Natural Perspectives:

Vic and I just returned from a three-day weekend in Yuma, Arizona and Brawley, California. In case that sounds like an odd vacation, I should point out that it was not a holiday for us. Vic was working, leading his natural history class for senior citizens on a field trip. I tagged along to provide comic relief.

This outing was mainly a birding trip, but we learned about other things as well. At Yuma, we visited Imperial Dam, where water from the Colorado River is diverted into California’s All-American Canal and Arizona’s Gila Gravity Main Canal.

To conserve water that was leaching into the sandy soil, the U.S. government began lining the All-American Canal with concrete. When completed, this project will conserve water for farmers in California’s Imperial Valley. But it will reduce water that is available to Mexican farmers. Their agriculture depends upon shallow wells that are fed by seepage from the canals. The Mexican farmers won an injunction against the U.S. government to stop work, but an appeals court in San Francisco recently overturned the injunction.

We saw work continuing on the concrete canal liners as we drove along I-8. Vic noted that the work was being done by the Kiewit Pacific Co., the same company that constructed the full tidal basin at Bolsa Chica.

Global climate change continues to impact the already parched southwest, and population growth on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border puts increased pressure on precious water supplies. Battles over water rights are likely to continue long into the future as we outstrip the supply.

From Yuma, we traveled to Brawley. From there, we drove around on the dirt roads of the Imperial Valley agricultural district for two days. After nearly 30 years of leading birding trips to the Salton Sea, Vic knows those roads as well as the streets in Huntington Beach. He knows exactly where to go to find specific species of birds.

We communicated with other vehicles in our 10-car caravan by walkie-talkie. Vic called out, “Kestrel at 2 o’clock, red-tailed hawk on the telephone pole on the left, flock of glossy ibis flying in on the right.” That allowed most people in the caravan to know what the various birds were that we passed. Of course, we stopped at a number of hot spots to search for birds on foot as well.