Habitat
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
Playa lakes seem to come out of nowhere, suddenly emerging with a passing shower. Shrouded in mystery, they are among North America’s most important and imperiled wetlands, providing critical resting and foraging habitat for more than a million migrating shorebirds, ducks, geese, and songbirds.
By T. Edward Nickens
They come in waves, drifting slowly across a cloudless December sky. Their gray necks are outstretched a quarter-mile, or so it seems, in front of an arcuate, six-foot sweep of wings, legs trailing behind as if an afterthought. Their cries fill the air, a trilling, high-pitched trumpeting that seems to come from everywhere at once. Hundreds set their wings and soar, and hundreds more are behind them. A wash of color against a ruler-straight horizon, the sky is veined with ragged lines of sandhill cranes for as far as I can see. They are flying low and high, gliding, flapping, descending in flocks of 20, 50, 100.
I’ve wormed my way on hands and knees along a coyote trail that tunnels through dense brush, crawling over scattered bones and firebursts of ruddy ring-necked pheasant feathers. Now I’m settled into a clump of brittle smartweed stems, about a half-hour from the closest town of Lubbock and just a few feet from the edge of a small, elliptical pond tucked into an enormous field of harvested west Texas cotton.
The body of water is a playa, a shallow, often circular freshwater wetland untethered to stream or river. Thousands of them are atomized over 140,000 square miles of the Great Plains like azure coins flung across the land. In a landscape that receives as little as 15 inches of rain a year, more than a million ducks, geese, and cranes stop to feed, rest, and forage in and along playas during their spring and fall migrations, and many overwinter in the region. At least 185 species of birds, including 30 types of shorebirds, such as snowy plovers and long-billed dowitchers, are drawn here because of that glittering bowl of water at the end of the coyote trail.
“In years past, well, there’s no other way of saying it—we just raped those lake bottoms. Nobody knew better. A lot of folks still don’t know better.”—Bobby Harlan
But with each new season of migration, the birds find fewer and fewer of these irreplaceable wetlands. Playas are bulldozed for suburban construction and plowed under for cotton. They are drained, laden with cattle waste, and suffocated with silt from eroding agricultural lands. Playas threatened by growing cities or targeted by developers familiar with wetlands protection laws might enjoy a measure of oversight and planning. But playas that exist far out in the sparsely settled plains—as most do—are often altered or destroyed with little thought given to their natural functions. Efforts to strip isolated wetlands such as playas, vernal pools, and fens of federal protection surfaced in Congress in early 2001. The subsequent loss of Clean Water Act protections resulting from an infamous Supreme Court decision that year—and the uncertain future of the Conservation Reserve Program and other farm-based conservation initiatives—has left playas with few defenses.
To complicate that grim scenario, less than one percent of the region’s more than 25,000 playas are found on public lands. This places the fate of playas, and the biodiversity of a huge swath of western America, completely in the hands of ranchers, farmers, and other private landowners—a growing and passionate number of whom are committed to preserving what is perhaps the most enigmatic of North American wetlands.
Over the next half-hour sandhill cranes by the thousands descend to the water’s edge. They wing in so low I can make out the red bare skin on their foreheads and crowns, and they fly so late that I can barely see them, save for their silhouettes blocking out the stars. But I can hear them, hundreds above joining the thousands below. Their cries comprise a music that some have called “the voice of the Pleistocene.” Others hope it is the song of the future for the embattled High Plains of North America.
Ephemeral, paradoxical, phoenixlike in their ability to suddenly emerge from a parched landscape with a passing shower, playas are found in eastern Colorado and New Mexico, western Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and, most abundantly, in the Panhandle region of west Texas. Their name comes from the Spanish word meaning “beach,” as hopeful an appellation as it is helpful. Similar in size and shape to the better-known prairie potholes, they are typically small; 87 percent are less than 30 acres, although a few are smaller than an acre and a smattering of others sprawl for a square mile or more. Regardless of size, however, playas are completely dependent upon rainfall and runoff. Each is a clay-lined depression that lies at the bottom of its own unique watershed.
Their location in semi-arid and arid plains makes playas the tidal pools of a huge section of the continent, but this is a sparsely settled piece of North America, and few people are aware that these wetlands provide critical resting and replenishing habitat for untold millions of migrating shorebirds, ducks, geese, and songbirds, and that they comprise one of the most important wintering regions for ducks in the Central Flyway. Playas also provide irreplaceable habitat for an astonishing range of non-avian wildlife, from fairy shrimp to black-tailed prairie dogs, and recharge the Ogallala Aquifer, one of the world’s largest sources of underground freshwater.
