The river as refuge

Steve Bouffard scans the 20,000-acre Minidoka National Wildlife Refuge for waterfowl. Concentrations of more than 100,000 birds gather in the fall along the 25-mile-long river reservoir, Lake Walcott.

For waterfowl, it's a lifesaving respite

From Buhl, our road continues east through Twin Falls, then northeast past the tiny settlement-era vestige of Acequia to Minidoka.

Virtually every mile of the Snake is a working river, but it's most obvious here in the south-central section of Idaho.

Twin Falls is the agricultural epicenter for 500,000 acres of irrigated farmland, roughly three-quarters the size of the Columbia Basin Project.

The Bureau of Reclamation's Minidoka Project nurtures crops worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year in a land where annual rainfall is a stingy 10 inches. Sugar beets, alfalfa, potatoes, wheat, corn, dry beans and several other commodities flourish here.

So does angling for trout, bass and perch. Engraved on a bench here at the edge of the Snake near where pelicans play: "In memory of William E. Martin. Gone fishing."

Perhaps the region's most fascinating man-made attraction is the Perrine Bridge - 1,500 feet long and a dizzying 486 feet above the Snake River. In size and scope, it is eerily reminiscent of the bridge in the book on Reed Burkholder's end table back in Boise, a bridge that was blown up by subversive environmentalists.

Nearby, daredevil motorbiker Evel Knievel once tried - and failed - to jump the canyon.

As a warm dawn broke over the Snake River, Steve Bouffard had nothing so dangerous in mind. He was just looking for ducks.

MINIDOKA, Idaho - In the charcoal hour before sunrise, Steve Bouffard scanned the horizon, dressed in the standard brown-on-brown uniform of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Slowly, billowing thunderheads emerged from a slate sky.

He was hoping to boat into the duck molting grounds, where 30,000 ducks are hiding until they regain their flight feathers. But with lightning likely - and already the culprit in dozens of fires across the state - Bouffard didn't like his chances in an aluminum craft on the 25-mile-long Snake River impoundment behind Minidoka Dam.

Instead, the manager of the Minidoka National Wildlife Refuge hiked past his house at the edge of Lake Walcott to a small basalt promontory. With the unsettled waters of the Snake lapping at his feet, Bouffard called out the names of the birds that flew overhead.

Hundreds of black-headed Franklin gulls and their larger cousins, California gulls, sensed the coming sunrise and sliced across the sky.

For a biologist like Bouffard, sunrise is important for more than aesthetics. Birds typically are most vocal at daybreak, and bird songs are one of the main ways to count their populations.

"Most of the stuff you detect is by sound, so you have to know all the calls," Bouffard said.

It's not unusual for 100,000 waterfowl to gather here by fall, which is still more than a month away.

But this is the ducks' time and place. They need a protected rest area during their molt to regain their flight feathers. Mallards, canvasbacks, redheads, teal and others have lost their bright feathers, making the males a drab match for the females.

As he walks and talks, Bouffard, 50, is enveloped by clouds of humming insects - black flies, mosquitoes, mayflies.

"At times, my house turns almost black" with midges, he said. "It's kind of a pain - but it's really rich as far as food for birds. That's one of the main reasons that they are here. They ... have a food supply."

The bugs are there because of the water. And the water is there - at least in its present quantity - because of the dam that created Lake Walcott. And the dam is there because Congress in 1902 wanted to "reclaim" the West.

Until then, this particular patch was low on the list of settlement hot spots.

"Few people had occasion or desire to stop along this stretch of the Snake River," according to a history by the Department of the Interior.

And some of those who did stop fared poorly. The first known party of whites in the area boated down the Snake in 1811, only to crash on a rock and lose a supply boat.

But toward the end of the century, the Oregon Short Line Railroad was being built across the Snake Valley. It lured settlers, some of whom experimented with Snake-irrigated agriculture.

Based on the success of a private Minidoka-area irrigation project, the secretary of the interior authorized Minidoka Dam and many of the canals that were completed in the following years.

The region's population exploded and almost instantly, "the amount of water needed by the new irrigation project was far more than the Snake River could supply," the federal history says.

In 1907, the headwaters of the Snake were dammed at Jackson Lake, Wyo., an effort to control more of the river.

A year later, construction crews started installing the Pacific Northwest's first federal power plant at Minidoka Dam to serve the growing region.

And one year after that, President Theodore Roosevelt created one of the nation's first national wildlife refuges at Minidoka.

The complex hybrid environment - one part nature, one part man - has been adopted by various species. For instance, islands made of mining spoils now provide quality bird habitat.

And at American Falls reservoir upstream, migrating arctic shorebirds overtake mud flats that were created by the annual lowering of the dam pool to serve irrigators. Nearly 75,000 shore birds probed the sand this summer, relying on dropping water levels to open fresh "grazing" areas.

The region's natural history is no less fluid.

For hundreds of thousands of years, some geologists believe, the North American continental "plate" has been sliding southwest over the top of a "hot spot," a place where heat from Earth's depths rises near the surface.

As the plate slides, the hot spot produces violent volcanoes with openings called calderas up to 30 miles across. In the second stage, lava spills over the earth. One study calls the caldera a "geologic rototiller."

Today, the caldera that etched Southern Idaho is thought to be in Yellowstone National Park in northwest Wyoming. Given enough time - 20 million years, by some estimates - it will carve through Montana to the Canadian border.

Idaho's famous rock garden, Craters of the Moon National Monument, is the result of second-stage basalt flows as recently as 2,000 years ago.

"If you look at the Snake River plain," said Bouffard, "it's like a burnt scar. That is the track of that hot spot."

The hot spot explains the basalt on which Bouffard stood, and which stretches across the state.

All that rock, however, makes Phil Bradfield's job more difficult. The longtime Idaho rancher is Bouffard's only full-time refuge employee, and the one who builds and repairs about 40 miles of fences. With all the rock, he can't just dig holes, he's got to drill them.

And the fences don't seem to hang together as well as one might think, especially since 1995 when the refuge started eliminating grazing and "water lanes" for cattle. There's just one water lane - a path for cattle to get to the river - left on the refuge and that's slated to go, too.

"For some reason, them cows, they all pack a pair of pliers," joked Bradfield as he poured a cup of coffee from his thermos at the refuge headquarters.

"The old cowboys are used to a way of life, and they are good people," he continued. "But when they have been doing something for 40 or 50 years and all of the sudden you say, 'No more grazing,' they get perturbed."

The ban on cows is supposed to preserve the refuge for deer, antelope and the 208 species of birds that have been spotted here over the last 50 years. Cows are not compatible with the refuge because they graze native grasses and trample shorelines used by birds.

"Some of the water lanes look like you dropped a bomb on them," Bradfield said.

So, with what little resources he has, Bouffard aims to reclaim the "reclaimed" refuge land by uprooting the pervasive Russian olives, stopping the spread of invasive cheat grass and keeping cows out.

"You see a lot of sagebrush out there, but less than 2 percent of it is in really good condition," he said, naming a handful of animal species that depend on the ubiquitous bush.

"It's all invaded by cheat grass ... or it's all in agriculture" - except for patches in this lone national wildlife refuge on the Snake River.