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How Great Salt Lake's low levels affect shorebirds on Access Utah

Three small black and white birds wade in Great Salt Lake.
Clarissa Casper
/
All About Birds

On this episode, we talk with Clarissa Casper. Her article in Cornell Lab’s All About Birds is titled "Dry Times at Utah’s Great Salt Lake Threaten a Crucial Migratory Stopover." She says the biggest gathering place for migratory shorebirds in the Intermountain West is drying up. But where there’s still water, there’s still hope of keeping what’s left.

Clarissa Casper is writer/editor at the American Bird Conservancy and was the 2025-2026 Rachel Carson Science Journalism Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She is a graduate of Utah State University and was the UPR/Salt Lake Tribune Cache Valley reporter.

Sharon Montecino’s master's thesis at USU is titled "Understanding the Impact of Environmental Change on Shorebird Abundance and Distribution Across the Intermountain West Over the Past 30 Years." She earned a Bachelor of Science in Natural Resources Engineering from the University of Chile, served as a Coastal Solutions Fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and coordinated the Waterbirds and Wetlands Program for the Chilean NGO ROC.

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Tom Williams worked as a part-time UPR announcer for a few years and joined Utah Public Radio full-time in 1996. He is a proud graduate of Uintah High School in Vernal and Utah State University (B. A. in Liberal Arts and Master of Business Administration.) He grew up in a family that regularly discussed everything from opera to religion to politics. He is interested in just about everything and loves to engage people in conversation, so you could say he has found the perfect job as host “Access Utah.” He and his wife Becky, live in Logan.