Astonishing bird counts at California’s dying Salton Sea
After trudging through slippery muck to the edge of California’s vast, dwindling Salton Sea last summer, wildlife biologists were astounded by what they and fellow surveyors found: A quarter-million birds were ultimately tallied, feasting along what was supposed to be a much mourned near-dead zone on the 4,000-mile-long Pacific flyway. … Snowy plovers that had flown in from the region’s Pacific Coast were joined by dense flocks of western and least sandpipers, newly arrived from far-flung Arctic breeding grounds. It was more than double the previous one-day shore bird count record in the 1990s, before the Salton Sea’s woes accelerated, and came just four years after biologists had despairingly concluded bird life had largely been wiped out at California’s largest, often ignored water body.