Suddenly I wanted to see the jetty again, so I hopped in my car and drove to the remote site. I saw the Spiral Jetty was now high and dry. Drifting sand had already started to bury parts of it. The water’s edge was now over 300 yards away. I thought of the millions of migratory birds that would be arriving in the spring to rest and feast on the tiny treasures of the lake, the brine shrimp. I hoped a smaller lake would still be enough for all of them.
The recent words of the director of Friends of the Great Salt Lake, Lynn de Freitas, rang in my head: “The Great Salt Lake is a gift that keeps on giving. Just add water.”
Case, William, GEOSIGHTS: PINK WATER, WHITE SALT CRYSTALS, BLACK BOULDERS, AND THE RETURN OF SPIRAL JETTY!, Survey Notes, v. 35 no. 1, Utah Geological Survey (UGS), Utah Department of Natural Resources, January 2003, https://geology.utah.gov/map-pub/survey-notes/geosights/spiral-jetty/
Female Rufous Hummingbird(Selasphorus rufus) on Red Flowering Current(Ribes sanguineum) Courtesy US FWS, Peter Pearsall, PhotographerWhen we are hungry, we head for the kitchen. When birds are hungry they head for plants. Native plants, in particular provide important sources of food for birds and other wildlife.
Native plants play an important role in an ecosystem, providing the best habitat for wildlife. They are species of plants that have grown naturally in an area and thrive in an environment that matches the soils, moisture, and weather of a particular locality.
Arrowleaf Balsamroot Hyde Park, UT Courtesy & Copyright Linda L’AiThere are mutually beneficial connections for plants and birds that have evolved together. Native plants are a veritable market place for birds offering them nuts, seeds, fruits, nectar, and tasty bugs. They have an important influence on a bird’s diet, feeding habits, and even migration patterns. And as birds feed on the local fare they spread pollen and seeds.
This data gathered by Audubon’s Plants for Birds Program supports the planting of native species whenever possible.
96% of land birds feed insects to their chicks.
Native oak trees host over 530 species of caterpillars while non-native ginkgo trees host just 4.
To raise one nest of chickadee babies, parents must gather between 6,000 and 9,000 caterpillars.
Suburban yards planted with native species host 8 times more native birds.
Birds shape their migration patterns around native plants. Plants that produce fleshy fruit duirng the late summer and fall provide birds with the energy needed for long migrations.
Urbanization has resulted in a threat to native plants. According to Audubon, the continental United States has lost over 150 million acres of native habitat due to urban sprawl. Fragmentation of native plant habitat is believed to be due to the construction of cities, roads and river flow reservoirs. All of these, combined with a changing climate’s impact on timing of insect hatching and flowers opening, present many challenges to our birds.
Northern Flicker Courtesy & Copyright Linda L’AiYou can help improve the connection between native plants and birds by adding native plants to your landscape. The native plants database developed by Audubon provides users with customized lists of native plants specific to your area, as well as the steps needed to evaluate which plants will find success in your soil. You can find the website at Audubon.org/plantsforbirds. It’s as easy as putting in the area code, then clicking search. There are over 40 native plants listed for the Cache Valley area.
Dark-eyed Junco Courtesy & Copyright Linda L’AiFinches, sparrows, and chickadees are common birds to our area and are attracted to the seeds of the common sunflower.
The Wild plum, provides fleshy fruit for sparrows and chickadees and insects for woodpeckers.
Milkweeds attract hummingbirds and insect pollinators and serve as larval hosts for Monarch Butterflies.
Growing native plants is something we all can do in our yards or in the community to help bird populations increase now and in the future. Consider this: native plants that are adapted to the local region require less water, fertilizers and no pesticides.
Check out Audubon.org/plantsforbirds to find out more.
If you really dig birds, try digging native plants into your garden!
I’m Linda L’Ai with the Bridgerland Audubon Society, and I’m Wild About Utah!
Tallamy, Doug, Sustainable Landscaping, Research, University of Delaware, May 2, 2013, 2.26 min, https://youtu.be/NTbPNwNIoLs
Tallamy, Doug, Eierman, Kim, EcoBeneficial Interview: Dr. Doug Tallamy In His Garden on the Importance of Native Plants, EcoBeneficial!, Nov 22, 2013, 29:30 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w39g_f7BMUk
Male Mallard, Wings Set Courtesy Pixabay, Ilona Ilyés(ilyessuti), PhotographerIf it flies like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, but there’s hundreds in a maelstrom whirlpool whose torrent of wingbeats make your ears mute and skull hum, it must be a Great Salt Lake tornado a la duck.
