In a Dark Time

I’ve long wanted to visit The Salton Sea, a well-known winter sanctuary for birds. I also knew that visiting in June I wasn’t likely to see many birds, but we were driving by on our way from Goodyear to Fresno, and we didn’t need to be in Fresno until the next day. And I really wanted to see it. So.

The birding was definitely limited, but I’m still glad we stopped and talked to the State Rangers at the Park Headquarters. We discovered that the Salton Sea isn’t quite man-made, but it’s not a natural feature either. ChatGPT explains its origin more clearly than I can:

In 1905, engineers diverting water from the Colorado River for irrigation lost control of the river after heavy flooding. For nearly two years, the entire Colorado River poured into the Salton Sink because levees and diversion works failed. By the time the breach was finally closed in 1907, an enormous inland sea had formed.

Since then, the lake has survived not because it has a natural outlet or regular river inflow, but because it receives:

• Agricultural runoff from the surrounding irrigated farmland.
• Water from the New River and Alamo River, which carry irrigation drainage.

The bad news is that farmers who receive water from the Colorado River for their crops have had to agree to stop leakage from their irrigation system, which means that the sea is steadily receding and becoming more saline. Without steps to save it, it could well disappear within 20 years and disrupt wildlife migrations.

Hopefully, they/we will find a way to preserve part of the lake without endangering the migratory birds any more than we already do. It’s criminal to ignore the environmental damage our way of life has inflicted, but that awareness should also make us grateful for the wildlife that still shares our world.

In that spirit, we walked the beach where we were greeted by this Albert’s Towhee, a bird that looks a lot like a California Towhee but is quite dissimilar from the Spotted Towhee we have in the Pacific Northwest.

We saw several American Avocets

but not in the numbers we saw earlier in our trip or you could expect to see in the Spring migration.

We also saw this gull at Bear River, but I didn’t recognize it because I seldom see immature Bonaparte’s Gulls.

It was a treat seeing this Blue-winged Teal since they are rare in the Pacific Northwest, and it has been a couple of years since I’ve seen one in Colorado

It’s been even longer since I’ve seen a Redhead, so long that I didn’t know what it was until I could get back to my computer.

I doubt I would visit the Salton Sea again unless it’s during November through February when birds are migrating.

I started this record of our recent trip to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge with a shot of an American Avocet and a White-faced Ibis. If I had had a shot that included those two and a Black-necked Stilt, birds I call Tres Compadres because they are so often seen together. So, after featuring the other two, I thought I would end this review of our trip with some shots of the White-Faced Ibis.

I’ll have to admit that I usually end up presenting shots of White-faced Ibis last because I find them the hardest to edit. I shoot almost all my photos in RAW format because it gives me the best way to adjust colors. Unfortunately, it’s hard to know how to adjust shadows and whites in shots of White-faced Ibis so that the photo looks like what I actually saw.

I’m never really sure what I saw because the color of the plumage is never the same. ChatGPT offers this description of its color:

The White-faced Ibis is not actually white overall. Its body is predominantly a dark, glossy color that changes depending on the light.

Key coloration includes:

• Body: Deep chestnut-brown to dark reddish-brown.
• Wings and back: Iridescent, with metallic green, bronze, purple, and magenta highlights that shimmer in sunlight.
• Face (breeding season): A thin border of white feathers surrounds the bare reddish facial skin, giving the bird its common name.
• Eyes: Bright red in adults during the breeding season.
• Legs: Reddish to pinkish.

Outside the breeding season, the white border around the face becomes much less distinct or disappears, making the bird look darker overall.

So, although it’s called a “White-faced” Ibis, only the narrow facial border is white during breeding season. The rest of the bird is a rich, dark brown with a striking iridescent green and purple sheen.

To complicate matters, the birds like to feed in the reeds, which create their own irregular shadows. Even though I lightened this shot a little bit, the bright colors are barely noticeable. I’ll have to admit that because my glasses turn dark in bright sunlight, birds often seem darker than they really are.

This shot emphasizes the dark reddish chest, but I could have easily popped the colors so the chest stands out more than it does here, but that would have drawn attention away from that remarkable beak.

I “cheated” on this shot, lightening the subject and darkening the background because it was nearly white — certainly not the bluish color it appeared to be when I took this shot.

I really don’t like it when photographers “pop” the colors in scenics, making real-life experiences seem less powerful than they really are, but the more you work with photos, the more you learn that they are less realistic then they are representative.

Where you find American Avocets, you will usually find Black-Necked Stilts. Bear River is no exception, though on this visit we saw a lot more Avocets than Stilts. I tend to prefer pictures of Avocets to pictures of Black-Necked Stilts, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to get good shots of the Stilts.

Usually, I prefer close-ups like this shot of a Stilt probing the mud flats for food,

or this shot of one taken at medium range with it’s reflection in the water,

but my favorite shot on this visit was this long shot showing the stilt in its natural habitat.

Sometimes I think we let our equipment determine what we photograph and how we photograph it. There’s no arguing that expensive equipment can capture better photographs when used well, but our equipment also tends to determine what we emphasize in our photography. I’ve spent a lot of money on telephoto lenses (probably far too much), so I tend to emphasize closeups and ignore better shots I might have gotten if I’d backed off the zoom.

Close-ups can show us details we would otherwise never see, but they eliminate the surrounding environment. By necessity, the photographer feels that environment, but it can’t be experienced in the same way sitting in front of a computer screen.

The Avocets we saw on the alternate auto tour were acting very differently from the large group pictured on the previous blog entry. They were acting the way I would expect them to act after years of photographing them. All of them we saw on the temporary auto route were paired up and feeding together,

or nesting, with a mate standing protectively nearby.

We saw several nesting beside the road, so close that I worried about the safety of their chicks when they hatched.

The only violence we saw here was an American Avocet chasing away a Black-Necked Stilt that might have been too close to its nest.

I’ll have to admit that if we didn’t live so far away, I would be there regularly to get shots of the Avocet chicks about now.