Tainted Ponds, Deformed Birds Raise Warning

On many mornings, Joseph Skorupa meticulously gathers the eggs of American avocets and black-necked stilts that nest by the only water they can find on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley--man-made ponds that brim with contaminated drainage from the cotton farms.

When the sun gets hot, he returns to a lab in a small trailer on the Kern Wildlife Refuge and carefully opens the shells. All too often, the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service researcher finds deformed embryos.

Almost half the eggs Skorupa collects at some ponds contain some deformity: twisted beaks, no wings or no eyes. He found one last month that had no head.

If all this sounds familiar, it is. It is part of what Skorupa calls “the Kesterson syndrome,” named for the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge, 100 miles to the north. It drew national attention a decade ago when biologists discovered that irrigation drainage water tainted with selenium caused tens of thousands of bird deaths and deformities.

Federal authorities reacted by burying the Kesterson ponds, but other ponds on private land on the west side of the valley remain open. And, as Skorupa’s evidence shows, birds have continued to die.

“Kesterson wasn’t a worst case,” Skorupa said. “We thought it was worst case. Now, we know it wasn’t.”

Farmers say the evaporation ponds are essential to growing crops on the arid west side of the San Joaquin Valley, giving them somewhere to drain highly saline water that lies just below the surface and can render soil infertile. They discount the effects on wildlife, as do some state and federal engineers in charge of delivering water to the region.

But Edgar Imhoff, who until his retirement from the U. S. Interior Department last year headed a massive study of the drainage problem, called the evaporation ponds “time bombs. . . . They’re ticking away.” He cited the data produced by scientists in 100 reports for his San Joaquin Valley Drainage Program over a seven-year period ending last December.

“Concentrations of selenium in some of the ponds, in food chain organisms, and in the liver and eggs of the birds using them sometimes equals or exceed those found at Kesterson,” one analysis said in 1989.

Scientists have found Kesterson-like effects, from deformities to complete failures of species to reproduce, at 11 ponds. These ponds cover 3,600 acres, an area three times the size of the notorious Kesterson bird nesting areas.

In at least three ponds, concentrations of selenium and other elements, including arsenic, in the tissue of plants, insects and birds match or exceed what was detected at Kesterson, according to reports.

The 1,433 dead or deformed bird embryos discovered in a recent three-year period suggest that tens of thousands of birds died before hatching over the past decade. Eared grebes, which nest on the water, have failed to reproduce at the ponds.

Although selenium poisoning has not been confirmed as an adult bird’s cause of death, Douglas Barnum, manager of the federal Kern Wildlife Refuge, said he has found telltale signs of possible selenium poisoning--emaciation, deformed livers and atrophied breast muscles.

“You know it’s there,” he said, estimating that for whatever cause, a fourth of all adult birds he dissects are in poor condition.

As evidence of selenium poisoning mounts, federal law enforcement agents have begun looking at whether there is a criminal violation of wildlife protection laws, and the state’s Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board--which ordered one pond shut last year--is threatening action.

But officials also know that the price of closing the ponds would be dear. Crops would die and jobs would be lost.

“If we just shut them off, we’re going to have--I don’t want to say ‘disaster’--but we’re going to have economic problems,” said Carroll Hamon of the state Department of Water Resources, which delivers the bulk of irrigation water used in the region.

Hamon, the department’s official responsible for the ponds, said that “some of those ponds are going to have to be closed” eventually. But he raised doubts about the research, saying scientists “haven’t established that there is any kind of danger as significant as what they found at Kesterson.”

Many farmers also are skeptical that wildlife is being harmed in large numbers.

“We don’t find dead birds or anything,” said Phil Nixon, manager of the Lost Hills Water District, which operates the 600-acre pond system for several large farmers near Interstate 5. “There’s probably more birds killed as a result of ongoing studies to try to figure out what’s going on than anything else.”

The roots of the problem are as old as farming on the west and south ends of the Central Valley. There are reports dating back a century of farmland that had to be abandoned because it was too high in salt. But the problem is made worse by modern-day irrigation. Even in this water-short year, the State Water Project will deliver 178 billion gallons to the region.

The irrigation water becomes contaminated as it seeps through the soil. Although fertile, the soil is high in salts and trace elements such as selenium.

Complicating the situation is a thick layer of clay that blocks the contaminated water from seeping deep into the Earth, trapping it in a shallow aquifier. The more the land is irrigated, the higher the contaminated ground water table rises, threatening to render the soil unusable for most crops.

According to geological studies produced for Imhoff’s group, ground water is within five feet of the surface beneath more than 800,000 acres of valley fields. By 2000, studies say, that number may grow to 1 million acres, 40% of the irrigated farmland on the west side.

With no river to carry the contaminated ground water away, farmers devised the evaporation pond system. They installed underground pipes to collect the water and empty it into canals, which dump it to the ponds.

Before the San Joaquin Valley became a farming area, there were 800,000 acres of freshwater lakes and swamp, perfect for the birds that travel the Pacific Flyway on annual migrations. Now, the 7,000 acres of evaporation ponds are the only year-round water of any significance. “The birds can’t tell the difference between clean and contaminated,” said Barnum of the Kern Wildlife Refuge.

Imhoff’s study group suggested reduced irrigation as another key part of the solution to the drain water problem. In one of its more costly proposals, the drainage study called for the removal of 75,000 acres of land high in selenium and salts from production over the next 50 years.

If the drainage problem is not solved, the studies warn, vast tracts of farmland would have to be abandoned because the soil will be too saline, and the 6,000 acres of evaporation ponds will have to be expanded to cover tens of thousands of acres.

Farmers argue that the solution is a drain to what some call the “ultimate evaporation pond”--the ocean. Jack Stone, president of the Westlands Water District, said that without a drain, salts will continue to build and threaten crops from cotton to melons.

The drain that was supposed to empty the contaminated water into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Valley Delta and San Francisco Bay ends at the Kesterson Wildlife Refuge. It was this drain that delivered the poisonous water that caused such havoc a decade ago.

The plugged drain is empty now. The buried evaporation ponds are blanketed by grasses and brush. Cottontails and coyotes have moved back. Hawks and blackbirds fly above. It is a vision of what may be in store for the remaining evaporation ponds.

For Gary Zahm, the Fish and Wildlife Service manager at the Kesterson wetlands, the new troubles with bird deformities sound too familiar. He was among the first officials to notice something wrong at Kesterson in 1981: There were no crayfish or frogs in the marsh. So he called in the researchers. As selenium levels rose, he found dead birds daily.

Politics heated up. Farmers and Bureau of Reclamation officials fought to keep the ponds open, while Zahm and other Fish and Wildlife officials fought to close them.

“It’s going to happen again,” Zahm said. “The biopolitics are strong.” But in time, he said, the ponds will be cleaned. “It’s clear. It was clear at Kesterson. How many dead birds do you need?”