For years, Clarissa Casper has been fascinated by the shorebirds that stop at the Great Salt Lake during migration.
Now, she's telling their story to a national audience.
Casper is the Rachel Carson Science Journalism Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Her upcoming feature for the lab's Living Bird magazine looks at the Great Salt Lake’s decline through the birds that depend on it.
The story will be the cover feature for the magazine's fall issue.
But Casper's connection to these birds started much closer to home — when she was a journalism student at Utah State University.
She volunteered with the Intermountain West Shorebird Survey, a project tracking birds across wetlands in the region.
“I went out,” Casper said. “And it was literally the most life-changing thing of my entire life.”
Casper said she had never realized how many shorebirds were living in Utah.
“There were hundreds of American avocets and black-necked stilts and long-billed curlews and willets,” Casper explained enthusiastically.
And that experience changed the direction of her career.
She kept volunteering with the survey, eventually becoming a team leader near Tremonton.
Now, she's using that experience as the foundation for her Living Bird feature — which comes as researchers release new results comparing today's shorebird populations with surveys from the 1990s.
The findings are troubling.
Black-necked stilts are down 59%. American avocets are down 68%. And dowitchers are down 72%.
Casper said the birds are losing the specialized habitat they need to feed during migration.
“Shorebirds need very unique habitat,” she explained. “They need shallow water, and they need, you know, the brine shrimp and the brine flies.”
As water levels fall, shallow mudflats disappear. And Casper said the problem isn't limited to the Great Salt Lake.
Wetlands and saline lakes across the Intermountain West are becoming more sparse, leaving migrating birds with fewer places to stop and refuel.
“The metaphor people always use is the gas station one,” Casper said. “They always consider Great Salt Lake as like the gas station for the shorebirds.”
Casper hopes her story will help Utahns see the lake — and the birds that rely on it — differently.
“I just really want people to know how special where they live is,” Casper said. “It's so special, and there's so many birds, and it's so magical, and they are disappearing, and it's something you should care about.”
She says you don't have to be a bird expert to help. If you care about birds or wildlife, that’s good enough.
