In one issue of Audubon magazine—which had a circulation far smaller than it does today—the magazine’s bird-watching columnist, Olin Pettingill, made a derogatory reference to the Bureau in an article which, for the most part, was about curlews and gallinules. Pettingill remarked that the Bureau’s Nimbus Dam, on the American River east of Sacramento, “has ruined what once were spawning grounds for salmon and steelhead rainbow trout”—an observation that happens to be entirely true. That was the sum total of Pettingill’s criticism: one sentence in a two-thousand-word article about birds.
...more
