(CN) — Two species of endangered sucker fish could face extinction this year because the federal government let farmers take irrigation water from Upper Klamath Lake instead of leaving enough water in the lake for the fish born this year to survive, the Klamath Tribes claim.
Southern Oregon’s Klamath Basin is in its third straight year of drought. Last year, the fight over the region’s water risked a standoff between extremist farmers who threatened to take control of the irrigation system the government had shut off in an effort to prevent the extinction of two species of endangered sucker fish sacred to the Klamath Tribes: the c’waam, or Lost River sucker and koptu, or shortnose sucker. The fish live nowhere else on Earth.
C’waam and koptu were one of the tribes’ main foods for millennia, a gift from Gmok’umps, the creator, according to tribal chairman Don Gentry. But their numbers declined dramatically when white settlers arrived and began damming the Klamath River, which is fed by Upper Klamath Lake, draining the vast wetlands that once surrounded the lake, sucking out its water to irrigate farmland and letting cattle wade through the pristine streams that feed the lake.
Upper Klamath Lake, the most critical spawning habitat for c’waam and koptu, has shrunken and dwindled. Every year, it suffers a toxic algae bloom caused by erosion and decades of pollution from cattle ranching and other agriculture that kills off the majority of each successive generation of sucker fish.
But because c’waam and koptu are listed as endangered, the federal government is legally required to prioritize their survival needs over the irrigation needs of farmers and ranchers, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday by The Klamath Tribes, a federally recognized tribe that consists of the Klamath, the Modoc and the Yahooskin Band of Snake Indians — three groups of people who have always lived in the areas now called southern Oregon and Northern California.
Built in 1905, the Klamath Project dramatically reordered the hydrology of the Klamath Basin so its rivers act as drains and the Upper Klamath Lake, Oregon’s largest freshwater lake, serves as a natural reservoir to store the water the Klamath Irrigation Project uses to irrigate 200,000 acres of farmland and feed four federal wildlife refuges nearby.
In March, Oregon Governor Kate Brown again declared a state of emergency in Klamath County, as the basin plunged deeper into a historic drought. Weeks later, the Bureau of Reclamation let farmers take water from the lake starting April 15 — right in the middle of c’waam and koptu spawning season. Irrigation withdrawals from the lake in the last month sent water levels plummeting so severely that an important group of fish that spawn on the east side of the lake can’t reach their spawning grounds, the lawsuit states.
In 2020, the Bureau of Reclamation produced a biological assessment of the Klamath Project, as part of its consultation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under Section 7 of the Endangered Species Act. The agency determined in a biological opinion issued that year that the bureau’s water allocation plan wouldn’t jeopardize the survival of the fish. The Klamath Tribes disputed that finding, arguing that the plan did jeopardize the fish.
The bureau uses a set of mathematical formulas to determine how much water to allocate to each of three categories, in descending order of priority: the c’waam and koptu in Upper Klamath Lake, then endangered salmon and steelhead downstream in the Klamath River, and third, irrigators who depend on water from the Klamath Project.
But this year, the bureau didn’t even bother to stick to the minimum protections outlined in the biological assessment. Instead, it ignored critical elements of its water allocation plan that require it to maintain specific water levels in the lake that allow the fish to spawn, the lawsuit states, allowing irrigators to take water from the lake without regard for the lake elevation levels outlined in the biological opinion.
“The net effect of the 2022 Ops Plan, therefore, is to consign to death 2022’s entire year class of baby c’waam and koptu,” the lawsuit states. “This decision appreciably reduces the survival and recovery of these species in contravention of the ESA, which requires Reclamation to prioritize listed species’ needs ahead of those of project irrigators when there is insufficient water to go around.”
Attorneys for the federal government didn't return requests for comment.
The tribes want a judge to issue an injunction and declare that the bureau’s operation plan for this year violates the terms of the 2020 biological opinion and that the irrigation the bureau has allowed for the last month violate the Endangered Species Act.
In addition to requirements under the Endangered Species Act, the federal government is required to protect C’waam and Koptu under the treaty agreements it made with the tribes in exchange for the 20 million acres of land they have inhabited since time immemorial. The Ninth Circuit has held that one of the “very purposes of establishing the Klamath Reservation was to secure to the Tribe[s] a continuation of [their] traditional hunting and fishing lifestyle” and that these treaty rights survived the federal government’s 1954 termination of the Klamath Tribes’ former reservation. The Klamath Tribes worked to regain federal recognition in 1986, but their original 2.5 million acre reservation is now mostly absorbed into the Fremont-Winema National Forest.
Today, the tribes run a spawning facility to support the recovery of the c’waam and koptu and do habitat protection work and investigate water quality violations. But they say their efforts alone aren’t enough to prevent extinction. Historically, they caught thousands of the fish each year, but they voluntarily stopped fishing c’waam and koptu in 1986 — two years before the government listed the fish as endangered. Today, they catch and release just two fish each year for ceremonial purposes.
Gentry explained in an interview that when the creator made c’waam and koptu, he tied the people’s survival to that of the fish.
“If those fish go away, what does that actually mean?” Gentry asked. “Does it mean we die or does it mean there’s going to be something dead within us?”
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