Birds Aren't the Only Thing to See at a Great Valley Wildlife Refuge

River Otter at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

California's Great Valley (called by some less proud people the Central Valley) is the most agriculturally productive place on the planet, producing something like a quarter of the nation's nuts, fruits and vegetables on about 2 percent of the land. The agricultural and accompanying urban development has altered 95% of the original savanna landscape. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in the 1800s the valley was a vast prairie/grassland that stretched for 400 miles, broken up here and there by a vast network of rivers and wetland marshes fed by numerous streams flowing from the Sierra Nevada.

Raccoon at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

For several million years the valley was the wintering ground for millions, maybe billions of migratory birds that spent their summers breeding in the Arctic. The arrival of humans and their alteration of the landscape disrupted this intricate ecosystem. The birds continued to migrate in reduced numbers and with their natural food sources gone, they started going after the crops being grown by farmers. This became an untenable situation, and there were those who advocating shooting the birds to extinction, but cooler heads prevailed, and work began on establishing a chain of national and state bird refuges at strategic locations up and down the valley. These refuges provide us an idea of the primeval appearance of the valley.

Deer at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

It turns out of course that birds weren't the only creatures displaced by human development. The original valley was a savanna with multitudes of grazing animals and their predators. There were elk, deer, and pronghorns, along with wolves, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, mountain lions, and bears. Prior to 12,000 years ago, there were mammoths, mastodons, giant sloths, saber-tooth cats, and giant short-faced bears. To a degree, the refuges that were originally meant for birds also provide shelter for the remnants of this incredible ecosystem. In my travels, I've seen the elk and deer pictured in this post along with river otters, raccoons, foxes, and coyotes.

Tule Elk at the San Luis National Wildlife Refuge

Today's post was prompted by my sighting yesterday of three River Otters crossing a road at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. They were moving so fast that by the time I was able to raise my camera, only one was left, and I got but a single shot.

A Visit to a Remaining Piece of America's Serengeti: A Great Valley Love Story

Red-shouldered Hawk at entrance to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

Every so often, I remember what an extraordinary place I live in. It's sometimes easy to forget while dealing with the air pollution, the lingering drought, and the seemingly non-ending recession, but California's Great Valley is one of the most important provinces in the United States. It provides something like 25% of the nation's fruits and vegetables, and is the world's leading producer of almonds and a number of other products. Despite being almost completely altered by agricultural and urban development, a few remnants of the original landscape survive. It's a reminder that America once had its own version of the plains of the Serengeti (translation: "endless plains").

Along the auto tour route at the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge

The Great Valley extends for 400 miles from Redding to Bakersfield, averaging 50 miles in width. It is extraordinarily flat, with most parts lying below 300 feet in elevation. Practically the only exception is an extinct volcano called the Sutter Buttes north of Sacramento, which rise some 2,000 feet over the valley floor. The mountains loom on the horizon of the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge, where I paid a visit a few weeks ago. It was like exploring the Great Valley in another geological age.

The refuge is a year-round home for many species, but it really comes alive during the winter, when tens of thousands of migratory birds arrive from the far north. A seven mile-long auto route allows for a leisurely exploration. It's a great place to be introduced to the natural landscape of the valley, although there are many others that are equally spectacular (the Merced, San Luis, and San Joaquin being other excellent choices). I just happened to take most of these pictures during my visit at the Sacramento NWR last month.

Gadwalls at the Sacramento NWR

The Great Valley originated as a shallow sea along the subduction zone and trench that dominated the western coast of the North American continent for more than a hundred million years during the Mesozoic Era, the time of the dinosaurs. The sea occupied a sedimentary trough called a forearc basin. As the basin filled with sediment, the weight of the layers pressed the crust downward, allowing more sediments to accumulate. Over time, vast thicknesses piled up, in places reaching 25,000 to 50,000 feet (7,500 to 15,000 meters).

Northern Pintails at the Sacramento NWR

The subduction zone began to transform into a new plate boundary beginning about 30 million years ago. Instead of the convergence of the crust, the plates began to slide laterally, forming the San Andreas fault system (this type of boundary is actually called a transform boundary). The crust along the transform  crumpled, causing the uplift of the Coast Ranges just a few million years ago (the mountains are among the youngest ranges in the world). The shallow sea receded and became dry land in recent geologic time.

