California Farmers Will Flood Their Own Fields to Prevent a Birdpocalypse

Due to a massive and ongoing drought, California is lousy place to live right now, for people but also for water fowl. Given that birds, unlike people, can't read about how the Golden State is so dry that ground is literally rising up from a lack of surface water, it's hard to imagine that the snow geese, sandhill cranes, and plovers will have any idea when they leave their summer nesting grounds that the river valley they're flying through is going to be depleted by 85 percent.

In a typical year, 8 million birds migrate along the Pacific flyway, using the region as a necessary rest stop en route to and from the northern Midwest and Canada and off-season homes in Mexico and South America. Some species, sandhill cranes in particular, even end their journey here. And there's some speculation that, while there won't be much water along the flyway this year, there's going to be a lot of water fowl.

In addition to having happy people and a strong economy, the Dakotas also enjoyed steady rain over the spring. The number of ducks is up 43 percent from the 58-year long-term average, according to US Fish and Wildlife Service forecasts, which estimated 49.2 million breeding ducks across 2 million square miles of nesting grounds surveyed in May and June. But a year with California's worst drought in a half a millennium can hardly be considered typical.

The drought is just the cap on top of decades of adapting the wetlands in the Sacramento Valley for agriculture and urban development. While there's a history of farmers and nature sometimes having competing interests, Tom Stienstra has a great story at SF Gate about farmers whose interests have aligned with those of the migratory birds, and a conservation organization that is willing to pay farmers, rice farmers specifically, to flood their fields to function as ersatz wetlands.

Given the great expense of developing millions of acres of permanently protected areas for birds that are passing through from as far away as Alaska and Canada en route to their winter nesting grounds way down in Mexico, the Nature Conservancy has come up with a pretty clever solution called Birdreturns: pay rice farmers to leave their fields flooded so they might function as "pop-up" habitats.

Instead of draining the fields, as Nature reported is typical practice after duck season wraps up, farmers in the central valley would be paid to use their well water to keep a few inches of water on the fields for migrating birds. Combined with crowd-sourced data tracking where the need for wetlands is greatest and a reverse-bidding system, the system is more dynamic and much cheaper than permanent wetland development.

A pilot program that ran in February and March paid 33 farmers to keep their fields under a few inches of water, which attracted 30 to 50 times more shorebirds than the control sites.

It's clear that the changing climate is going to be hard on birds—and this very year is shaping up to be a bad one already. Since we as humans, even if we somehow pull our heads out of our asses and address a changing climate, still need to eat, finding a way to accommodate nature that's compatible with agriculture is about the best you can hope for. That and some rain.