The New Deal
Southwestern Farmers Share Their Water with Endangered Birds
In the West, as the saying goes, whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. So why on earth did New Mexicans--during a severe drought, no less--decide to give precious drops to southwestern willow flycatchers?
BY PETER FRIEDERICI
Published: November-December 2013
One blazing hot day last June, I stood on the banks of the Rio Grande at New Mexico's Broad Canyon Arroyo, about 20 miles north of the sprawling city of Las Cruces, to witness an act of creative destruction. The agent this day was not the river, though its floods once wiped out local houses and irrigation canals. Instead, a team of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service employees was unleashing chainsaws and excavators on the riverside shrubs.
Scrubby trees were uprooted and piled into heaps, waiting to be burned. The soil was churned up. Here and there, windrows of garbage gave mute evidence of the kinds of activities--wild-cat dumping, teenage parties--that plagued the site before the workers started their job. Above the flat, narrow floodplain, sere desert hills were a stark reminder that the river is what makes any kind of plant abundance possible at all in this place.
The Rio Grande is an exceedingly tapped watercourse, one engineered so thoroughly that it hardly merits the label "river" anymore, and certainly not grande. "Growing up here, this stretch of the river was always neglected," said Kevin Cobble, a tall, gray-mustachioed biologist wearing the agency's regulation brown uniform. "It's always been a little disheartening to me how the river is treated. It's like that trash pile over there--that's how people have seen the river. It's just been an irrigation ditch."
Cobble, then manager of the nearby San Andres National Wildlife Refuge (he has since moved on to manage Bosque del Apache, about 100 miles upstream), was inspecting his team's habitat renovation. A wolfberry shrub, 18 inches high, stood on the berm just above the river; higher up, screwbean mesquite trees bloomed, their yellow flowers attracting bees and butterflies. Those native plant species, Cobble said, make much better wildlife habitat than saltcedar or tamarisk, pink-flowered invasive trees and shrubs from Eurasia that have colonized numerous river systems in the Southwest. A few years ago this was mostly saltcedar, he said. "Now that the competition's been removed, the natives are starting to come back."
The new plants signal the beginning of a new era of cooperation. . . .
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