Ring-necked Pheasants are masters of camouflage...well sort of.

The valley has a Mediterranean climate, with warm dry summers and cool (but not cold) wet winters. The amount of precipitation ranges from very low in the south to relatively high in the north, but for the most part the ground cover is a grassland savanna, with oak woodlands in the wetter areas. Numerous rivers flowing from the adjacent Sierra Nevada supported mile after mile of riparian habitats and wetlands. Swamps and marshes dominate the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. These environments provide habitat for a staggering variety of wildlife.

The original prairies supported vast herds of elk and pronghorns, along with deer, and numerous smaller species of rodents. In earlier times, the landscape supported mammoths and mastodons, bison, ground sloths, horses, and camels. When humans arrived, this rich habitat was forever changed. Many of the species went extinct, or were driven elsewhere. Only about 5% of the original landscape remains.

Despite the horrible destruction of the original ecosystem, patches survived. The vast flocks of migratory birds, though much diminished, still flew into the valley and occupied what corners they could. Members of a subspecies of the elk endemic to the valley, the Tule Elk, were once common across the valley floor. They were hunted mercilessly for hides and meat until they were thought to be extinct around the 1860s. A single breeding pair was discovered in 1874, and after twenty years only two dozen of the elk survived in a single refuge in the south valley.

Ring-necked Ducks at the Sacramento NWR

In the early 1900s, a new ethos emerged, the idea that humans needed to nurture and protect the ecosystem that sustained life on the planet (although few at the time would have worded it this way!). In some cases, the actions came about because favored species had become depleted from over-hunting. In other cases, it happened because migratory birds were damaging agricultural fields because they had no other sources of food. Whatever the reasons and motives, the result was the establishment of hundreds of wildlife refuges across the United States. A series of refuges span the length of the Great Valley like a string of pearls. Animals once on the edge of extinction were brought back from the brink. The Tule Elk now number in the thousands. The Aleutian Cackling Goose, also once thought extinct (a flock of 600 survived on a remote and rarely visited island) number in the hundreds of thousands. The refuges have played a pivotal role in survival of dozens of endangered species.

It is an amazing privilege to experience a place like the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge (and the dozens of others across the valley) in fall and winter as the migratory flocks arrive. I was stunned to find that this incredible movement of birds was taking place here literally under my nose (okay, over my nose) during the first 25 years I was living here. I was so busy exploring the more showy Sierra Nevada or California coastline that I failed to recognize the treasure that lay just a few miles away from my backyard. I can barely describe the noise of tens of thousands of birds taking flight all at once. It's not just their calling back and forth. It's the sheer compression of all those wings beating at once.

The Snow, Ross's, White-fronted, and Cackling Geese are the very visible and charismatic parts of the ecosystem of the valley, but they are only part of a chain that includes many other species of plants and animals. The challenge of the refuges is in re-creating and sustaining the entire "circle of life", as certain Disney movies might put it. With this basic challenge there is a myriad of conflicts and compromises with the many other stakeholders of our valley, especially when it comes to the issue of water.

Ross's Geese at the Sacramento NWR

My videos from the Sacramento NWR didn't quite work out, but a week later I caught the same species of geese at the San Joaquin National Wildlife Refuge. There are thousands of them taking to the air all at once.

There is another critical part missing from this ecosystem. It's the loss of predators. There are still birds of prey like the Red-shoulder Hawk at the beginning of the post, and the Red-tailed Hawk below. There are the occasional foxes and coyotes that have learned to survive among the human invaders. People have brought their cats and dogs. But the valley was once home to the California Grizzly Bear, the much-larger Short-faced Bear, the American Lion, the Sabertooth Cat, and the Dire Wolf. These animals died out at the end of the Ice Age, although the Grizzly survived into the 20th century. When the large grazing animals disappeared, so did the larger predators.

Red-tailed Hawk at the Sacramento NWR

The Great Valley is a challenge. It's a challenge to live here, it's a challenge to fully understand. In the face of so many land-use issues, it is challenge to one's sanity. But it is also a fascinating place, one that retains a precious link to the past, when it was a functioning ecosystem with a diversity of animals and plants that was the rival to any African savanna. It's worth the effort to explore and understand this landscape.

