If you know anything about the Salton Sea, maybe you’ve heard that California’s largest lake has been shrinking for decades, the fish are dying, and toxic dust from the lakebed is blowing around the Coachella Valley. The term “apocalyptic” gets thrown around.
For the people who live here, that’s not a helpful way to think of the place.
“We always dissuade people from using [the term] ‘apocalyptic wasteland’ because it discourages investment,” says Aydee Palomino, an environmental justice campaign manager for the nonprofit Alianza Coachella Valley.
Thinking of the Salton Sea as a place that’s doomed can make it hard to see it as a place in the middle of dramatic change, affected in real time by humans — and lately by the equivalent of a really big faucet.
Long-running plans to add more water — more sustainable water — to the edges of the sea are now coming online, which should be great news for the region’s most devoted tourists: the birds.
A sandpiper considers the present state of the Salton Sea and its delicious bugs. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
Let’s say you’re a bird — a sandpiper, maybe. One of those very cute but very intense shorebirds that spends all its time pacing back and forth at the edge of the water, looking like you're questioning your life choices.
One of those choices was to fly from South America to Alaska — just because that's what everybody in your family has done since the beginning of time. Which is how you ended up here, dragging your little feet in the mud of the Salton Sea, looking for something to eat.
The Salton Sea is an avian scene: Some 400 species of birds — like you — come through what’s called the Pacific Flyway on their migratory routes. What are they looking for? Kind of the same thing people were looking for here in 1960 when the Salton Sea was sold as a paradise of weekend boaters and tanned men in very short swim trunks.
As a bird, you don’t have opinions on swim trunks, but you’ve historically enjoyed the abundance of fish, the camaraderie, the easy living.
Vestiges of an extinct species of the Salton Sea — vacationers — can still be found around the lakeshore. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
But as water is rerouted from the lake to San Diego and other urban areas, the Salton Sea is getting saltier. So the fish are dying off, and the fish-eating birds, like pelicans, are also going elsewhere as the place changes.
“You can see it in the shoreline in front of you and in the birds — just knowing which birds were there before and which birds are here now, there’s been a lot of changes,” says Kurt Leuschner, a professor of natural resources at the College of the Desert, as he sits at a picnic table looking out at the shoreline that used to be a lot closer. “You wonder how the birds figure it all out, or how fast they can adapt.”
Kurt Leuschner takes it all in from a seat amid the art installations of Bombay Beach. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
Leuschner has been studying birds here since he was a kid in the late ‘70s.
He’s seen how the politics of water have changed this whole area.
“Some of these shorebirds may actually be benefiting from the exposed shoreline of the sea,” he says. “As the sea recedes, it’s actually creating more habitat for certain birds,” which is maybe good news if you’re a sandpiper, “but unfortunately the salt levels have gotten so high in the main body of water that the fishery has collapsed, and so the fish-eating birds are not visiting the sea like they used to.”
Changes to the Salton Sea show up in strange ways, like the series of hats that mark the decreasing depth of the lake (from 240 feet to 239 feet here). Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
To save the birds and the people, in 2017, the state launched what was intended to be a 10-year plan to create new habitat and dust-suppression areas. Among other innovations, state agencies are building wide, shallow ponds with islands and greenery that give birds a place to go and that keep the dust down. The goal is eventually to create 9,000 acres or more of pop-up wetlands.
In April, after years of delay and more than $200 million spent on construction, the Species Conservation Habitat Project began flooding thousands of acres on the lake’s south side.
Wading birds enjoy the remains of a wetland at the south end of the Salton Sea. Photo by Brandon R. Reynolds.
For Leuschner, who’s seen decades of changes firsthand, he doesn’t look at the shifting shoreline as evidence of the apocalyptic last act of the Salton Sea. It’s just a new chapter.
“The birds and the people are going to need to adjust to a changing Salton Sea, and hopefully they will,” he says. “But it’s not going to dry up and go away. It’s going to remain a very important habitat along the Pacific Flyway for millions of birds each year.”