Posted on February 19, 2025
The summer sun was sinking in the sky and casting a warm glow over the marsh as Klamath tribal member Garin Riddle and his family paddled their kayaks through the browning patches of wocus plants floating in the water near Southern Oregon’s Upper Klamath Lake.
“I see one!” 9-year-old Knala Riddle cried out. She plunged her hand under the surface of the water and pulled out a green bulb about the size of a plum.
“Dad, is this good?” she asked, holding it up for him to see.
“That’s decent size,” he said, pulling a bulb of his own from a thicket of plants underwater.
In August of 2023, the Riddle family invited “Oregon Field Guide” to film their annual wocus harvest in one of the few remaining wetlands where they can still safely gather this first food, along the Rocky Point canoe trail.
In the spring and early summer, the wocus plants, also known as pond lilies, have bright yellow flowers on them. By August, most of those flowers have turned into seed pods.
Garin Riddle holds a wocus bulb that he harvested from a marsh near Southern Oregon’s Upper Klamath Lake in August 2023.
Gathering these wocus pods is a tradition Garin Riddle inherited from his ancestors, who have eaten their highly nutritious seeds for thousands of years.
“There’s something beautiful about those first foods,” he said. “It’s almost like it sparks a reawakening of your genetic memory. Like you remember who you are. … Our people have been gathering in these spots right here that we’re at right now since the beginning of time.”
Before gathering, Garin Riddle said a prayer and the family sang a song, and the singing continued on the water as their boats floated quietly and birds flew overhead.
“We always sing songs when we’re gathering,” he said. “I truly believe… that when people consume the foods that we gather, that they consume that good spirit that it was gathered with.”
But since the early 1900s, wocus plants have gotten harder and harder to find as about 80% of the wetlands in Southern Oregon’s upper Klamath Basin were drained for agriculture. In more recent years, water shortages and pollution from surrounding farms have dried up marshes in nearby wildlife refuges and fueled toxic algae blooms in Upper Klamath Lake that could make wocus seeds unsafe to eat.
“I’d say 90-95% of what we used to have as far as wocus around here in the Klamath marsh … is non-existent anymore,” Garin said. “It’s all farmlands. So the majority of our most precious, staple food that we had that would sustain us through the winters and all the other times is gone.”
A tradition in jeopardy
Wocus thrive in fairly shallow water in healthy wetlands. The marsh where the Riddle family gathers wocus bulbs are near the headwaters of the Klamath River, where cold, clear water bubbles up from underground springs.
But as that water makes its way downstream, it gets hot and overloaded with pollution from nearby farms.
Starting in the early 1900s, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation drained many of the lakes that used to provide habitat for wocus and replaced them with a massive irrigation system and hundreds of thousands of acres of new farmland. In aerial views of the region, square tracts of green, irrigated land are visible in areas that used to be Lower Klamath Lake and Tule Lake.
A 1905 U.S. Geological Survey map of the upper Klamath Basin shows the historical locations of Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake, both of which were drained by a federal irrigation project to create new farmland.
A 2021 aerial image from the U.S. Department of Agriculture of the landscape in Southern Oregon where farms now operate in the footprints of Tule Lake and Lower Klamath Lake.
Upper Klamath Lake remains, and the surrounding farms use its water for irrigation.
“This is no longer a lake as it once was. It’s more treated today like a bathtub,” Jeff Mitchell, chairman of the Klamath Tribes Culture and Heritage Committee said. “We’re constantly filling it and lowering it and filling it and lowering it.”
Dams, dikes and irrigation ditches move water from the lake to farms and ranches across the upper Klamath Basin. Now, Mitchell said, only a few places have the right amount of water for wocus plants.
“They’ve drained that type of habitat where wocus once thrived,” he said. “There was wocus all along this lake and the fringes … it was simply filled with wocus along the sides. All of these aquatic plants are like little factories that clean the water.”
A patch of brown and shriveled wocus plants on parched ground in Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge in August 2024.
Wocus plants in Klamath Marsh National Wildlife Refuge were shriveled and brown without enough water to survive in August 2024.
To protect their longstanding wocus gathering tradition and the habitat it depends on, the Klamath Tribes have advocated for projects that restore the wetlands that used to dominate the Southern Oregon landscape and provide rich wildlife habitat that experts often describe as “the Everglades of the West.”
Last month, the tribes teamed up with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited and private landowners to breach a dike on the uppermost section of Upper Klamath Lake and restore 14,000 acres of wetland habitat.
Tribal leaders say it’s encouraging to see private landowners helping to repair the ecological damage that worsened over the course of the 20th century as lakes and wetlands were transformed into farms and ranches. But they still have a lot of work to do.
In restored wetlands, wocus plants often need to be reintroduced. A process for growing these plants from seed was only recently developed, along with some new underwater planting methods such as dropping the plant in a biodegradable pot into a wetland.
