Dark-eyed Junco
Latin: Junco hyemalis
From fires in the Sierra to clouds of windblown dust at the Salton Sea, the effects of drought driven by climate change are impo
Peregrine Falcon Photo: Jim Verhagen
California’s Mediterranean climate has the most variable weather of any U.S. state, so it’s no stranger to catastrophic droughts and disastrous floods. Still, even in a drought-prone region, recent years have been exceptional – the result of natural climate cycles colliding with a warming planet. From fires in the Sierra to clouds of windblown dust at the Salton Sea, the effects of drought driven by climate change are impossible to ignore.
The latest science confirms that climate change has arrived and that we are in the middle of a megadrought. In August 2021, a report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that climate change is quickening and intensifying. Even in a best-case scenario, global temperatures will likely rise by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040.
In May, 2021, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared that the nation has entered uncharted territory in which climate effects are more visible, changing faster and becoming more extreme. Temperatures are rising, snow and rainfall patterns are shifting, and more extreme climate events –like heavier rainstorms and record high temperatures –are already happening. Some, like hotter forest fires, are directly related to historic drought conditions gripping the U.S. West.
The consequences for both California’s avian and human populations are likely to be devastating. Simply put, climate change is the number one threat to the survival of our nation’s birds. In 2019, the National Audubon Society released Survival by Degrees, a study examining the impacts of various climate change scenarios on North America’s birds. Under a worst-case rise of 3.0 C, up to two-thirds of bird species face extinction, including from specific factors like extreme heat and fires. The report came on the heels of another by Cornell’s Lab of Ornithology that the continent has already lost an estimated three billion birds since 1970 due to habitat loss and climate change.
Audubon's Bird and Climate Report
Just 200 years ago, the Central Valley was a vast, seasonal wetland teeming with birdlife. Only about five percent of California’s historic wetlands have survived two hundred years of colonization and intensive agriculture. Those that remain are heavily managed, for the most part receiving water allocations from the state water system together with California’s cities and farms. In addition, some agricultural lands, like flooded rice fields, serve as “surrogate wetlands,” providing vital habitat to migrating waterfowl and wading birds.
However, as of August 2021, the state’s largest reservoirs, Lake Shasta and Lake Oroville, were respectively at 35 and 24 percent of capacity, with proportionate impacts on water deliveries to farms, cities, and wildlife refuges in the Central Valley and elsewhere in California. Our last remaining Central Valley wetlands are expected to receive less than 60 percent of their usual water supply. Winter flooded rice fields, which provide half of the winter waterfowl food supply, are expected to be reduced by 75 percent. The importance of keeping water flowing in the Central Valley is difficult to overstate. Tens of millions of birds depend on the area’s rivers and wetlands as they migrate through an otherwise arid region.
Flooded habitat provided by the region’s farms, refuges, and other managed areas supports between 5-7 million waterfowl and 350,000 shorebirds each year. That’s over 60 percent of the total population along the Pacific Flyway and 20 percent of the nation's waterfowl population. Migrating landbirds also rely heavily on Central Valley stopovers; an estimated 65 million birds pass through during fall migration, along with 48 million each spring. Those numbers include a quarter of all North American Tree Swallows and a whopping 80 percent of Lawrence’s Goldfinches.
Years of fire suppression in western forests and California’s years-long drought have created a trifecta of conditions perfect for explosive wildfires: extreme heat, low humidity, and abundant, desiccated vegetation fire needs to spread. In fact, the state’s worst-ever fires, the 2020’s August Complex Fire at more than a million acres and the 2021 Dixie fire, at more than 960,000, both dwarf all previous fires in both size and ferocity.
The increasingly apocalyptic wildfires of the past five years have cost California dozens of lives and billions of dollars, though the toll on birds is somewhat harder to quantify. While most birds can easily escape advancing flames, extensive wildfires across the western United States in 2020 are suspected at least in part for causing a mysterious die-off of migrating birds in the Southwest. Fire can cause birds to migrate to winter habitats before their bodies have stored enough fat for the arduous journey and thick smoke may disorient some and kill others outright.
While western forests – and their birds – evolved with fire as a natural part of the ecosystem, vital in maintaining diverse habitats, no analog exists for the megafires of the past decade. Experts expect that temperatures in the Sierra will rise by some 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century and that the snowpack to melt almost a month earlier. By the end of the century, that could double the acreage burned by wildfires each year.
California’s largest lake is located in one of its most arid regions. The Salton Sea formed in 1905 when an irrigation canal from the Colorado River broke and flooded a historic lakebed. The breach was fixed within a few years, but the Salton Sea, fed by agricultural runoff, remained and became a vital stopover for migrating birds that no longer found wetlands available farther north.
But the Sea is evaporating quickly.
Drip irrigation, and the diversion of the water saved to thirsty San Diego, means that not enough water is flowing to the Sea to maintain it. The retreating shoreline has exposed thousands of acres of playa, or dry lake bed, which contains a century’s worth of agricultural fertilizers, pesticides, heavy metals, and salts. Those contaminants, blown airborne by desert winds, waft towards surrounding towns as choking dust, causing high rates of respiratory illness in some of California’s most disadvantaged communities. Meanwhile, as the surface area of the lake decreases, its salinity increases, killing the fish on which many species of migratory birds depend.
While limited restoration work on the Salton Sea is beginning to proceed – after years of delays – the Sea’s future in a warming climate remains very much in question. Audubon is working with the state of California and partner organizations to maintain the Sea as an asset both for wildlife and for surrounding communities.
While there’s no denying the gravity of the climate crisis, it’s not too late to limit warming and stave off the worst impacts of climate change. With rapid action, we can still limit warming to 1.5 degrees and push lawmakers to enact water policy good for both humans and birds as we all adapt to this warmer, drier new normal.
