Willow flycatcher – Conservation Sense and Nonsense

We spent a few days in a small family-owned resort in Sierra City in mid-July. It’s an area we know well because we have visited many times in the past 25-years and taken many birding and geology courses at the nearby San Francisco State University Sierra Nevada Field Station.

It has been about 12 years since our last visit and we were expecting to see significant changes after a decade of drought. Our previous visits were also earlier in the summer, during nesting season in June, when birds are more active and vocal. As expected, the weather was much warmer than previous visits.

The Setting

Sierra City sits at the base of Sierra Buttes at 4,200 feet elevation. Sierra Buttes tower above at 8,560 feet. The Buttes are the remains of the lava flow of an ancient volcano. The soft rock surrounding the lava flow eroded away long ago and the harder rock has been sculpted several times by glaciers during past ice ages. The glaciers sculpted rocks on the valley floor into the basins of many lakes that remain today.

This area was occupied by a hunter-gatherer culture of Indigenous people for thousands of years. They migrated according to the seasonal harvests of plants and animals until Europeans arrived in 1850 to mine for gold. The first generation of the owners of the resort arrived as miners. When gold was exhausted, ranching became the family enterprise. When the recreational treasures of the area were discovered in the 1960s, the family converted the ranch to a resort in 1967. The economy of this area has evolved, just as its flora and fauna have.

Fire Hazard Mitigation?

The most significant change we observed since we were last in the Sierras is the massive timber operations. In the 12 miles from Sierra City to Yuba Pass at 6,700 feet, we saw roadside clearings created by cutting young trees. Huge piles of small-diameter logs and wood chips were stacked in the clearings (see below).

These clearings looked like fire hazard mitigation partly because of their proximity to the road and to campgrounds, but also because they destroyed small trees, which are more likely to ignite than big trees. On the other hand, the piles of logs and wood chips are more flammable than any living tree, big or small.

Thinning the forests is also a strategy to reduce competition for available moisture at a time of extreme drought. Extreme drought stress in the conifer forests of the Sierra Nevada is one of the primary causes of tree mortality in California in the past decade.

Commercial Logging?

When we reached the summit of the road at Yuba Pass, we saw another clearing that used a different strategy than those we had passed. The campground at Yuba Pass was entirely clear cut of all of its trees, big and small. Lonely picnic tables were surrounded by the stumps of large trees. Appropriately, the campground was closed and its bathroom locked (see below). No one would want to camp there now.

This destruction of the campground at Yuba Pass looks like a fire hazard mitigation project gone bad or a commercial logging operation at the expense of a campground at an important trail head that is used for winter cross-country skiing and summer hiking.

We visited the bar at our resort at the end of the day to get the perspective of the locals about these logging operations on Highway 49. We learned that they are controversial with the locals, but there is no vocal opposition to them in a small community of only 200 year-round residents. (The bartender said the community was more concerned about AT&T’s threats to disconnect their landline phones because the community does not have a cell phone tower.)

However, the public’s reaction to the destruction of the campground at Yuba Pass was much stronger than to the thinning of young trees. The rumor is that the contractor who clear cut the campground at Yuba Pass did not do what they were supposed to do. The Yuba Pass project is considered a rogue operation by the locals.

We also learned that the piles of logs and wood chips will eventually be hauled away to be used as biofuels to generate electricity. As the wood is burned, the carbon stored in the wood will be released into the atmosphere, contributing to greenhouse gases that cause climate change. Some of the dead wood has already been removed. Nine months after the trees were destroyed, much still remains to be removed. Meanwhile, the piles are clearly a fire hazard. Fire hazards are increased in the short term by dead wood and in the long term by contributing to global warming.

Tree Mortality

At Yuba Pass, we began to see first-hand the tree mortality in the Sierra Nevada we had been reading about in the media for years. We saw many dead red firs as well as one of the symptoms of more red fir deaths in the near future.

Adjacent to dead red fir trees, younger red fir trees were heavily loaded with cones, which are an indication that the tree is making a last gasp for survival of the species by trying to produce a big, new generation of trees (see above).

