Arizona’s wildlife watering crew has been chasing the drought nonstop since last June.
Using tanker trucks and helicopters, the Game and Fish Department delivered a record 2.4 million gallons of water to human-made catchments across the state in 2020, and the agency is on track to shatter that mark in 2021.
“It’s a daily thing,” said Joseph Currie, who directs the water deliveries as the department’s habitat planning program manager. “We have four water trucks with 1,700-gallon tanks on them, and we’ve been using them almost every day of the week, every week, for the last year.”
Currie’s six-person crew is responsible for approximately 3,000 artificial watering holes statewide. Roughly 1,000 of them belong to Game and Fish.
The other 2,000 or so were built by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, though all of them have been filled and maintained by the state since about 2002, Currie said.
The catchments, also known as guzzlers, were primarily built to support herds of popular game animals, but all sorts of wildlife — from bears to bees — benefit from the water they provide.
Currie said state workers have been putting out water tanks for wildlife since the mid-1930s at least, though the first “Arizona Guzzler” he has documentation for was deployed in 1946.
“They did an amazing job building these catchments, because some of them are still working today,” he said.
The systems range in size from old 750-gallon small-game guzzlers to a 25,000-gallon behemoth designed to sustain bison near the Grand Canyon. Pima County is home to 69 catchments.
Currie said the tanks in desert areas generally store about 10,000 gallons, while the ones up on the Mogollon Rim can hold double that. “Elk drink a lot of water,” he explained.
A helicopter is called in to fill the hardest-to-reach spots, like the cliff-top catchments set up for bighorn sheep.
In recent years, Currie and company have partnered with county flood control agencies around the state to install weather gauges on some catchments to collect valuable data on rainfall and water levels. Some of the systems will send out email alerts when catchment tanks run low, he said.
The crew also gets a lot of help — and donations to support the work — from conservation groups, hunting organizations and a small army of individual donors and volunteers.
Until 2020, the program had never delivered more than about 1.4 million gallons of water in a single year. Deliveries this year are on track to top 3 million gallons.
“We anticipate having to haul more water this year than we ever have before,” Currie said. “It’s completely contingent on the monsoon. If we have another ‘non-soon’ like last year, oh yeah, it’s absolutely going to happen.”
His crew has trucked and airlifted about 200,000 gallons of water in the past month alone.
In a good year, the catchments don’t need to be filled at all. Currie said they are designed to collect enough water from average precipitation to be self-sufficient. And since they operate using float valves and gravity, with few moving parts, they generally don’t require much maintenance.
But last year was anything but normal.
Currie said half the state received only about half of its average precipitation, while the rest of the state got maybe a third or less. As a result, the break his water crew usually enjoys near the end of monsoon season never arrived.
“We haven’t stopped since,” Currie said.