Audubon and our many partners are working to complete science to better understand how drought impacts birds, we are working with land managers to roll out emergency drought relief funding to create bird habitat, and we are advocating for long-term policy and infrastructure solutions that will make California, our communities and our birds more resilient to this new climate reality.
We are in uncharted territory. Birds are on the move to escape the smoke and stress. What will happen to them and the habitat they need to survive?
Vital protections are needed for wetlands that depend on groundwater under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act
Audubon science finds that two-thirds of North American birds are at risk of extinction from climate change.
Audubon California has begun the planning phase for the restoration and enhancement of the newly emerging Bombay Beach Wetland, located by the town of Bombay Beach at the Salton Sea.
Funding to address threat to 1.6 million people and 300 species of birds
More than 400 species of birds come to the Salton Sea in California.
Audubon California Executive Director Brigid McCormack today writes in the Desert Sun that while the narrative around the Salton Sea is often one of environmental decay, the site remains one of the most important places for birds on the Pacific Flyway. She notes that it was created at a time when humans were wiping out natural inland water habitat:
"For birds, the creation of the Salton Sea came at just the right time – just as humans began wiping out wetland habitat throughout California.
Two years before dredging began on the Imperial Valley canal, the last remnants of Tulare Lake disappeared. Once the largest freshwater lake in the West, Tulare Lake was nearly twice the size of the Salton Sea, and anchored more than five million acres of Central Valley wetlands, 95 percent of which are now gone.
In 1906, the federal government began work on the Klamath Project, which eventually eliminated 437 square miles (80 percent) of wetland habitat in the Klamath Basin along the California/Oregon border.
Just a few years later, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting water from the 108-square-mile Owens Lake, where Native Americans recalled a sky blackened with migratory birds, and naturalist Joseph Grinnell found great numbers of avocets, phalaropes and ducks. By 1926, Owens Lake was gone.
Fascinating piece today in the Los Angeles Times about the growing concern over declining water levels in Lake Mead that, if they continue to fall, could trigger substantial water cuts in Arizona and New Mexico. Because of this pressure is growing on California users to reduce its use of Colorado River Water. You might recall recently that the Imperial Irrigation District, one of the primary users of water from the Colorado River, has said that will be uncomfortable with any agreement regarding Colorado River water unless the major issues of habitat conservation and dust mitigation at the Salton Sea are resolved.
"All the parties are under pressure to reach an agreement by the end of this year, before the current administration leaves office and the process has to start anew with new federal overseers. But the interstate complexities may pale in comparison with the difficulty of working out agreements among water users within each state. California's Imperial Irrigation District, which has the largest entitlement of Colorado River water, has balked at any agreement to preserve water levels in Lake Mead without a parallel agreement to preserve the Salton Sea. That huge inland pond has suffered as a result of earlier multi-billion-dollar deals by which the Imperial Irrigation District transferred water to San Diego, the MWD and other users.
The shrinkage of the sea already is an environmental and public health disaster. Withholding more water in Lake Mead without a rescue plan would be unacceptable, Imperial Irrigation District General Manager Kevin Kelley said recently. "The Salton Sea has always been the elephant in the room in these talks," he told the Desert Sun newspaper."
When Audubon California talks about the Salton Sea, we often highlight that about 400 species of birds make regular use of this habitat -- massive numbers of sandpipers migrating between Alaska and South America, as much as 90 percent of the world’s Eared Grebes, and large numbers of American White Pelicans, Double-crested Cormorants, the threatened Snowy Plover. Without the Salton Sea, these species and many others would struggle for survival.
The two maps below offer another view of how birds from all over the Western Hemisphere use the Salton Sea. Since 1908, volunteers and researchers have been banding birds for the U.S. Geological Survey's North American Bird Banding Program, and so we have data on where we found birds that were banded at the Salton Sea, as well as where birds were banded that ultimately turned up at the Salton Sea.
Birds banded at the Salton Sea and found elsewhere
Birds banded throughout the Western Hemisphere and found at the Salton Sea
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is warning of a high risk of intense fires in 2016 thanks to a combination of ongoing drought and a large number of dead trees in the Sierra.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said during a briefing on the fire season in Washington, D.C., "“You’ve got 40 million dead trees. You’ve got 40 million opportunities for fire. You’re looking at a very serious situation.”
While fire is a natural occurance in California's open spaces, intense fires can have a number of bad consequences for birds and other wildlife. Not only can large swaths of habitat be wiped out, but the intensity of the blazes can actually cause the habitat to change type -- which leaves little opportunity for native birds to return.
The California State Senate last week approved importat climate change legislation that addresses the role that farms and other working lands play in reaching the state's goals for reducing carbon emissions. In particular, Senate Bill 1386 will make it state policy that protecting and managing natural and working lands is key to meeting California’s climate change goals, and directs all relevant state agencies to consider this policy when conducting their work.
With news that representatives of California, Arizona, and Nevada are negotiating potential cutbacks to relieve water usage from the overtaxed Colorado River, the water district holding the largest rights to Colorado River water said that issues at the Salton Sea need to be resolved before any settlement regarding the Colorado River.
News emerged in late April of ongoing negotiations among representatives of California, Nevada, and Arizona about the use of water from the Colorado River, which is on the verge of a major shortage. While details of the negotiations aren't clear, the goal has been to keep more water in Lake Mead to stave off a declaration of a shortage.
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Our newsletter is fun way to get our latest stories and important conservation updates from across the state.
Help secure the future for birds at risk from climate change, habitat loss and other threats. Your support will power our science, education, advocacy and on-the-ground conservation efforts.
Join the thousands of Californians that support the proposed Chuckwalla National Monument.