Nonetheless, playas are one of the least-studied ecosystems. “We know enough to recognize that these wetlands are the connective tissue of the southern High Plains,” says David Haukos, a wildlife biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “They are the reason everything is here—the ducks, shorebirds, geese, pheasants, farms, people. Everything. Yet we’re a long way behind other wetland systems in terms of understanding the ecology of how playas work.”
Unless you know what you're looking at, you might not recognize the dry depression in Bobby Harlan’s field as a playa wetland. The businessman owns huge chunks of west Texas cattle country. He steers his burgundy pickup truck through a wire gate in a four-strand barbed wire fence and we coast into the bottom of a 60-acre basin, tires crunching brittle grasses and reeds. “I was born and raised on a 400-acre farm outside Lubbock,” Harlan says. “We didn’t call them playas back then. Just lakes, or lake bottoms, even though they were dry most all the time.”
At 59, Harlan wears the uniform of the west Texas cattleman: white cowboy hat and pressed jeans with a pleat running straight down to caramel-colored boots. He is unflinchingly honest about his history with his land, not an uncommon trait in this region, and apologizes for not knowing what kinds of hawks are soaring over his playa or what kinds of plants form the thick cover on the land. Only in recent years, he says, has he given conservation any thought at all. “In years past,” he explains, “well, there’s no other way of saying it—we just raped those lake bottoms. Nobody knew better. A lot of folks still don’t know better.”
He’s doing his best to change that, at least on his land. Buffer zones of acreage set aside in the federal Conservation Reserve Program, or CRP, are chest high in bluestem grasses. Harlan has erected more than a mile of barbed wire fence to keep cattle out of the basin, with more miles of fencing to manage rotational grazing in the watershed. He’s letting a prairie dog town spill into the playa, where mountain plovers forage in the native short grasses and ferruginous hawks and short-eared owls hunt the small mammals. Harlan also has plans to pipe in water to increase the playa’s value as wildlife habitat and to renourish the native vegetation.
This is the work of a patient man. Driving his truck out of the playa basin, Harlan tells me that in the six years he and his brother have owned the wetland—years during which he’s spent thousands of dollars preserving the basin and its uplands—he’s never seen a drop of standing water in it. “If a man doesn’t have good sense,” he says with a laugh, “then he better have hope.”
He suddenly hits the brakes. “Looka there—a rabbit,” he says, in a Texas drawl so slow and soothing that the animal is gone by the time the word rabbit is spoken. He sits for a moment, gazing over the steering wheel. “That’s what I like to see: something out there, living on my land,” he muses. “I guess I’m just more of a giver than a taker.”
Playas seem tailor-made for folks, like Harlan, who can bide their time. It is, in fact, normal, natural, and even essential for a playa to turn dry as toast for months, even years, on end. In an average year only 10 to 20 percent of playas hold any water at all. Those that do, however, offer a rare buffet of wildlife foods in a harsh landscape. During spring and summer, storms fill dry playa basins with a fertile stew of protein-rich leeches and midge and dragonfly larvae, which feed migrating shorebirds and passerines. The moist-soil plants that thrive on the edges of these waxing and waning wetlands must produce tremendous numbers of seeds, and quickly. That’s a boon for birds. “Playa forage is so much better than anything else on the landscape that migrating birds will feed out the playas before they forage in the fields,” Haukos explains. “And it’s not just ducks. We’re talking about shorebirds, upland species, wading birds—the gamut.”
This ephemeral nature drives the ecological complexity of playas, but it compounds the challenges of conserving them in a natural state. Simply preserving one or two here and there, explains Bill Johnson, a waterfowl biologist with Texas Parks & Wildlife, won’t provide the mosaic of wet and dry habitats that are the natural status of playas, and the foundation for biodiversity in the region. “We have to convince people of the need to protect as many individual playas as possible,” he urges.
But in a region with modest surface water and meager rain, most landowners view playa basins as little more than water-storage ponds to exploit at every opportunity. In the southern High Plains, nearly 70 percent of playas larger than 10 acres are pocked with excavated pits and trenches, modifications that hold additional water for crop irrigation or use by cattle.
Fortunately, such simple items as fencing pliers and bags of native grass seeds are the primary tools needed for playa conservation. “This isn’t rocket science,” explains Johnson. “We already know the techniques that will preserve the hydrology and ecological functions of playas, and as long as they remain intact, these lands can be used for many agricultural purposes.” Those techniques—controlling grazing, halting sediment runoff from nearby uplands, and preserving the critical, water-holding soils of the playa basins—don’t preclude working the land. In fact, they help prevent a landowner from working that land to death.
