The Life and Hard Times of the Platte River
When I was a graduate student at Cornell University in the late 1950s two of my best friends were doing field research in the Platte Valley of Nebraska on hybridizing bird species pairs found there, such as orioles, grosbeaks, towhees, and flickers. At the end of each summer they would return to Ithaca with stories of the beauty of the Platte’s riparian woodlands, its birds, and the natural glories of central Nebraska in late spring. I had grown up in eastern North Dakota but had never visited Nebraska, so I listened with quiet jealousy to their descriptions of the clear-flowing, sand-bottomed Platte, mentally comparing it with the sluggish and muddy Red River that was within easy walking distance of my home.
Later I spent two years on postdoctoral fellowships in England. During my second year there I happened to learn of a job opening at the University of Nebraska, and my memories of those vivid descriptions of the Platte Valley immediately returned. I knew little else of Nebraska but had heard that, except for North Dakota, it perhaps had the best waterfowl-breeding habitats of any state south of Canada. As a waterfowl specialist, my dreams came true when I was offered the job sight unseen.
Arriving on campus in the fall of 1961, I could scarcely wait to visit the central Platte Valley in spring. In March 1962 I drove out to Elm Creek, then turned south to cross the Platte. Suddenly the fields were alive with seemingly endless flocks of sandhill cranes. Like Dorothy landing in Oz, I found myself in a world transformed. From that moment on I knew I would remain in Nebraska for the rest of my life and that cranes would become a constant leitmotif for me. I quickly learned that the Platte Valley’s spring crane population had been essentially ignored and was entirely unrecognized as a major ornithological phenomenon. In addition, the seemingly uncountable numbers of Canada and white-fronted geese and the endless flocks of ducks that poured into the Platte Valley during March and April took me back to my days as a teenager, when I waded through hip-deep marshes to try photograph these beautiful birds as they migrated northward by the millions along the western edge of the Red River Valley.
In the early 1980s I finally decided to write a short book on the Platte River and its ecology. By then the river was increasingly in danger from various sources. Its broad channels were gradually disappearing and being replaced by shrubs and trees, partly as a result of an absence of the prairie fires that once kept the trees in check. More importantly, the smaller and shallower river channels were entirely disappearing, a combined result of dewatering effects of upstream surface diversions and local groundwater extraction for irrigation.
A Prairie River and Its Groundwater Reservoir
To understand the current state of the Platte River a review of some history is needed. Nebraska’s natural resources districts (NRDs) were established in 1969 by the state legislature in a belated and halfhearted attempt to try to manage the state’s groundwater resources. These multicounty districts were sensibly organized along watershed boundaries. However, it wasn’t until 1975 that they were given authority to regulate groundwater use through the state’s Groundwater Management Act, by controlling well spacing, establishing pumping limits, and proposing controlled-use areas, all being subject to oversight by the state of Nebraska’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR).
The development of center-pivot technology during the 1950s had resulted in a profusion of center pivots by the 1970s and had made the irrigation of even fairly hilly ground feasible. In 1970 there were about seven thousand center pivots operating in Nebraska, but by 2005 there were about seventy-two thousand center pivots in the state. By 2005 there were also 7.2 million Nebraska acres irrigated by groundwater, and another million irrigated by surface water. Two-thirds of all the irrigated lands were owned by the state’s seven thousand largest farms, some of them larger than ten thousand acres and many controlled by out-of-state interests.
The year 1999 marked the start of a decade-long statewide drought. Nebraska was then leading the nation in irrigated corn acreage, and by the middle of that decade corn had become the most heavily federally subsidized of all U.S. crops. Nebraska was then fourth in the nation in total federal crop subsidies received, with most of them going into the pockets of the largest farm operations.
In 2004, after the initiation of litigation by a surface-water user complaining of damages owing to excessive groundwater pumping, a new state law (LB 962) gave full recognition to the need for the state to conjunctively manage surface water and hydrologically connected groundwater. The law directed the DNR to annually review all the river basins of the state as to the status of their surface and groundwater conditions. By the time the 2004 law was fully in effect it was really too late to put, as it were, the water back. By 2006, 94.4 percent of our state’s groundwater extractions (averaging some 7,420 million gallons per day) were being used for irrigation by seventeen thousand users who represented only about 1 percent of the state’s population.
Between 1999 and 2006, during the first half of the drought period, groundwater levels declined an average of nearly six feet in the Central Platte NRD. Not only did state groundwater levels begin to decline seriously at this time over broad regions of Nebraska, but the state’s largest reservoir, Lake McConaughy, also began to suffer. This huge reservoir was built during the 1930s to serve for irrigation needs and hydroelectric power. It has a maximum capacity of 1.9 million acre-feet and is the largest reservoir in the entire Platte River system.
