Name: California Farmers Work to Create a Climate Change Buffer for Migratory Water Birds - Inside Climate News
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California Farmers Work to Create a Climate Change Buffer for Migratory Water Birds - Inside Climate News

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On a warm, sunny afternoon in late November, Roger Cornwell stopped his pickup near the edge of a harvested rice field to avoid spooking a great blue heron standing still as a statute, alert for prey. He pointed to a dozen or so great egrets at the opposite end of the field as a chorus of killdeer sang a high lonesome tune in the distance.&nbsp;of the region’s historic wetlands, flooded croplands provide food and habitat that help egrets, sandhill cranes and other iconic water birds get through the winter. Inundating fallow fields mimics the way rivers breached their banks 150 years ago, before engineers built thousands of miles of levees, and funneled Sierra Nevada snowmelt through a vast network of aqueducts and canals to farmers and more than 27 million Californians.“Our wetland birds are among those showing the biggest declines,” said Khara Strum, who works with Cornwell as conservation manager for Audubon’s Working Lands Program.. Some 3 billion birds have vanished from the continent since 1970, another team of scientists reported in the. Avoiding the collapse of bird populations, they said, requires urgent action to mitigate ongoing threats like habitat loss and agricultural intensification, “all exacerbated by climate change.”of California’s rice, farmers started flooding their fields to decompose postharvest stubble in the 1990s, after the state restricted traditional straw burndowns to protect air quality. Water birds soon took to the flooded fields as if they were wetlands, speeding stubble decomposition in the process.with ways to use less water more strategically to provide maximum benefit to water birds as well as the state’s critically endangered salmon.Growing rice would help reduce carbon emissions and protect the soil. But right now rice is concentrated in the Sacramento Valley, Baldocchi said, and it’s not easy to simply switch crops, given market demands.crops in the Delta. Permanent crops aren’t like field crops, which you can decide to sacrifice for a year, Golet said. “So when you get drought, trees get water before the birds do.”The expansion of crops incompatible with cranes in the Delta is a major concern for Gary Ivey, a researcher with the International Crane Foundation. “A lot of the favorite crane spots are lost already,” he said. “That’s an alarming trend.”“In the Intermountain West, where the greaters are breeding, we’re getting drier summers and less wetland habitats,” Ivey said, referring to the cranes. And in dry years, they don’t reproduce as they should. Plus, the permafrost is melting in the Arctic, where lesser sandhills breed. Once they lose the ice that supports summer wetlands, he said, they’ll have to crowd into remaining habitats, which increases disease risk. “That won’t work very well.”It’s an open question whether the birds will switch to new sites, but history suggests there’s a good chance they will if the conditions are right. The challenge will be to identify places and practices that will be resilient to climate change over the long term. “If we do it that way,” Reiter said, “it will provide benefits today but it will also provide benefits a hundred years from now.”ICN provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going.Inside Climate News uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept this policy.Accept

On a warm, sunny afternoon in late November, Roger Cornwell stopped his pickup near the edge of a harvested rice field to avoid spooking a great blue heron standing still as a statute, alert for prey. He pointed to a dozen or so great egrets at the opposite end of the field as a chorus of killdeer sang a high lonesome tune in the distance.&nbsp;of the region’s historic wetlands, flooded croplands provide food and habitat that help egrets, sandhill cranes and other iconic water birds get through the winter. Inundating fallow fields mimics the way rivers breached their banks 150 years ago,...

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California Farmers Work to Create a Climate Change Buffer for Migratory Water Birds - Inside Climate News

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