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Directing the Flow: Migratory Waterfowl, Scale, and Mobility in Western North America

In the fall of 1946, thousands of ducks and geese descended into the Klamath Basin. Straddling the Oregon-California border, the basin funnels the different flight paths that migratory waterfowl follow, bringing up to seven million birds together at one time in the basin's marshes. During the previous four decades, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation had drained most of the wetlands in the basin. Two U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) refuges, Lower Klamath Refuge and Tule Lake Refuge, contained the few remaining marshes that once blanketed the area. The Bureau of Reclamation had converted parts of the lakebeds into homesteads, many for World War I and World War II veterans. Hence, the birds flew into a landscape of wetlands surrounded by grain farms. The birds found little food on the refuge and quickly moved on to the nearby fields of barley and wheat. Farmers watched in anger as acres of grain disappeared into the stomachs of mallards and pintails. Federal regulations protecting migratory birds prevented the farmers from shooting the "trespassers," so they called on the FWS, the agency that was supposed to provide sanctuary for the birds in its wildlife refuges. Pressured to take action, the FWS tried a number of methods to help the farmers clear their fields of waterfowl. Using military surplus equipment like smoke grenades, searchlights, and small airplanes, the FWS herded the birds back into the refuges. The service also issued permits that allowed local farmers and their Mexican laborers to scare them from the fields with shotguns and flares. The combined efforts of these groups contained the birds on the refuge until farmers completed their harvest. For the most part, the birds remained there until hunters came to kill them after the beginning of hunting season in October, or until they flew south to their wintering grounds in California's Central Valley and Mexico.2 The FWS's waterfowl-herding effort was one small part of the agency's response to a continuing challenge-a challenge that has significant implications for environmental history. Unlike other land management agencies in the western United States such as the U.S. Forest Service and the National Park Service, the FWS