Defenders Magazine

Saving a Desert Oasis

Can we keep California's vital Salton Sea from turning into a dustbowl?

by Krista Schlyer

© Jenny E. Ross

On a dusty shoulder of a rural road in southeastern California’s Imperial Valley, Bob Miller pulls the car to a jarring halt and grabs his binoculars. He bolts from the car, lopes across the road and stands with the pointed toes of his cowboy boots at the edge of an irrigation canal that fronts a sprawling pasture.

“It’s gone,” says Miller, a lifelong resident of the area and a guide with Southwest Birders. “Probably a merlin.” He lowers the binoculars but continues scanning the sky for whatever might come along next. At the Salton Sea, and in the Imperial Valley farmlands that surround it, one never knows.

“I’ve seen Sprague’s pipits and black-legged kittiwakes,” says Miller. “That’s like being on a boat in the middle of the ocean and seeing a house sparrow. A knowledgeable birder can see 100 bird species in a single day here. There’s not a lot of places you can do that.”  

Few places in the country rival the Salton Sea in numbers and variety of birds. More than 400 species have been documented at this 265-square-mile patch of water—the largest lake in the state. Birds come here for the fish and pileworms in the sea and briny mudflats. They come for the marshy waterways that slice through the valley, irrigating and draining farmland. They come because along the Pacific flyway, there are few places left to rest weary wings en route to faraway homelands.

Though birds steal the show, this area is also home to the endangered desert pupfish, rabbits, coyotes and other desert critters. All this in an ecosystem stitched together by castoff threads—old tires that fortify seawalls, non-native fish and third-hand water. It’s far from wilderness, and it’s not always pretty, but somehow for the past century, it’s generally worked for birds.

But perhaps not for much longer. In the next year, Californians will decide the fate of this vital ecosystem, determining whether to spend billions of dollars to save it and choosing among various scenarios for how it should be saved. In none of the potential scenarios will the sea exist in 15 years as it does today. Without restoration, it will die of thirst and drown in salt, leaving millions of birds to find an alternative haven in a state where 95 percent of the wetlands that once sustained them are gone.

Miller drives us on, down the dirt road that follows the seawall on the southern end of the lake. On the sea side of the road, a white-crowned sparrow rests in a patch of dry scrub; on the other a field of onions spreads in neat watered rows. Evidence of the coexistence of agriculture and birds punctuates the landscape here. Shiny Mylar flags flapping about in fields serve to scare birds off crops, while pink flags remind irrigation workers to avoid excavating where imperiled western burrowing owls are nesting. Bird cannons boom from a hay field to scare off thousands of snow and Ross’s geese that launch and land as a single pale apparition against the hayfields and distant Chocolate Mountains.

Though many people think of the Salton Sea as a modern-day byproduct of irrigation, it has a long history of sustaining both wildlife and people. At one time, this low-lying area was part of the Gulf of California. But as the Colorado River deposited acres of silt upon its delta, the Gulf’s shoreline retreated southward, leaving behind an inland sea named Lake Cahuilla. Eventually evaporation dried the sea, but because the basin it left behind lay several hundred feet below sea level, when the Colorado River periodically shifted course it would often spill into the basin.

This cycle of filling and drying the basin continued until white settlers, intent on establishing agriculture in the arid but fertile valley, corralled the Colorado in the early 1900s. True to its impetuous character, the river breeched its agricultural diversion in 1905 and the modern-day Salton Sea was born as floodwaters charged into the then-dry Salton Sink. The sea would have disappeared again, but Imperial Valley farmers began using it as a drainage point for the irrigation water that runs off fields. This runoff has sustained the sea and the wildlife that depends on it for the past century.

Because of the climate and the constant presence of water in an area surrounded by a vast desert, the location has a magnetic allure for uncommon birds. Miller parks on the edge of a freshwater impoundment at the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge and points to a small white bird flitting near the surface. “That is very cool,” he says. “It’s a little gull.”

The gull is indeed small and restless. It has been loitering at the sea for a few weeks, but this species, the smallest of all the gulls, is rarely seen anywhere in the country aside from the far northeastern corner. “That’s probably the rarest bird on the whole Salton Sea right now,” Miller says.

Last fall, the little gull was bested in that category by its cousin the Ross’s gull, a resident of the Arctic that rarely ventures out of the far-north. News of the Ross’s appearance on the Salton Sea traveled around the world, and hundreds of birders from all over jumped at the chance to see it. “That’s the farthest south anywhere in the world it’s ever been seen,” Miller says of the event.

For much of the 20th century, the balance between agriculture and wildlife in this area held. The farm economy boomed and birds began to rely on the sea as damming of the Colorado dried the river’s delta wetlands at the Gulf of California. The Salton Sea even became a popular resort lake, stocked with sport fish and frequented by stars such as Dean Martin and the Marx Brothers. In the 1960s and 1970s, as a destination, the Salton Sea rivaled Yosemite National Park.