As we drove over the summit to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada we could see the scale of the death of red and white firs. The eastern side of the Sierras is drier than the gently-sloping western side, which receives the moist air from the ocean. The Sierras drop steeply on the eastern side to the Great Basin, which extends into Nevada as a dry, hot desert. (see below)

Dead conifers at Yuba Pass in October 2022. Source: Sierra Nevada Conservancy

Until 2022, tree mortality in the Sierra Nevada range was confined to southern and central portions of the range and at lower elevations. An aerial survey of trees in the northern portions of the range in October 2022 found 28 million dead red and white firs at higher elevations. Red and white firs are higher elevation conifers and were therefore harder hit than lower elevation conifers in this portion of the range.*

Ecological “restorations” are never done

We visited a restoration project on the eastern side of Yuba Pass at Carmen Meadow. The project was done about 20 years ago. We wanted to see how it was progressing.

The meadow had been the home of rare willow flycatchers until it dried out, killing the willows that were home to the flycatchers. A berm had been built as the roadbed of a railroad. The berm diverted water into the creek, digging its channel lower than the meadow, draining water from the meadow into the creek. A check-dam was built to divert water channeled by the berm from the creek into the meadow, restoring water to the meadow. The flycatchers returned when the willows returned.

We had last seen Carmen Meadow over 12 years ago. Although willows remained, there were also young Jeffrey pines on the perimeter of the meadow as well as dotted throughout the meadow. Thus, natural succession from pond, to meadow, to forest is in progress. (see below) Restoration projects are never done because nature is dynamic and evolution is never done.

Must this natural succession of the Carmen Meadow be stopped? That is probably a matter of opinion. My readers know that my opinion is probably “NO.” In defense of my opinion, I offer my readers an alternative scenario.

Willow flycatchers are also rare in the Southwest, where the loss of water also caused the loss of willows that are home to the flycatchers. But, in Southwestern desert, the solution is not so easy and painless as diverting water into Carmen Meadow.

Water in the Southwest has been diverted from riparian areas for agriculture and drinking water for large and growing residential communities. As you might imagine, few are willing to divert water supporting human activities to support a rare bird.

In the Southwest, willow flycatchers solved their own problem by making the necessary transition from willows to non-native tamarisk trees that require significantly less water than willows. And in this case, native plant advocates resisted this transition by trying to eradicate tamarisk solely because they are not native trees. The birds were willing and able to transition to a non-native tree, but the nativists wouldn’t accommodate their preference.

The Message

We had a wonderful time on our brief trip to Sierra City at Yuba Pass. We hope to go again and we expect to see more changes when we do. We took these messages away with us.

Yes, the Sierra Nevada range is changing, but it remains beautiful. We encourage you to visit and if you have, visit again because it is never the same twice.
There is a fine line between fire hazard mitigation and commercial logging and it isn’t always clear what the objective is.
The short-term objectives of any landscape project are sometimes at odds with the long-term objectives.
Change is the only constant in nature.

*Sources:
https://www.sfchronicle.com/climate/article/california-tree-deaths-17770026.php
https://sierranevada.ca.gov/signs-of-a-new-tree-mortality-event-showing-up-in-the-sierra-nevada/

We have said before on Million Trees that eradicating non-native plants will not result in the return of native plants because the underlying conditions that supported those native plants have changed and they are no longer competitive within their historic ranges. In those earlier posts we have focused on higher levels of CO₂ and the resulting climate change as the environmental variables to which non-natives are better adapted. Changes in water quality and flows have also resulted in changes in animal and plant populations and we will provide a few specific examples in this post.

Water levels in the Sacramento River delta have been hotly debated for decades and that debate has recently heated up as a commission gets close to making recommendations that will be legally binding.(1) On one side of the debate, the cities of Southern California and agriculture throughout the state want more water from the delta. They have been getting a lot of it for decades, but they want much more of it. On the other side of the debate, environmentalists object to exporting “our” water because they believe that the decline in the populations of native fish such as smelt and salmon is a direct result of the reduction in water flow from the delta to the ocean via the San Francisco bay. They object to further diversion of delta water and have legally challenged historic levels of water diversion using the Endangered Species Act.

Sacto Delta0001 — USFWS Recovery Plan for Native Fish in the Sacramento River Delta

The non-native bass in the delta are the proverbial red herring in this debate. Those who want yet more water diverted to agriculture claim that the bass are to blame for the declining salmon population. They demand that the bass be eradicated and they predict that the salmon population will recover once their non-native competitor is removed.(2)

The diversion of fresh water flow from the delta reduces the speed of the flow of the water, making it turbid and brackish as the ocean water overwhelms the fresh water from the Sacramento River. The warmer temperature of the water also promotes the growth of water weeds and algae. The bass benefit from these conditions, but the salmon do not. Eradicating the bass will not change these underlying conditions. Salmon populations are unlikely to rebound unless these underlying conditions are changed.

