TULELAKE, Calif. --
Dave Mauser walked the edge of a mudflat, peering underneath the dried brown rushes where one coot after another had gone to hide and then die.
"Now the coots are getting the worst of it," said Mauser, head biologist on the Lower Klamath National Wildlife Refuge, the nation's first large marshland preserved for waterfowl habitat. "Prior to that it was the snow geese and the white-fronted geese."
Standing in line for scarce water behind both endangered fish and agriculture, Lower Klamath Lake has watched one marsh after another dry up in recent years. Now migratory geese, ducks and other waterfowl that come here by the millions, following the Pacific Flyway, are so closely packed together that an outbreak of avian cholera has killed more than 10,000 birds, mostly pintail ducks, Ross' geese, snow geese and now coots.
First reported in the United States in the 1940s, the disease is not new to the refuge. Bald eagles that congregate here in winter depend on the deadly bacteria to provide them easy food. But what is different about this year is that only half the refuge's 31,000 acres of marsh are flooded, creating perfect conditions for a broader kill off.
Lying on the east side of the Cascade Range along the Oregon-California border, the shallow lakes and marshes of the Upper Klamath Basin were once known as the Everglades of the West, providing a place to rest and eat for untold millions of birds on the Pacific Flyway.
More than 260 species - ruddy ducks, cinnamon teal, white-faced ibis, sandhill cranes, white pelicans, snowy egrets and bald eagles - pass through in the spring. Some stay the summer to breed, but most fly north to the Arctic to nest, returning here in the fall. Some spend the winter, and others continue south to California's Central Valley and the Salton Sea.
The historic refuge got its origins after wildlife photographer William L. Finley wrote a story for Atlantic Monthly about market hunters wiping out white egrets and grebes here for feathers to decorate ladies' hats.
President Theodore Roosevelt, an avid bird hunter and amateur taxidermist in his youth, signed the executive order creating Lower Klamath in 1908. It was the second of 55 refuges he would create, but the first to offer a large area of land for habitat.
In the 1950s the refuge would see 5 million to 7 million birds annually. Now numbers have dropped to about 2 million, primarily due to the loss of nesting habitat in the far north.
But it still "may be the most important real estate for migratory birds in North America,'" said refuge manager Ron Cole.
The problem is that it is at the end of a long line for water, legally and literally. When it comes to water in the West, first in time is first in right.
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