… Rice farmers in the Central Valley flood their fields when the growing season ends, generally around November, and keep them flooded until February to help the leftover vegetation decompose. They plant their crop after the fields dry out in late spring. The program pays rice farmers in the birds’ flight path to flood their fields a bit earlier in the fall and leave them flooded later in the spring. This creates habitat when the migratory birds need it the most, as they fly southward in the late summer and early fall and pass through again on their way north in the spring. Daniel Karp, a researcher at UC Davis who studies conservation in working landscapes and is not involved in BirdReturns, sees the program as a rare conservation win. … While it’s far from a complete solution, “it’s this weird rare circumstance where you have a large industrial-scale intensive agricultural system that can simultaneously support wildlife,” Karp said.