This is not an isolated example of the fallacy of invasion biology. There are as many examples of similar arguments as there are non-native animal and plant species now occupying spaces previously occupied by natives. Native plant advocates and their allies want non-native turtles eradicated because they believe they are responsible for declining populations of native turtles. They want to eradicate non-native bull frogs which they believe would benefit the native red-legged frogs. Etc., etc., etc., ad nauseum.

And there are as many examples of how such eradication strategies may not benefit natives as there are demands for eradication efforts. Here are just a couple.

The Tamarisk or saltcedar tree is one of hundreds of non-native trees that are considered invasive by native plant advocates. Here’s a description of an expedition on the Colorado River to eradicate Tamarisk that was published by the Sierra Club magazine.(3)

“’Kamikase!’ The most enthusiastic team members start to yell…and fall upon the larger plants with samarai fervor…’Kill tammys!’ someone yells. ‘Boy, that was satisfying.’ says a fellow tammy warrior…” And these are their tools of the trade: “…a veritable armory of tamarisk-killing tools, 32 gallons of herbicide, more than 40 cases of beer…and a Virgin Mary votive candle that…the camp cook has christened with a label reading, ‘Our Lady of Biodiversity.’”

Herbicide is being used in one of the country’s most important watersheds, yet there is no evidence that the Tamarisk is harming the environment:

One study found the “mean values for 22 of 30 soil, geomorphology, and vegetation structure traits did not differ significantly between saltcedar and Fremont cottonwood stands.”(4)
The same study found that saltcedar increased floristic biodiversity.
Another study stated, “As for the claim that salt cedar has little or no value to insects, birds, and mammals, that has been obliterated by available data.”(5)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA — Tamarisk in natural habitat in Isreal, taken by Michael Baranovsky, Wikimedia Commons

But more importantly, eradicating the saltcedar is not likely to result in the return of the native cottonwoods because the natural flood cycle upon which the cottonwood depends has been altered by man. The saltcedar thrives in the reduced water flow. Unless the water flow is restored, the native trees will not return no matter how many saltcedar are destroyed. Not only are we wasting our time and effort trying to eradicate saltcedar, we are also poisoning our water in the process.

In our final example, cause and effect were not confused, and a restoration was successful. The Yuba Pass area in California is one of the most important migratory bird routes in the state. The breeding population of Willow flycatchers disappeared from one of the wet meadows east of the pass. The native willows upon which the flycatcher is dependent were disappearing from the meadow because channels caused by man along the edge of the meadow diverted water out of the meadow and dried it up. Ponderosa pines and sage, which prefer the drier conditions, were taking over the meadow. If native plant advocates had been in charge of remediating this situation their reaction may have been to eradicate the “invading” pines and sage. That would have been fruitless effort; conditions in the meadow were suitable for pines and sage, not for willows. But in this case biologists provided a more sophisticated solution. They eradicated no plants. They redirected the water from the channel back into its original slow flow through the meadow. The meadow is again wet, the willows are now thriving, and the Willow flycatcher has returned.

Southwestern_Willow_Flycatcher — Willow flycatcher, USFWS

“Invasion biology” is an ideology, not a science. It frequently confuses cause with effect. A proper diagnosis of what may superficially appear to be an “invasion” requires an understanding of the complexity of nature. Most often the underlying reasons for an “invasion” are man-made conditions such as pollution and competition for scarce resources that are extremely difficult to fix. It may be convenient to scapegoat a plant or animal for what man has caused, but it is unlikely to reverse the conditions that create an opportunity for a non-native plant or animal that is better adapted to those new conditions.

(1) “Delta plan may do more harm than good,” Oakland Tribune, 11/5/10

“Effort Falters on San Francisco Bay Delta,” NY Times, 12/15/10

(2) http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article/article?f=/c/a/2010/12/11/EDG21GN1MJ.DTL

(3) http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200407/grand_canyon.asp

(4) Stromberg, JC 1998, “Dynamics of Fremont cottonwood and saltcedar populations along the San Pedro River,” Journal of Arid Environments, 40:133-155

(5) Anderson, BW 1998, “The Case for Salt cedar,” Restoration and Management Notes, 16: -130-134, 138

Tag: Willow flycatcher

Mid-Summer Visit to the Sierra Nevada