If you are one of my Modesto-area readers, please be sure to pay a visit to the Great Valley Museum of Natural History. The new museum is a wonderful resource for beginning to understanding the valley as it is and how it once was.

Evening Scenes of a Primeval Landscape: The Great Valley as it was

It's my home, and I've been known to denigrate it for it's pollution, dust, and visual desolation (hundreds of miles of monotonous agricultural fields). Only 5% of the original landscape of California's Great Valley remains. But there are times when my travels take me to places where I can travel back in time, and the natural beauty of the valley shines through. This week it was a return to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge near the small town of Willows just off Interstate 5. A six mile self-guided auto tour provides access to the refuge, and a visitor center provides interpretation.

As I have noted many times, the valley was a originally an arid savanna environment, with vast prairies, oak woodlands, with miles of riparian (river) habitat, and associated floodplain wetlands. The valley provided a living for horses, camels, antelope, bison, mammoths, mastodons, sloths, bears, sabertooth cats, lions, and dire wolves. After the great extinction at the end of the last ice age, the valley still had vast herds of pronghorn antelope, deer, and tule elk who were hunted by wolves, coyotes, grizzly bears, and mountain lions, and the new arrivals, the humans. Today the valley supports vast herds of dairy cows, pigs, and sheep (along with the occasional small herds of horses or llamas).

We had already traveled 400 miles, and had 160 to go, and the sun had just slipped below the horizon when we arrived at the refuge. Yet we couldn't resist the urge to stop and have a look at this fascinating spot that we had discovered only a month earlier. We thought we would be alone, but there were a dozen other cars on the auto tour. The natural environment of the Great Valley has a lot of appeal.

After a week of hectic traveling all over the northwest, the peacefulness of the twilight was a welcome moment. The birds, thousands upon thousands of Snow Geese, Ross's Geese, and numerous species of ducks, were settling in for the night.

The valley serves as a winter haven for many dozens of species of birds who spend the summers far to the north, in Canada and Alaska. We rarely have freezing nights or snow, and the wetlands and grasslands provide a source of food during the lean months. The string of federal, state and private wildlands and refuges up and down the valley provide a piece of the original environment that allows the birds and other animals to survive.

The darkness was growing as we came around the final corner of the auto tour. We noticed for the first time the moon high in the sky above us. After a week of gloomy overcast skies, it was a surprise to see that the moon was already half full. We drove back onto the paved highway, and headed home.

A Truly Great Valley: Ruminations on California's Most Valuable Resource

What is the most valuable mineral commodity in California, the so-called Golden State? Gold? Not hardly. We produced somewhere around 150 million ounces of the stuff over the last 160 years, netting riches for a few, and producing a sad heritage of scarred hillsides, fouled rivers and bays, and thousands of people (and their cultures) dead before their time.

So what is it? California has one of the largest ore bodies in the world of borate minerals, and we produce something like 50% of the world's supply of these important industrial chemicals. But their value pales in comparison to the most precious resource.

What about rare-earth elements?  For several decades California was the world's largest producer of these technologically important chemicals before being supplanted by China, which now produces around 95% of the world supply. Nope, it's not that one either.

There's oil, of course. We've been drilling it for more than a century, and currently produce around 200 million barrels a year. At current prices, maybe $15 billion a year. But that's not our most productive resource either.

No, our most valuable mineral resource is dirt. Or more specifically, soil. Our Great Valley is covered with it, and we produce incredible riches by converting the macronutrients stored on the surface of clay particles into carbohydrates, which are then consumed in large amounts by populations worldwide. In other words, we produce food. Lots and lots of food, more than 200 different kinds. For a variety of geological reasons, the soils in the Great Valley are among the richest, most productive on the planet. Our valley, comprising about 1% of the agricultural lands of the United States (about 15,000 sq. miles out of 1,500,000 sq. miles) produces about 25% of the country's table food.

