The Last Refuge : Federal Bureau Joins Battle to Ensure That Pacific Flyway Has the Wetlands for Wildlife

A thick layer of white blankets a harvested rice field near Colusa in California’s northern Central Valley. It isn’t snow. As visitors approach, the blanket stirs and moments later rises like a cloud and disperses into a thousand snow geese on the wing.

“This gives me goose pimples,” says Mike Mathiot, intending no pun. “These roost all the way up in Wrangell Island (in southeast Alaska). The miracle of migration--I’ll never get over it.”

The Central Valley is used by 60% of the birds using the Pacific Flyway, the busiest of the four major seasonal migration routes for waterfowl in North America. Geese and ducks by the millions fly it south in the winter and north in the spring. About one-fourth of North America’s waterfowl winter in the Central Valley. Others stop to rest and feed before continuing on to Mexico or Central America.

They need food, water and shelter for nesting, but have found the selection of wetlands in California shrinking more than any other state--from more than 4 million acres before ranchers and farmers came, followed in recent years by developers, to fewer than 300,000 acres today.

The Central Valley, fed by the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers and their tributaries, has been hit hardest, losing 96% of its wetlands. It is estimated that since a peak in the mid-’70s, flights along the Pacific Flyway have dropped by 40%, or 5 million birds.

When the decline became alarming, various conservation agencies and organizations--Ducks Unlimited, the Nature Conservancy, the California Waterfowl Assn., the Audubon Society, the Trust for Public Lands, the California Department of Fish and Game, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service--joined forces to regain some ground.

Now another major player has joined the fight, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

Historically overburdened and under-funded, the bureau brings one huge stake to the table--300 million acres of land, including 80% of Nevada. It owns 183 historic wetlands sites along the Pacific Flyway, encompassing 11 million acres, 271,100 in California. Mathiot’s mission as Pacific Flyway wetlands administrator is to enhance what remains and restore the rest. The bureau plans to add 50,000 acres of wetlands in California alone.

In 1987 the bureau published “Fish and Wildlife 2000/a Plan for the Future,” outlining its goals for this decade. A part of that was “Waterfowl Habitat Management on Public Lands,” which became a mandate for the bureau’s director, Cy Jamieson, when President Bush stated his strong feelings on wetlands--”no net loss”--meaning, if some wetlands are surrendered to development, they must be replaced elsewhere.

The bureau formed a partnership with Ducks Unlimited, coupling its massive landholdings with the know-how of that group, which has provided leadership in wetlands conservation since 1937. Then it hired Mathiot late last year.

Mathiot--dog trainer, coyote caller and most recently Quail Unlimited’s successful organizer for Southern California--is no bureaucrat, and there are those who know more about wetlands. But there are not many with Mathiot’s feel for the outdoors and his knack for getting things done. And what he doesn’t know is at his fingertips. His office is in Ducks Unlimited’s Western Regional headquarters in Sacramento.

But typically, Mathiot is found out in the gray, chill Central Valley, loping along levees and exploring potential wetlands. He is a determined, energetic man who attacks problems head-on. Because he lacks the patience for playing politics and bureaucracy wastes his time, his performance would be better measured by results than appearances.

Mathiot wrote his own program for implementing the bureau’s plan. Wanting a catchy title to get people’s attention, and without consulting Washington, he called it “WETT”--Wetlands Environments Today and Tomorrow. Then he got it approved.

Waving a copy of the plan, he vows, “I’m gonna bring that document to life.”

He has already chalked up what he calls a “flagship project” in southern Oregon’s Warner Valley, where 67,000 acres have been reclaimed for waterfowl, as well as other victories in Idaho and Montana.

“We’re going to restore migratory waterfowl to 1970 levels,” he says.

The only problem is money. In 1990 the U.S. Forest Service had a budget of $102 million to administer its 191 million acres. The bureau had a little more than $30 million for 270 million acres.

But Mathiot intends to acquire wetlands not only by purchase but through donations and what he calls “conservation easements”--one-time payments to farmers who agree to manage their property for waterfowl by planting the right crops and controlling their flooding and drainage.

The bureau also offers parcels of unsuitable land to developers and uses the money to buy and develop wetlands.