Control grazing in a playa and a number of good things happen: Plant cover grows dense and structurally complex, making better brood habitat for ground-nesting birds like grasshopper sparrows, pintails, blue-winged teal, scaled and bobwhite quail, and ring-necked pheasants. Wading birds such as white-faced ibis and black-crowned night herons stalk reedy edges thick with bulrushes, pondweed, and arrowhead, foraging for the explosive irruptions of invertebrates that accompany a healthy wet playa. It’s not a total hands-off approach. Carefully planned spring grazing can promote the growth of annual plants that provide rich seed resources for feeding wildlife. Even in moderately grazed playas, the resulting moist, bare grounds provide foraging habitat for shorebirds. But it’s easy to overdo it. And overgrazed, barren playas aren’t much good for cattle or wildlife.
In many parts of the playa region it is crops, not cows, that pose the major threat to the wetlands. The southern High Plains region has been called the most intensively farmed agricultural region in North America; from the air, the plains stretch to the horizon in a geometric grid of 160-acre blocks patterned with circles of center-pivot irrigation that wink like the pupils of a thousand eyes. Irrigating square mile after square mile of cotton, corn, and sorghum requires enormous amounts of water. Much of it is pumped from the Ogallala Aquifer; the rest is siphoned from playas. Regardless of the source, the playas receive a deadly return. A covering of sediment just a few inches deep is enough to doom a wetland, and one study revealed that playas with cropland watersheds had 8.5 times more sediment than those surrounded by grasslands.
Runoff from nearby fields carries choking sediment, and that is “the biggest threat facing playas today,” according to Michael Carter, coordinator of the Playa Lakes Joint Venture, an organization that works with public and private partners to support playa conservation across the region. The PLJV, which began in 1990, operates in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas, and has worked with thousands of landowners to protect about 200,000 acres of wildlife habitat in the playas region. Still, it’s an uphill battle. In a recent PLJV poll, only half of the responding southern High Plains landowners reported that they had ever heard of playas.
And private-lands issues such as cattle and row-crop agriculture are only two of the many ills to befall these unique wetlands. Nearly a quarter of all playas on the southern High Plains are split by roads, and the threats aren’t confined to open spaces. In urban and suburban areas, playas are paved over for parking lots and used as storm-water basins. They are bulldozed and filled with nonnative fish to serve as municipal ponds that look like something you could find in Charlotte or Seattle. One morning in Lubbock I watched a backhoe dig out a playa that would soon serve as a water hazard for a golf course. On a nearby telephone pole, the construction permit allowed for “the enlargement of playa lake.” Enlarging the playa, of course, kills it. I could see its dark, water-holding clay soils being trucked over to the fairway.
Help for fencing, moist-soil plant management, prairie restoration, and native plant seeding comes from a host of cost-share programs that shoulder part of the conservation bills, including the CRP, the federal Grasslands Reserve and Wetlands Reserve programs, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program. During the past decade and a half, Haukos has worked with more than 100 private-lands playa projects. But there are no guarantees that such a safety net is permanent.
“These wetlands are the connective tissue of the southern High Plains. They are the reason everything is here—the ducks, shorebirds, geese, pheasants, farms, people. Everything.”—David Haukos
Currently, figures the PLJV’s Carter, roughly 8 percent of all playas are enrolled in the CRP. The group would like to see that figure rise, but it will be a challenge to keep it from falling. More than 16 million acres of CRP contracts will expire in 2007, and an additional 6 million acres will leave the program in 2008. Changes to the CRP will seriously hurt farmers in the playa region and have dire consequences for wildlife. “We put a lot of effort into reorienting farm policies so that playas are recognized as eligible habitats for conservation funding,” says Carter.
The CRP is a critical component of conservation efforts, especially since playas recently lost what little federal protection they had enjoyed. For years the wetland basins were protected under the Clean Water Act’s “migratory bird rule,” which covered all waters hosting migratory birds. But the infamous Supreme Court decision of 2001, which pitted the Solid Waste Agency of Northern Cook County (SWANCC) in Illinois against that bird-friendly provision of the Clean Water Act, left isolated wetlands such as playas with little federal protection. The result, Haukos says, “has caused an utter lack of concern for preserving playas in their natural state. Before the court case, developers and transportation officials would at least consult with the Fish and Wildlife Service and other regulatory agencies. No longer. It’s very difficult to quantify how many playas we’ve lost, and are losing. So much is unknown. But we know we are losing intact, functioning playas at a very rapid rate.”
All of these problems stem from a common condition: an overall lack of understanding, even respect, for what the playas mean to the health and welfare of wildlife, as well as to the long-term stability of the region’s water resources for humans. One afternoon, while watching ducks and geese pour into a tiny roadside playa south of Nazareth, Texas (population 356), I meet a rancher who tells me of a larger playa he owns down the road. He offers to take me there. He is a big, soft-spoken man with cracked and calloused hands. He tells me his family has been in west Texas for 100 years. I ask him if he hears much discussion about playa conservation. “Not really,” he says. “We just kind of leave ’em alone.”