I imagine that my description sounds a bit like a public relations campaign, but it's not. I was thinking about the valley, my home, as I traveled through the northern half of it on Thanksgiving weekend. For more than 200 miles, I passed one planted field after another pretty much without a break, other than a few widely spaced farm towns (Sacramento and Stockton being two huge urban exceptions). In that entire distance I could see but a view spots where the valley resembled anything like its natural condition, including the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge near Willows, and a  handful of river crossings. We have, I realized, treated our most valuable mineral resource the same way we dealt with gold when it was discovered: get as much out of it as possible, and damn any repercussions. We've tried to squeeze every last bit of profit from the rich soil, through the addition of fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and imported water until the natural ecosystem was in a shambles. Our valley is one of the most altered landscapes on the planet. The gold miners affected a few tens or hundreds of square miles with poisons and wastes. In the Great Valley we've affected around 15,000 square miles.

Of course, it couldn't be any other way. We have to eat, and the story of humans for the last 8,000 years or so is the development of agriculture leading to the development of cities and civilizations. We could not colonize a landscape like California without providing a source of food, shelter and water. The wistfulness in my thinking the other day is the fact that we did this thing with no planning, and no thought to sustainable development. The bounty of the valley was also sustaining millions of birds, grazing animals, amphibians, and fish, and we simply plowed over those habitats and many of the animals simply disappeared. It's only in the last few decades that we've started to recognize that we are truly part of a worldwide ecosystem, and that there is value in maintaining ecological diversity. We are finally setting aside some of the leftovers of our headlong development of the valley in an effort to provide for the millions of birds, fish and other animals that have depended on the valley for hundreds of thousands of years.

The Great Valley is a gigantic geological anomaly in the normally mountainous American west. It's incredibly flat, flatter maybe even than Florida or Louisiana. 400 miles long and around 30-40 miles wide, it is a vast trough that has been collecting sediments for around 140 million years, first as a seaway formed between a subduction zone and the coastline (a forearc basin), and later as a series of river floodplains and deltas. In places like Bakersfield, the thickness of the sediments approaches 10 miles. In my neck of the woods, they reach half that, a mere 25,000 feet or so (sort of an upside down Mt. Everest).

The "primeval" valley was mostly a dry savanna or short-grass prairie, more desert-like in the south, more oak woodland in the north. Dozens of rivers flowed out of the Sierra Nevada, providing hundreds of miles of riparian habitat. The rivers at the south end of the valley ended in huge ephemeral lakes, the now dry Buena Vista and Tulare lakes. Until 11,000 or 12,000 years ago, the valley teemed with horses, camels, antelope, bison, mammoths, mastodons, sloths, bears, sabertooth cats, lions, and dire wolves. After the great extinction at the end of the last ice age, the valley still had vast herds of pronghorn antelope, deer, and tule elk who were hunted by wolves, coyotes, grizzly bears, and mountain lions, and the new arrivals, the humans.

For birds, the valley was paradise. Sure, when the weather got hot billions of them migrated far to the Arctic north where they could consume the trillions of bugs and breed, but when the winter came, they migrated back to the snow-free Great Valley and fed on the marsh grasses, berries, fish, amphibians and bugs that lived along the rivers, marshes, lakes and other wetlands in the verdant valley.

So it was that I was visiting one of the few spots in the valley where one could imagine the way things once were before the agricultural revolution. The Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge is one of a series of reclaimed farmlands and marshes that serve as a winter home of hundreds of thousands of geese, ducks, cranes, and other migratory fowl, as well as the yearlong resident birds and other animals. It is, in fact, a highly regulated landscape, with square plots that are flooded some years, dry in others, managed in such a way as to provide as much forage for the birds as possible. But it recalls the primeval environment. Driving along the auto loop, we were quietly amazed at the sheer numbers of birds. There were thousands of Snow Geese, and at one point literally all of them took flight. The rush of thousands of flapping wings was like the sound of a jet plane.

A lot of us kind of take the Great Valley for granted. It's actually not the nicest place in the world to live, with foul air, dust and heat in the summer, cold tule fogs in the winter, high unemployment rates, and crushing poverty in many areas. But it is we who feed the rest of the state, and much of the rest of the country. We've made a kind of devil's bargain with the land, wresting as much nutrition as we can from the soil, and leaving a bit of the leftovers for the others who inhabit the planet with us. But if you can, give our valley a look, especially on a clear winter's day. I suggest a stop at a place like the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge just off Interstate 5 near Willows, or the Merced National Wildlife Refuge near Merced and Los Banos. You will be truly astounded to realize that we have our own small version of the Serengeti right here in the middle of the tilled fields.