He bought a fifth of a barley farm to shoot ducks. Then he flooded it.

Lakeside Farms sits on the south-eastern shore of Upper Klamath Lake, just north of Klamath Falls on Highway 97, on land that was a fringe of wetland until it was diked and drained early in the last century and put to barley, and it had grown grain more or less continuously since the war when Karl Wenner, an orthopaedic surgeon looking at retirement, bought a one-fifth share in it in 2017 because the place had more water than any farm around it and the ducks knew. His plan, by his own account to Yale Environment 360, was to spend his retirement shooting them.

What he found instead was that the springs on the farm ran too generously, and that the excess water the farm pumped into the lake every year carried phosphorus at levels far above what the state allowed, which mattered because Upper Klamath Lake already had too much of it, and phosphorus feeds the algae blooms that pull the oxygen out of the water and kill the young of two endangered fish, the C'waam and the Koptu, Lost River and shortnose suckers, which the Klamath Tribes have eaten and held sacred for longer than anyone has farmed there. The farm was, in a small way, part of the reason the fish were dying, and the man who had bought it to hunt ducks turned his attention to water quality.

Seventy acres

It took four years and the agreement of the other owners, plus the Klamath Watershed Partnership and a Fish and Wildlife Service biologist called Dustin Taylor, and in 2021 Wenner diked off 70 of the farm's 400 acres and flooded them with the water the farm had been pumping away, so that instead of running straight into the lake it now wanders through a marsh where the plants take the phosphorus and the sediment out of it before it leaves. The Guardian's headline, when it visited in 2023, was his own line: this place wanted to be a wetland.

The field filled with aquatic plants almost at once, and the plants brought the ducks, geese and swans in their tens of thousands, and after them otters, beavers, muskrats and, by the last count Environment 360 printed, at least 140 species of birds, on a farm that still grows barley on the other 330 acres. The phosphorus problem, the thing that started it, went away.

The fish

Then came the part nobody had done before. On 21 April 2022, with a small crowd around a truck-mounted tank and Wenner holding the net, the Fish and Wildlife Service released 1,712 juvenile C'waam and Koptu from its hatchery in Klamath Falls into a spring-fed pond the project had deepened on the farm, the first time hatchery-raised suckers had gone into a pond on private land, on a working farm, in a basin where farmers, tribes and wildlife agencies had spent thirty years fighting over the same water. The shortnose sucker population in the lake had fallen from more than 20,000 to about 3,400 in five years. Roughly 5,000 young fish were due at Lakeside that spring.

Ducks Unlimited's western operations director, Jeff McCreary, told Environment 360 the experiment showed that wetlands and farming together "can lead to a more resilient watershed where abundant fish, wildlife, and better water quality are not divergent outcomes," which is a long way of saying what Wenner found out by accident: that a duck hunter and an endangered fish want the same thing from a field, and it is not barley.