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Special to Continuum online
Craig Denton on the importance of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge on bird populations.

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The area surrounding the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge is critical to stopovers for a wide variety of birds—more than 260 species—which do much of their feeding there. The birds need those calories to make the tremendously long migrations required of them, and if we lose the capacity to provide them with that critical caloric intake, which is associated with the availability of water, then we’ll see those bird populations disappear.

In the early 1900s, that area of the Great Salt Lake experienced massive breakouts of botulism. The bird refuge was established then as a way to control the lake’s intake of water and, at the same time, cut down on the number of bird deaths from botulism. The only way that water managers could do that—since they weren’t able to get rid of the botulism, it’s just there—was to encourage ducks to move from one area where the botulism was present to another pond where it wasn’t. They did this by draining one pond and filling another with clean water so that the ducks would just naturally migrate to the clean pond, away from the pathogens. The availability of water at the end of the summer is critical because that’s when the botulism breakouts tend to happen. If water managers can’t gain access to the water, then they have fewer tools to work with.

The refuge gets a lot of water in the spring—both because of natural flow and because the local farmers don’t need it at that time. Ironically, the bird refuge doesn’t benefit from all that spring runoff because the water is silt laden. As a result, the water is directed into the Great Salt Lake so that the silt doesn’t cover the ponds. But then, when the water is needed for the refuge and the ponds in the late summer, that’s when agricultural irrigation takes place, and the farmers’ needs take precedence.

 

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Excerpt from “From Alpine to Desert” in Bear River: Last Chance to Change Course”:

Inside the periphery of the desert-shrub, mudflat community are the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge wetlands. They are an oasis in the harsh desert of the Basin and Range geography of dry playa lakebeds for more than 26 species of birds that use the refuge sometime during the year. Part of the western Hemisphere shorebird reserve Network, these wetlands are visited by approximately thirty-three species of shorebirds. They are a portion of the two to five million individual birds that rely on the Great Salt Lake annually. Approximately 30 percent of migratory waterfowl in the PacificFlyway use the Bear river Migratory bird Refuge as one of their refueling and resting stops, as reported in Box Elder county’s Wetlands Management Plan.

The Army Corps of Engineers says that any one of three characteristics defines a wetland. It must have a hydrology where it is inundated temporarily or permanently some portion of the year. It has hydrophytic vegetation, meaning it supports water-loving plants like cattails, rushes, or sedges. Lastly, it contains undrained, hydric (wet) soil that is anaerobic (lacking oxygen) in its upper stratum.

Such wet areas are biologically diverse ecosystems. Most species of birds utilize wetlands, with approximately one-third of all North American types relying on this habitat for their existence. In the United states, 28 percent of endangered animals spend part of their life cycles in wetlands