Historically, most of the money for wetlands has come from duck hunters. Some waterfowl fanciers don’t reconcile killing with conservation, but, traditionally, wetlands have been restored and maintained by waterfowl hunters, either directly through their own projects or indirectly through their donations and licensing.

Last year Ducks Unlimited’s 500,000 members kicked in $67.5 million. About two-thirds of the Central Valley’s wetlands is privately owned and managed for duck hunting. In California, it costs $41.50 to hunt waterfowl--$21.50 for the basic license, plus a $12.50 federal migratory waterfowl stamp and a $7.50 state duck stamp.

Mathiot says, “Hunting clubs are absolutely critical to waterfowl survival. Without them we would be in serious trouble. Let’s face it, it was a bunch of hunters that started Ducks Unlimited.”

Colusa, set hard against a levee of the Sacramento River upstream from the capital, is a town where hunters walk the streets in camouflage clothing without drawing a second glance. At the Richmond Hunting Club, Mathiot watches a hunter bring down a snow goose.

“Out of a thousand geese, he got one and it cost him $40, all of which goes to habitat,” Mathiot says. “Hunting is a very legitimate use of the resource.”

Not only legitimate but critical, say advocates, who fear that a successful anti-hunting movement would cripple wetlands and doom not only ducks but the 30% of the nation’s endangered species that live there, not to mention the vast majority of nongame wildlife that make wetlands their home.

Currently, many rice fields are disc harrowed into dirt or burned after harvest to destroy straw that harbors the fungus that causes stem rot in the next year’s crop, leaving them useless for waterfowl. There is a clear example on opposite sides of a levee bordering the Colusa National Wildlife Refuge: on one side, greenery and fields flooded to a few inches’ depth, with an abundance of ducks; on the other, only dirt.

Mathiot hopes to acquire and turn 500 acres of that dirt into wetlands.

Elsewhere, it’s a more congenial world for waterfowl.

“I’m going to show you what California looked like 250 years ago,” Mathiot says.

He heads south toward the 1,400-acre Cosumnes River Preserve developed by Ducks Unlimited and the Nature Conservancy, where 1,200 acres of wetlands have been restored since 1987. Mathiot hopes to acquire 500 more adjoining acres.

The small river winds through groves of valley oaks into ponds where flocks of threatened sandhill cranes stand tall in ankle-deep water. The oaks themselves were endangered by clear-cutting years ago, but Nature Conservancy volunteers have replanted 15,000 seedlings.

Cosumnes, where no hunting is allowed, is managed by Ducks Unlimited biologist Ed Collins, who restored wetlands on 31 national wildlife refuges before retiring from the Fish and Wildlife Service. Now he spends his time educating adjacent farmers about waterfowl and their needs. Some rice farmers have been persuaded to leave their fields in stubble for feed and not to drain them until July, when the ducklings have grown.

Downstate, at the DFG’s Mendota Wildlife Area near Fresno, hunting is allowed, but manager Bob Huddleston runs the 12,500 acres as he pleases, flooding and draining ponds at optimum times.

Huddleston is cryptic: “While 2% of Californians are hunters, only another 2% are environmentalists and the others don’t care.”

Because he cares, Huddleston grows crops, including rice, but only to feed the waterfowl.

“Basically, that’s what we are--a farm, except we don’t harvest the crops,” he says.

North, at Los Banos, the birds are in trouble. Burlingame Investments, owned by a Hong Kong consortium, plans to build 1,500 homes between the north and south sections of the federal Grassland Wetlands, comprising 31,000 and 21,000 acres, respectively. Half of the Central Valley’s waterfowl winter there.

Gary Zahm, who manages the areas for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, was quoted by the San Francisco Chronicle recently: “What bothers us biologically is interrupting the Grasslands’ water flow from south to north. Also, people living right next to a wetland impact the natural system. They want you to start spraying mosquitoes with pesticides, which hurts the food chain for waterfowl. Then you gets cats, dogs . . . “

This is what waterfowl have been up against, especially in California. But with Mathiot and the bureau adding their muscle to the cause, perhaps it can be what it was 20 years ago.

The prospect is enough to give someone goose pimples.