In normal years, when water is plentiful and affordable, some 270,000 acres of winter rice fields in the Sacramento Valley are lightly flooded and available to receive wintering shorebirds, such as white faced ibis, great blue herons and many varieties of geese and ducks.
The Central Valley, with its usual bounty of food and space, supports 30% of the shorebirds and 60% of the ducks and geese in the entire Pacific Flyway, nearly 3 million ducks, 1 million geese and a half-million shorebirds overwintering annually.
Given the severe drought conditions and paucity of available water, there is substantially less habitat for those flocks this year. Luke Matthews, a biologist with the California Rice Commission, said his group estimates there are only 60,000 acres of flooded rice land this year. Adding the acreage supported by various state and private conservation programs brings the total agricultural winter habitat to just over 100,000 acres, Matthews said.
Still, from the perspective of hungry, exhausted migratory birds, the Sacramento Valley must appear from the air like a spa retreat featuring an all-you-can-eat buffet.
Once settled, the birds will derive 50% of their diet from rice left on the ground after the fall harvest. As much as 300 pounds of rice per acre is available to birds after the crop is harvested.
Agricultural lands have proved critical for filling in the gaps from California’s wetlands loss. Dense, clay soil is nearly impermeable – a shallow vessel of water ideal for growing rice and hosting birds. Since air pollution concerns almost ended the practice of burning off rice straw after harvest, flooding harvested fields benefit both farmer and bird: While feeding in the fields, tiny bird feet and stomping geese churn and aerate soils, helping rice straw decompose, preparing the land for the next season’s crop.
A disparate collection of agencies and private groups is funding “pop-up wetlands.”Farmers are increasingly raising their hands to host wetlands, seeing a dual benefit: For rice farmers, winter flooding makes financial sense but also appeals to those with a conservation mindset.
“We grow two crops: We grow rice and we grow birds,” said Nicole Montna Van Vleck, president of Montna Farms in Yuba City.
Nicole Montna Van Vleck stands on a levee holding stalks of rice at Montna Farms in Yuba City.
(Karlos Rene Ayala for CalMatters)
Flooded fields on Montna Van Vleck’s sprawling 5,000-acre farm look like shallow kiddie pools. Some paddocks are dark with thousands of resting birds, with white molting-season feathers collected around the edges like a bathtub ring.
“Every season for me is awe-inspiring,” she said, surveying the flat expanse of water and birds. “You can almost imagine what it was like when this was a natural floodplain, when you get out here and see these ricelands work. We’ve created this ecosystem for them. There’s plenty of food for them. I never get tired of it.”
One conservation program, called BirdReturns, was launched during the last drought and is operated in part by Audubon California, the Nature Conservancy and Point Blue Conservation Science. It creates a marketplace for private landowners to provide shallow flooding, mostly for shorebirds.
A similar program, called Bid4Birds, operated by the California Ricelands Waterbird Foundation, encourages rice farmers to participate in a marketplace where they are compensated for the cost of leaving water on their land for migratory birds.
The BirdReturns program has a goal of creating an additional 100,000 acres of habitat available every year, said Rodd Kelsey, The Nature Conservancy’s lead scientist on the project.
Despite the gains made since its inception in 2014, “this drought is much worse,” Kelsey said. Rice farmers “will tell you that the water situation is something they have not seen since the late 70s drought.”
Paul Buttner, California Ricelands Waterbird Foundation’s executive director, called the outlook “really, really dismal.”
The severity of the last drought drove once-bickering sides into collaborative problem-solving. The drought was a “stark and shocking wakeup call,” prompting bird groups, farmers, duck hunting clubs and state and federal wildlife managers to begin conversations, said Meghan Hertel, Audubon California’s director of land and water conservation.
More than half of the wetlands in the Sacramento Valley are privately owned, operated by duck clubs established for bird hunting. Land managers regularly called each other to track birds on the move, Hertel said. “They’d say, ‘Hey I’ve got 100,000 snow geese coming your way, hold on to your water.”
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Winged warning: Migrating birds hit hard by California's drought - Lookout Santa Cruz
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