Lawsuit seeks action at Lake Mead, Hoover Dam to protect songbird

Thursday, April 17, 1997 | 11:59 a.m.

The lawsuit filed Wednesday in U.S. District Court asked that the Bureau of Reclamation be ordered to lower Lake Mead by 22 feet so as to uncover a willow thicket that was the home of Arizona's second-largest population of the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher.

Storing surplus water behind Hoover Dam on the Arizona-Nevada border the past 22 months submerged the willows, and they are dying, the Tucson-based Southwest Center for Biological Diversity argued.

"In the larger picture, we want management of the Colorado River system to benefit river-bank vegetation that serves as habitat for wildlife," said David Hogan, the center's rivers coordinator.

"That can be done with no effect on normal water deliveries in the three basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada)," Hogan said.

"The Colorado ecosystem is gravely endangered and the only way to change that is to change the status quo. It doesn't have to be a radical change."

Hogan said the bureau has been storing surplus Colorado water in Mead for 22 months and that the submerged willows are dying.

Lowering the lake would require releasing additional water through the dam. More generally, the suit asks that the bureau be ordered to operate the dam in a manner that would protect the tiny songbird.

Earlier this month, the center filed a similar lawsuit contending that having raised the height of Roosevelt Dam east of Phoenix to increase storage capacity is endangering another flycatcher habitat. When the lake fills, it will flood trees in which about 30 of the birds make their homes.

The sites are among only five places that harbor more than 20 flycatchers, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has said. The songbirds are migratory and usually return to the same trees each year during the May-July nesting season. Lake Isabella near Bakersfield, Calif., is another location where the birds' trees are subject to flooding.

The other major nesting areas are Camp Pendleton, an Army base in Southern California, and stretches of the upper Gila River near Cliff, N.M.

Bob Walsh, spokesman for the bureau office in Boulder City, Nev., said the agency has not seen the lawsuit and had no comment on it.

However, Walsh also said the bureau has been consulting with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since March 1996 to determine how Colorado dam operations affect wildlife.

Studies cover system maintenance and operations from the upper end of Lake Mead to the Mexican border, he said.

"We're not sure when they'll be completed," Walsh said. "There are a lot of species involved, more than 100, and several are endangered - the razorback sucker, bonytail chub and Yuma clapper rail, as well as the flycatcher."

But with 300 pairs of flycatchers left, the species is too near extinction to wait for completion of the studies, Hogan said.

In New Mexico, another environmental organization, Forest Guardians of Santa Fe, succeeded this week in getting the U.S. Bureau of Land Management to order removal of cattle grazing near flycatcher nests in the Elephant Butte Reservoir area until July 31.

The problem in this case is that cowbirds congregating around cattle lay their eggs in the nests of other birds and sometimes destroy those birds' eggs, including those of the Southwestern willow flycatcher. The cowbirds also consume food supplies the other birds need.

"It's the first time in the Southwest that the BLM and the Fish and Wildlife Service have recognized the severity of the threat of parasitism," said John Horner of Forest Guardians.