Lake McConaughy is also the source of nearly all of central Nebraska’s surface irrigation. The reservoir reached near-record high-water levels during the relatively wet years of the mid-1990s, but the 1999–2009 drought brought it down to equally historic lows within five years. Smaller than normal snowpacks in the mountains of Wyoming and Colorado have produced greatly reduced runoffs into the headwaters of the South Platte and North Platte Rivers for most years since about 2000. As a result, by 2004 Lake McConaughy was at a historic low level of 20 percent capacity, and 2005 was the fifth consecutive year in which the amount of water flowing into the lake was less than half its normal inflow.
Coincidentally, in 2007 the U.S. Department of Energy proposed replacing 30 percent of the nation’s petroleum use with ethanol by 2030. It has been estimated that up to about a fourth of this total might be obtained by using corn to produce ethanol without seriously cutting into the nation’s basic domestic food and livestock needs. Thus, about 60 billion gallons of ethanol per year would be needed to replace 30 percent of the nation’s annual gasoline consumption of about 150 billion gallons, since ethanol generates only two-thirds the energy content of gasoline.
To achieve even a fraction of the government’s 60-billion-gallon ethanol-production target by 2030 would require massive additional federal subsidies to agriculture and ethanol plant construction, since in 2007 only about 7.5 billion gallons of ethanol were produced. Spurred by the prospect of new federal support, corn reached record-high prices by 2007. As a result Nebraska farmers planted about nine million acres of corn in 2007, the most since 1936. The average dollar value of irrigated land in Nebraska reached $2,150 per acre by 2006, up 36 percent from 2000. By 2012 prime irrigated land in eastern Nebraska was selling for as much as $8,000 per acre.
After a summer of widespread drought, Nebraska’s 2012 corn crop of 1.3 billion bushels was down only slightly from the previous year’s record production. It averaged over 140 bushels per acre, harvested from 9.15 million planted acres. The average 2012 harvest weight was 58.8 pounds of corn per bushel, in spite of severe statewide drought conditions and an annual rainfall that over much of the state’s corn-producing region was nearly 10 percent below average. Little to no water was present in the Platte from Columbus east to its confluence with the Missouri River during the summer and early fall of 2012, killing uncountable numbers of fish and other river-associated wildlife.
The Platte’s Threatened and Endangered Species
In 1994 the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service decided to impose certain restrictions on the Platte River’s use in order to protect four nationally threatened or endangered species that use the basin’s natural resources, requiring all large water users, primarily irrigators, to assure that sufficient water is available to protect the habitats of the whooping crane, least tern, piping plover, and pallid sturgeon. The habitats of three of these rare or endangered species are mostly concentrated in the central Platte Valley, while the pallid sturgeon uses only the downstream stretch close to the Missouri confluence.
As a result, a consortium of persons representing diverse interests in the Platte Basin’s water and natural environments came together to try find a way to equitably share the Platte’s waters among a host of competing interests. The result was a much-debated compromise negotiated over a nearly decade-long period. The Platte River Cooperative Agreement, or Platte River Recovery Plan, was initially approved in 1997 as a three-year planning guide. As a part of a related and long-negotiated relicensing agreement for Kingsley Dam in 1998, the reservoir’s operators agreed to set aside 10 percent of the storable inflows of Lake McConaughy (averaging about one hundred thousand acre-feet in normal years) as an Environmental Account. This water would be released for maintaining wetland habitats of the central Platte Valley when needed.
Parties involved in developing the cooperative agreement for managing the overall Platte River Basin included representatives of the federal government, Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, in-state natural resources districts and irrigation districts, and various national and state environmental groups.
In essence, the Platte River Recovery Plan attempted to fulfill the basic requirements of the Endangered Species Act. Its primary goal was to add and restore twenty-nine thousand acres of additional wetland habitats in the central Platte Valley. Some ten thousand acres are scheduled for such acquisition in this region during the first thirteen years of the plan.
In addition to its basic habitat goal of acquiring ten thousand new acres of wetland habitat, the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program calls for the management, lease, or securing of an additional nineteen thousand acres of open channels or other riverine habitats in the same region. These include some lands already owned by the Crane Trust (until 2012 officially known as the Platte River Whooping Crane Habitat Maintenance Trust), the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, the Nature Conservancy, and the National Audubon Society. Furthermore, annual shortfalls to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service target flow rates in the Platte River are to be reduced by 130,000–140,000 acre-feet through enhanced upstream storage in several reservoirs, such as Lake McConaughy, with the water to be released as needed. Although single annual spring pulses of water are the historically desirable pattern for river flows, flow rates for hydroelectric power generation meant that the Central Nebraska Public Power and Irrigation District (CNPPID) and the Nebraska Public Power District (NPPD) had to agree to modify their flows in such a way as to minimize harm to the three federally listed bird species.
To cover associated costs, the federal government has agreed to pay for as much as half of the approximately $320 million program, with the three states contributing the remainder, through a combination of cash, land, and water. Nebraska’s share of the total cost is to be provided by land and water contributed by the NPPD and the CNPPID. However, Nebraska is also to be required to reduce existing stream-flow depletions to the 1997 level in order to offset water “depletions” resulting from irrigation wells drilled after approval of the initial 1997 preliminary agreement and before the final multistate approval of the Platte River recovery plan a decade later.