Scientists say restoring wocus will provide valuable habitat for shortnose and lost river suckerfish, also known as c’waam and koptu, which are another important first food for the Klamath people. But they’re both endangered species, and tribes haven’t fished for them since 1986.
“I actually grew up with part of my diet being wocus,” Mitchell said. “It was part of our lifestyle here in the basin, being hunters and gatherers. Everything we have comes from the land. We don’t have to plant anything. We don’t have to till the ground. It’s all here for us.”
Many farms take water from Upper Klamath Lake and send it back filled with extra nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, that fuel toxic algae blooms in the summer.
“On most of this lake right now, I wouldn’t gather wocus,” Mitchell said. “I wouldn’t feed it to my family.”
Can Klamath farmers help restore wetlands?
Mitchell is hoping that some of the farms around Upper Klamath Lake can be part of a solution that cleans up the water in the lake and provides the kind of habitat wocus plants need to survive.
In June 2022, farmer Karl Wenner points out native plants and migratory birds that have moved onto his farm since he turned one of his barley fields into a permanent wetland near Klamath Falls.
In recent years, farmer Karl Wenner has been putting this idea to the test.
To reduce phosphorus in the water on his farm, he turned one of his barley fields into a permanent wetland — and even transplanted some wocus into it.
As he walked along the edge of his new wetland in August 2023, he was delighted to see all the native wetland plants that sprung up after the farm field was inundated with water.
“All these plants? We did not plant them,” he said. “The seed bank was here.”
He grabbed a fistful of grasses.
“This stuff right here, this fluffy stuff, is called panic grass,” he said, breaking off the tops of the grass and spreading the seeds in the palm of his hand. “That is all seeds. … pintail and teal cocaine right here. They love this stuff. It’s pretty exciting.”
As much as he’s enjoying his wetlands, he didn’t do all this just for fun.
A transplanted wocus plant flowers at Lakeside Farms in June 2022 on a permanent wetland farmer Karl Wenner created to help clean the water he pumps into Upper Klamath Lake near Klamath Falls.
His farm depends on sending water into Upper Klamath Lake before planting, and the water on his farm was polluted with phosphorus, a nutrient in the soil.
“We were told we couldn’t pump in the lake anymore,” he said. “And that really messed up our operation. We didn’t want to stop doing that. So we tried to come up with a way and one of the ways was wetland.”
Wenner is one of a growing number of Klamath Basin farmers who received federal funding to create wetlands on their farms, and his results were dramatic. Phosphorus levels in the water on his farm dropped from four times higher than the allowable limit to a level that was safe to pump back into Upper Klamath Lake.
“In 18 months of being a wetland, it was sucking the phosphorus out so we had legal water,” Wenner said. “It wanted to fix itself. It wanted to be a marsh, and it became one.”
Wenner is also creating temporary wetlands that move around from field to field in between plantings. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s “walking wetlands” program has put wetlands about 15,000 acres of farmland, on both private land and federal leased land.
The program has helped provide habitat for migratory waterfowl in recent years, as chronic droughts and water shortages have dried up the wildlife refuges in the upper Klamath Basin, with scarce water supplies being distributed to endangered fish and farmers.
Wenner looked out at a field that would soon be flooded with water.
“As far as you can see, this will be duck food,” he said. “We’re trying to use the wetlands not only to provide food and habitat for waterfowl but it’s going to enhance our farm.”
Flooding the fields kills weeds and allows Wenner to grow food without chemicals once the water is drained.
“This will be very productive ground when we transfer it out of wetlands,” Wenner said. “We’ll get a better yield, and it will be organic.”
Wenner said adding wetlands to farms is a win-win for farmers and the surrounding landscape.
“Wetlands are what drove the system here for millennia,” he said. “This is the answer for the Klamath Basin.”
Restoring first foods
Aurora Riddle spreads wocus seeds across a screen to dry in August 2023.
After gathering wocus bulbs, the Riddle family spread their wocus seeds out on a screen to dry. They’re shiny, multicolored and still smell a bit like the marsh they came from.
“There’s some amber ones, some tan ones, there’s a deep purple one right here,” Aurora Riddle said, spreading them out on the screen.
There are still many steps to go before they can eat the seeds — either ground up as a flour and incorporated into muffins or pancakes or with milk in a bowl like oatmeal — but they will be highly prized because they’re so rare.
Garin Riddle said he hopes putting wetlands on more farms in the Klamath Basin will help restore first foods and the Klamath people who depend on them.
“There are some very good people out there that are using those federal funds to be able to bring back wetlands,” he said. “If we just give it a little chance, give it a little water, give it a little hope … a lot of times the creator will take care of everything else.”
In the meantime, he said, his family will continue to gather wocus in keeping with their tradition.
“It’s not a choice of mine to be able to do these things,” he said. “It’s not a choice of mine to sing songs and to gather wocus and to take my children out there. It’s not really a choice. It’s a responsibility of mine.”
