, it also clears the way for capitalism and the law of supply and demand to save the refuge, which is part of the Stillwater Wildlife Management Area run by the state of Nevada and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Fresh water for the Stillwater bird ponds will be bought back from the very 20th-Century creature that devoured the marsh--the first of the giant federal irrigation projects in the West that killed wetlands to transform arid valleys into bountiful farmlands.

This is the first place that water from a U.S. reclamation project will be liberated to save wetlands. The Stillwater experiment will be observed with interest in California, where the Central Valley is a prime example of the power of dams to alter geography--and a glaring example that wetlands and wildlife suffer when rivers are stopped from flooding.

The area around Stillwater, 60 miles east of Reno, is nowhere as fertile as the Central Valley. Like the valley, before man tinkered with nature, it held great marshes that sustained the massive winter migrations of arctic ducks, geese and other waterfowl down the Pacific Flyway into California and south to Mexico and beyond.

Stillwater was created by the Carson River, which flowed down the east side of the Sierra Nevada in California and spread across Nevada’s Lahontan Valley, a sandy scrub plain at 5,000 feet elevation. At the low point in the valley, Stillwater wetlands swelled and ebbed with the seasons and weather--a common feature of marshes in the landlocked Great Basin--and averaged about 100,000 acres.

The Truckee River left Lake Tahoe and flowed about 70 miles northeast into Nevada before dumping into Pyramid Lake, a historical home of the Paiute.

The natural order began to change in 1903, when the federal arm that would become the Bureau of Reclamation created the Newlands Irrigation Project, the first ambitious venture to dam rivers to reshape the American West. Farmers used water from dams on the Carson and Truckee rivers to build an economy based on alfalfa and cattle, with Fallon as the hub.

With the river water diverted onto fields, Stillwater gradually dried up, hitting its all-time low this year at 3,100 acres of wetlands. Counts of migrating birds have dropped from a high of about 500,000--Canada geese, white pelicans, grebes and other waterfowl--to fewer than 100,000 expected this winter.

“We’ve lost wildlife habitat at a phenomenal rate,” Anglin said.

Stillwater’s decline as a haven for waterfowl was hastened, ironically, by an overabundance of water. Heavy spring runoff down the Carson River in 1986 flooded 250,000 acres of dried marsh, forming the makings of an ecological catastrophe that brought Stillwater to national attention.

In saturating the sand, the flood unloosed salts, toxic metals and farming chemicals that had collected over many years. As the shallow flood ponds evaporated, the remaining water grew fouler, killing 7 million fish and calling attention to the plight at Stillwater. The Wilderness Society designated Stillwater one of the most threatened refuges in the country.

The new law directs the Department of the Interior to create 25,000 acres of Lahontan Valley wetlands. About 14,000 acres would be at the Stillwater refuge and the rest in other marshes in the valley that surrounds Fallon.

Anglin figures that about 50,000 acre-feet of water a year must be bought from local farmers--a huge amount that could irrigate almost a third of all the farm acreage in the Fallon area.

Many local farmers are opposed to the idea--fearing a gradual end to agriculture here--but others have been willing to sell their water. Anglin is not sure how much water will be available and whether the price tag--about $16 million and rising--can be met soon.

“There is a political limit to how much water you can buy in the driest state in the nation,” Anglin said. “They didn’t get into this mess in a year and they’re not going to get out of it in a year. I think a realistic time frame is 5 to 10 years.”

David Yardas, senior water policy analyst with the Environmental Defense Fund, said most of the water is available at the right price. More efficient farming practices and slicing the number of irrigated acres can make up the shortfall, he said.

“It’s a realistic total,” said Yardas. “It’s very doable.”

The first 5,000 acre-feet of privately purchased water was delivered to Stillwater’s ponds in June. It was purchased with about $1 million from the Nature Conservancy, a major player in the drive to revive Stillwater.

“This demonstrated that it could be done,” said Livermore. “It was the first time that water had been acquired from a reclamation project for wetlands and wildlife.”

NEXT STEP

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service will decide over the next few months how much it thinks water in the Lahontan Valley is worth. The agency and the state of Nevada plan to begin making offers to buy water rights from farmers. Water will be used to restore the dying ecosystem of the Stillwater National Wildlife Refuge.