This past waterfowl season, I saw them out in some of the flats not yet trammeled by cover brush in the wetlands which drain the Bear River to the Great Salt Lake. The experience was possible because my friend, a well-seasoned duck hunter, had “a spot” he wanted to check out. We headed out at 4:30 in the morning from town, drove to the icy ramp, and put in his boat. We navigated the winding canals lined with irreconcilable phragmites in the black until we reached an end. When he cut the engine, nothing but the sound of water trickling from unnamed subfoliage passageways could be heard. We unloaded our equipment, moored the vessel, and took off on foot for “the spot”.
We hauled floating coffins with our gear: decoys, grass blankets, some food, and our hunting tools. The air was cold, but hauling sleds through muck and knee deep water is warm work. We could see the delicate prints of yesterday’s game puttering in the mud, foraging for fuel. Our heavy feet cratered their Pollack art, mud streaking behind and steam rising as we trudged on.
When we found the spot to set up near a small patch of open water just deep enough, we set out the decoys, took our positions, hid, and waited until the clock struck the shooting hour. With the sun yawning from behind the morning’s dense clouds, the tornados began.
They started to the west on a rest pond and slowly rose about a half mile out, an acrid steam swirling along magnetic edges of lazy morning thermals. Slowly, the steam became more dense, a heavier molecularity, and yet somehow like the paint stretching off a worn artist’s haggard brush, harnessed a fluid winged chaos into streaks of prehistoric migratory cosmos.
Once a feathered mass rises and begins its molasses churn about its night’s pond, it is as if an intuition shoots through the birds, and they become an it, and suddenly strike off unified in a particular direction on the morning flight. One such wave comes our way.
You don’t hear the mass at first, but when you do it begins with quacks. Their distant airy rasps build as they approach and eye our decoys and open water. It gains slowly, like Holst’s Mars, or Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries, a romantic era symphony of avian legions unified by the course of cacophonous time. It’s epic and deeply beautiful.
Soon, they decide to give our hole a scout and the whirlwind aims itself at us. The squadrons of drakes and hens give passing dives. This is where the real magic lies; nothing makes your hair stand on end like the sound of cupped duck wings catching air, braking in the atmosphere with such force, and then throwing on the afterburners to pull back up towards their comrades. It makes F-35s look like the Wright brothers’ Kitty Hawk flier. That howl as air is held compressed beneath stressed wings comes in from all angles. We are transfixed within the eye.
Northern Shovelers Flying Courtesy US FWS, Steve Hillebrand, PhotographerAnd as quickly as the tornado cometh, it also flyeth away. The music dissipates as the breath of ancient gods gains altitude, eyes another pond, and moves on from us. The duck tornado roars on.
So even if you’re not a hunter, or even that keen on ducks, there is nothing quite like a duck tornado; a force in this world which once was commonplace with the other primal elements of nature, but now only rarely seen in those last lightly touched places. Know that they’re out there, and if you can, one day go looking for them. Gaze at the power, the glory, and the mystery of the Great Salt Lake wetland duck tornados. You’ll never forget it.
Do you have similar memories in the wild with your grandparents recorded somehow? Turning to one of my favorite books, “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” I read again how Terry Tempest Williams described the memories with her grandmother among avocets, ibises, and western grebes during their outings in Utah’s Great Salt Lake wetlands. Grandmother Mimi shared her birding fascination with her granddaughter Terry along the burrowing owl mounds of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge. Williams wrote, “It was in 1960, the same year she gave me my Peterson’s Field Guide to Western Birds. I know this because I dated their picture. We have come back every year since to pay our respects.”
I’m not a grandmother yet, but I will one day make a trek over Hades Pass again, gaze at the Grandaddy Basin below, and capture nature’s poetry with pen, camera lens, and little hiker hands in mine. Bloggers have technologies today to share instantly with me and the rest of the world their adventures in this Grandaddy Wilderness region. Documenting autobiographical history has evolved from dusty diaries and scrapbooks with black-and-white photographs to today’s digital image- and video-filled blogs in exciting ways that can include the places in Utah you love with the generations you love. Consider it your contribution to history.