The unstable nature of the system eventually caught up with the sea, however. Little evidence now remains of its resort past, aside from graffitied facades of abandoned buildings and the crunch of desiccated sport fish on the sands of its beaches.

Like most lakes with no outlet for water aside from evaporation, the problem for the Salton Sea is salt. The Colorado River is naturally salty, and becomes significantly more so as it percolates through crop fields picking up minerals. The salt that enters the sea lingers while water evaporates, and the sea becomes more saline. “Around here if you have a glass of water, and you let it sit, eventually all you’ll have is salt,” says Kimberly Nicol, a scientist at the California Department of Fish and Game.

Increased salinity, coupled with pollution from agricultural, industrial and human waste, causes algal blooms that in turn have caused massive die-offs of the sea’s sport fish and degraded habitat, thereby weakening bird populations. Disease events here killed 120,000 eared grebes in 1992, and one-third of the world’s population of endangered brown pelicans in 1996.

In 2003, the sea’s decline steepened when Imperial Valley farmers signed the largest water-transfer agreement in North American history, sending as much as 300,000 acre-feet of water per year to San Diego. Increased demand on Colorado River water from cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix has forced California to tighten its belt. Valley farmers are increasing irrigation efficiency and fallowing land so some of the water that has historically been used for agriculture can instead be sent to San Diego, thus reducing the state’s overall draw on the Colorado. The deal will mean significantly less water going onto the Imperial Valley’s fields, and therefore, less water draining off into the Salton Sea.

To give the state time to figure out how to save the sea, California officials required farmers to provide water to the sea for 15 years. Four of those 15 years have passed and in spring the myriad parties interested in the sea’s future—federal, state, tribal governments, developers, farmers, conservationists—finally settled on a draft restoration plan to present to the state legislature for approval and funding. The $9 billion draft plan currently calls for two separate lakes in the northern and southern portions of the former sea for boating and fishing (for humans and birds), and more than 50,000 acres of shallow, shoreline habitat for birds to be phased in during the next 30 years as the sea begins to dry up. It also includes provisions to ensure the continued survival of the endangered desert pupfish. But no one is precisely sure where the money is going to come from, or if the legislature will approve the plan.

Meanwhile, the sea’s decline is quickening. “We’re running into a time crunch,” says Nicol.

In 11 years, the state-mandated water flows from farmers will stop. When that happens, the sea will lose almost a fourth of its annual water—and most of its fish. The drying lakebed, combined with heavy winds that often channel through the Imperial Valley, will cause a drastic increase in airborne pollutants in an area already plagued by bad air.

For birds, this will mean reducing important habitat to a useless and perhaps dangerous patch of ground, says Chris Schoneman, manager at the Salton Sea wildlife refuge. “Something has to be done, or there will be a loss of most of the birdlife here. And we shouldn’t push the timeline of when that will happen. It needs to be now,” Schoneman says.

Loss of the Salton Sea habitat along the Pacific flyway could reverberate throughout western North America’s bird populations. “It’s kind of the last stand for migratory birds. If it’s gone, there’s no place left to go,” says Howard King, a birding guide with the California Audubon Society.

Even if the legislature approves a restoration plan and allocates money, it is unlikely that restoration could begin before 2014 because of all the regulatory approval needed. That could be too late for birds and fish. The state resources agency has proposed constructing 2,000 acres of marsh habitat to carry wildlife over until restoration can take shape, “so it won’t be the major disaster that it could be,” Nicol says. But so far the state legislature has not approved funding for this “early start.”

Some who have followed the plight of the sea have grown skeptical about its future. A friend of King’s recently found a 1960s newspaper in a local golf course club house that closed long ago. One of the paper’s articles detailed a new plan to save the Salton Sea. “Forty years of lips flapping and nothing going on,” King says. “I really like to be positive. I just feel like we’re kind of documenting the death of the sea.”

But Nicol, whose office is responsible for restoration, says the momentum is on their side. “Everyone agrees that doing nothing is not in the best interest of anyone,” Nicol says. And for her, it’s personal. She remembers the sea when 10,000 white pelicans lit the sky above it and you could put a pole in the water and pull out a corvina as long as your arm. “I know what it can be, and that’s my inspiration,” Nicol says.

And if it’s inspiration that’s needed, the Salton Sea can still oblige. This is one of those rare places where wildlife is so abundant and diverse that the 500th visit can be as stirring as the first. “Every time you raise your binoculars you see something new,” King says. “I’ve been birding here 30 years and I added a new bird last week.”

It was a golden-crowned kinglet, who wandered down from the mountains to see what all the Salton Sea fuss was about.

Washington, D.C.-based writer and photographer Krista Schlyer visited the Salton Sea earlier this year as part of her reporting for this piece.