NILAND — It began as an accident — a huge inland lake created more than 100 years ago when an irrigation-canal breach flooded a lonely corner of California desert with rushing Colorado River water.
But despite its unplanned start, the Salton Sea now serves a crucial ecological purpose.
It’s one of the last rest stops and breeding grounds left for millions of migrating birds, representing more than 400 species, that travel the Pacific Flyway — a bird superhighway that runs the western length of North America.
The birds, some of which are already endangered, rely on the Salton Sea’s tilapia-filled waters to survive as wetlands, rivers and lakes elsewhere have been lost to development in the past century. Experts have warned for years that more species would see their numbers plummet — with more becoming endangered and even extinct — if nothing is done to curb the rising salinity at the sea.
“Tilapia are the last game fish in the sea. If we hit their salt limit — and I think it will be soon — suddenly they are all going to go belly up in a short period of time,” University of Redlands Professor Timothy Krantz, an expert on the troubled sea, said last week. “And talk about a stink — that’s not going to be a pretty picture at all.”
Birds flying across the hemisphere feed on those fish at the sea, essentially a large oasis planted favorably in the middle of the desert. According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 70 percent of all bird species in California are seen at the Salton Sea’s waters and one third of all bird species that breed in the state breed there.
Continued: http://www.mydesert.com/article/20120923/NEWS0701/309230036/Sea-remains-key-survival-migrating-birds?nclick_check=1
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