But benign neglect is hardly apparent in the playa we visit. He drives a battered Ford F-150 pickup truck into the playa bottom, which he’s owned for 40 years. It’s a large one, 100 acres, and it holds water when many others in the surrounding region do not. When it does, he tells me, he pumps it dry to irrigate crops. He’s plowed and planted the playa, and bulldozed terraces across the bottom to force it to hold water longer. A fuel oil drum is snagged in the reeds. He points to 60 head of dead cattle piled in the middle. A cattle-disposal service recently raised its prices to $25 a head. “Too much,” he grumbles. He plans to bring in a bulldozer and bury the cattle in the playa.
Why here? I ask. Why not somewhere else where they won’t fester in water?
He offers an honest answer: “Well,” he says, “that’d take up good land.”
Such attitudes, not malignant as much as unknowing, are driving a convergence of science, outreach, and activism designed to preserve these irreplaceable wetlands. “So much work is being done on so many levels, and it’s exciting to see the connectivity apparent in these partnerships,” says Carter. The Playa Lakes Joint Venture works to educate individual landowners about the realm of cost-share programs available for playa conservation while simultaneously working within the political landscape to remove regulatory roadblocks to playa conservation. It’s an approach integrated with the focus of scientists attempting to underscore the connections between playas and people. “Much of our research now is geared towards the function of playas, so we can convince people how incredibly important they are,” says Haukos. On the northwest corner of Texas Tech University, he shows off a 167-acre parcel of land that has never seen a plow—one of only three tracts of native land left in Lubbock County. There he runs 2,000 schoolchildren a year through a playa program that must begin at the lowest levels of introduction. “One of the biggest problems is getting people to understand what this region is supposed to look like,” he says, watching a ferruginous hawk hunting low over the basin. “There’s a real lack of pride in having playas, so that’s where we start: People need to know what they are losing.”
It’s an effort that must take place farm by farm, farmer by farmer—in essence, playa by playa.
“People’s eyes drop out of their sockets when they hear Dr. Haukos talk about the 300 species of plants that thrive in playas,” says Darryl Birkenfeld. The former Catholic priest runs Ogallala Commons, an organization whose Playa Lakes Festival provides kids in the fourth through seventh grades with a multiday crash course on playa ecology and conservation, and holds public tours and workshops on the wetlands. “It’s simply a matter of recognizing the treasures in our own backyard. I tell the people in Nazareth: We don’t have a river or a mountain, but we have playas everywhere you look. We should, in fact, begin to think of towns like Nazareth as ‘communities of playas.’ ”
“It’s simply a matter of recognizing the treasures in our own backyard. We don’t have a river or a mountain, but we have playas everywhere you look.”—Darryl Birkenfeld
Birkenfeld is convinced the wetlands are an asset far too valuable to be squandered as dumps, drains, or watering ponds. On a recent field trip he guided birders to a single playa covered with 4,000 sandhill cranes. Afterward his group met the playa’s owner to learn of his family’s century of tenure in the west Texas plains. Too far removed to be a fixture on the state’s popular birding trails, the playas, Birkenfeld is convinced, are nonetheless keenly positioned as seasonal watchable wildlife destinations that lead tourists directly to the essence of the region. “I don’t envision an ecotourism industry where people are just looking at birds,” Birkenfeld says. “I want visitors to meet the people of the High Plains. Who are they? What are they like? Why are they here? All those answers are connected, one way or another, to the playas.”
Playas are connected, in one way or another, to every living creature of the High Plains. Whether glittering basins of water in a sunbaked landscape or parched depressions waiting on the rain, they reflect, precisely, the environmental conditions of their immediate surroundings. What playas look like in the future—filled with crane music or heaps of dead cows—and how they work for natural and human communities alike, will ultimately reflect the heart and soul of the people of the High Plains. Even for those who don’t know playas exist.
What You Can Do
For additional information about playas, see Loren M. Smith’s book Playas of the Great Plains (University of Texas Press) and the website of the Playa Lakes Joint Venture, which recently released a 28-minute film The Playas: Reflections of Life on the Plains. To order a copy of the film (VHS or DVD, free plus $5.95 for shipping and handling), e-mail Debbie Slobe of the Playa Lakes Joint Venture. Audubon supports The Clean Water Authority Restoration Act of 2005, H.R. 1356, which would restore protections to all the nation’s waters, including important wildlife habitat such as isolated wetlands. Urge your representative to support this legislation. To take action, click here.
T. Edward Nickens’ affinity for wet places has taken him from the polygonal ponds of Alaska’s tundra to the subterranean rivers of Puerto Rico.
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