Irrigation interests offered endless objections to the Platte River plan, with four of Nebraska’s natural resources districts firmly opposed to it. The Central Platte NRD even considered initiating a lawsuit that would attempt to remove the whooping crane from the list of federally endangered species. However, it was made clear to all the irrigation interests that, should they fail to agree to the plan’s terms, any number of federally funded projects, such as dams, reservoirs, and hydroelectric plants, would receive close scrutiny to make certain that current activities did not jeopardize any endangered species or their habitats.
With the threat of expensive environmental surveys looming and potentially crippling alterations possibly required of their activities, the irrigation interests finally reluctantly agreed to comply. In the fall of 2006 all three governors signed on, and the secretary of the interior also added his approval a few weeks later, initiating a thirteen-year Platte River Recovery Implementation Program that will terminate in 2019.
The Platte River Recovery Implementation Program
The Platte’s eighty-mile “Big Bend” stretches between Lexington and Chapman. It is nationally recognized as a critical habitat for whooping cranes, which have increasingly roosted on restored stretches of the river since the start of restoration activities about twenty years ago and have shown an encouraging if painfully slow long-term upward national trend.
The Platte Valley is also an important breeding area for both the nationally endangered interior race of the least tern and the threatened piping plover. Both species have responded rapidly to improved water-level management and the establishment of new nesting areas, such as at Rowe Audubon Sanctuary near Gibbon. As of the mid-1990s, Nebraska contributed about 20 percent of the piping plover’s northern Great Plains population of about 1,250 pairs. By 2009 about 140 pairs of piping plovers were nesting along the Platte River, and in 2006 this segment comprised over 7 percent of the interior least tern’s total breeding colonies (Mary B. Brown, personal communication). The restored areas of the Platte are also the single most important segment for seasonal use by waterfowl, shorebirds, and other migratory birds. By 2006 expanded ecotourism in the Platte Valley was generating an estimated $50–$100 million in annual total economic benefits.
Although not endangered, sandhill cranes have benefited greatly from increased protection and habitat restoration along this stretch of the Platte Valley. Since the 1980s sandhill crane numbers have gradually leveled off at five hundred thousand to six hundred thousand birds using the central Platte Valley each spring, making it by far the largest congregation of cranes anywhere in the world, and an influx of some two million snow geese has only increased the spring migration spectacle for birds, attracting fifteen to twenty thousand bird-watchers annually from around the world.
At least six thousand wetland acres in Nebraska had been acquired for restoration by purchase or from the Recovery Implementation Program participants by 2010, including a 2,650-acre ranch located between Elm Creek and Overton. This site, CNPPID’s Cottonwood Ranch, has two miles of channel frontage on both sides of the river and is adjacent to lands already owned by the Nature Conservancy and the Crane Trust. Seven other major land acquisitions situated between Overton and Gibbon, ranging from 200 acres to 718 acres and totaling nearly 3,500 acres, have been identified as Platte River Recreational Access lands. Limited access for fishing, hiking, bird-watching, and mushroom-collecting, as well as hunting for deer, turkey, small game, and even waterfowl, are allowed there.
Yet the joint decision by the Platte River Recovery Implementation Program and the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission to allow late-winter and other hunting of waterfowl along this stretch of the river from the start of the year until March 23 is an ironic and counterintuitive use of land acquired in large part to protect whooping cranes. Although a 2006 Fish and Wildlife Service biological position paper identified the species’ typical migration periods through Nebraska as running from March 18 to April 20 in spring and in fall from October 17 to November 10, whooping cranes are known to have arrived in the Platte Valley as early as February 10, and since the late 1970s one or two have regularly arrived with sandhill cranes before the end of February. Additionally, nearly half a million sandhill cranes are now regularly present in the Platte Valley by mid-March. Even if no whooping cranes are mistakenly shot under this arrangement, disturbance to roosting sites of sandhill cranes and other protected species by hunting activities might be severe.
The entire Platte River Recovery Implementation Program is to be evaluated for renewal in 2019. Additionally, the governor of any of the three cooperating states may decide to unilaterally withdraw his or her state from the program at any time. This is not an impossible scenario, given the decade-long foot-dragging that occurred among all of the three participating states before they signed on to its provisions.
In spite of this multistate and federal agreement that was so arduously cobbled together, the future of the Platte River lies primarily in the hands of Nebraskans, who, if past history can provide an example, have been inclined to let agriculture set the ground rules for water use. It would be a permanent stain on our society’s values to let the river literally be sucked dry. The resulting silence of the cranes and waterfowl, and the sullied spirit of the hardy pioneers who followed the Platte westward, drank from its waters, and used its fertile soils and abundant water to become a prosperous and modern state, would represent the actualization of a vision that should ever haunt us.