Snow geese, sewage and saving the Salton

The Salton Sea ? located in the Imperial Valley south of Indio ? sounds lovely. This 35-mile long inland lake, the largest body of water in California, sparkles in a desert valley bordered by the colorful Chocolate Mountains. Birds abound on the water and in the agricultural fields and feedlots that surround it. Some species are found nowhere else in Southern California. That’s why Vic goes there four times every year to lead birding trips.

I usually stay home. If you’ve ever been there, you know why. For one thing, the Salton Sea stinks. Sometimes the smell of rotting fish hangs so heavy on the air that you almost gag. Ammonia rising off all those feedlots burns your eyes and throat. The smell of manure drifts with the breeze, clinging to your clothing and following you into the diners.

Air quality can be horrid, with windstorms kicking up enough dust to choke a tractor engine. Because the burning of old stubble fields is an important part of agriculture in this region, smoke can be harsh on some days, a major irritant to eyes, throat and lungs. The weather in winter is usually nice, but summer temperatures soar into the 120s. And it’s not a dry heat.

And then there’s the New River. It is America’s most polluted waterway. It flows north from Mexico, passing through Mexicali on its way to the Salton Sea. The New River is filled with raw sewage from Mexico, plus industrial pollutants and the occasional dead animal. The river is so filthy that huge piles of white foam float down the brown river hour after hour, day after day, year after year, pouring pollution into the Salton Sea.

There is no outlet. Like the Great Salt Lake in Utah, the Salton Sea takes water in but loses it only through evaporation. Herbicides, pesticides and other pollutants that flow into the sea become more concentrated. Of all the chemicals that are rising in concentration, the most important may be salt, ordinary sodium chloride. The Salton Sea is already one-quarter more salty than ocean water. Projections are that in a few decades it will be as salty as the Dead Sea. And just as dead.

This year I decided to accompany Vic to Imperial for the ninth annual Salton Sea Birding Festival. The birding was spectacular, and the sight of those fields of bright green alfalfa, onions, sugar beets and field greens alternating with tan stubble fields was magnificent.

Going to the Imperial Valley is like stepping back in time fifty years. We bounced over an extensive grid-work of gravel and dirt farm roads laid out at intervals of a mile, just like Orange County in its farm days. We found burrowing owls everywhere, just like Orange County in times past. Fields filled with snow geese, cattle egrets, ibises, mountain plovers and long-billed curlews delighted us. Instead of hearing traffic and sirens, we heard honks, quacks and the whoosh of wings as thousands of birds took flight over our heads. At sunset, a million gulls headed toward the sea.

The locals are still amazed that people will come to their area for the birds. At the festival banquet, one of the members of the Chamber of Commerce recounted the original reaction of the local farmers to the idea of a bird festival. The late Jim Kuhn, a leading farmer of the area, was also a birding enthusiast. He had seen how birding festivals lure in birders and their tourist dollars. Ten years ago, he proposed to the Chamber of Commerce that they hold a festival.

“Dang birds,” said the farmers, “they eat our crops.”

“But people will pay to come see the birds,” Kuhn protested.

The farmers’ response: “People will pay to watch the birds eat our crops?”

They didn’t understand the sport of birding. But farmers aren’t stupid. When a thousand birders showed up for the first festival, they got the idea that it was a good thing for the local economy.

It’s hard to say how much longer the Salton Sea will be a birding paradise. The salt and pollution levels are so high now that the few fish that remain are no longer reproducing. Every summer, birds sicken and die by the thousands.

There are several proposals on the table for restoration of the Salton Sea, but it will probably involve dividing the sea and letting the majority of it die and dry up in order to clean up a small segment of it.

And then there is the complication of the New River. As polluted and filthy as that waterway is, it brings fresh water each year into the Salton Sea ? water that is needed for the sea’s restoration. Now the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California wants to buy the rights to that water, clean it up and sell it to us as drinking water. Ugh.

If the Salton Sea is to be saved as a wildlife refuge, it will take the people of the populous California coast to make it happen.

Face it, there are far more people here than in the Imperial Valley. It is up to us whether or not the Salton Sea will be restored. If you’re looking for the next big battle to save habitat for birds, that’s it. For more information, log onto Saltonseacoalition.org.

The Salton Sea doesn’t have to die.