By Robert M Wilson
Each one fall and spring, thousands of birds trip the Pacific Flyway, the westernmost of the 4 significant North American chicken migration routes. The landscapes they go fluctuate from wetlands to farmland to concrete, inhabited not just by way of flora and fauna but additionally by means of farmers, suburban households, and significant towns. within the 20th century, farmers used the wetlands to irrigate their plants, reworking the panorama and placing migratory birds in danger. The U.S. Fish and flora and fauna carrier spoke back by means of developing a chain of refuges that stretched from northern Washington to southern California.
What emerged from those efforts used to be a hybrid setting, the place the differences among irrigated farms and flora and fauna refuges blurred. administration of the refuges used to be fraught with conflicting priorities and practices. Farmers and shelter managers burdened birds with shotguns and flares to maintain them off deepest lands, and executive pilots took to the air, losing hand grenades between flocks of ducks and herding the startled birds into close by refuges. Such activities masked the growing to be connections among refuges and the land round them.
Seeking Refuge examines the improvement and administration of refuges within the wintering variety of migratory birds alongside the Pacific Flyway. even supposing this can be a historical past of efforts to preserve migratory birds, the tale Robert Wilson tells has enormous salience this day. some of the key areas migratory birds use ― the Klamath Basin, California’s crucial Valley, the Salton Sea ― are websites of contemporary contentious debates over water use. Migratory birds attach and rely on those landscapes, and farmers face strain as water is reallocated from irrigation to different reasons. In a time whilst international warming offers to compound the stresses on water and migratory species, Seeking Refuge demonstrates the necessity to foster landscapes the place either flora and fauna and other people can thrive
Read Online or Download Seeking refuge : birds and landscapes of the Pacific flyway PDF
Similar human geography books
Encountering Affect: Capacities, Apparatuses, Conditions
Because the mid-1990s, have an effect on has develop into imperative to the social sciences and arts. Debates abound over how you can conceptualise have an effect on, and the way to appreciate the interrelationships among affective existence and a variety of modern political differences. In Encountering have an effect on, Ben Anderson explores why knowing have an effect on concerns and provides one account of affective lifestyles that hones within the alternative ways within which impacts are ordered.
Water Worlds: Human Geographies of the Ocean
Our international is a water global. Seventy percentage of our planet includes ocean. notwithstanding, geography has frequently neglected this very important component to the earth's composition. The observe 'geography' at once interprets as 'earth writing' and according to this definition, the self-discipline has preoccupied itself with the learn of terrestrial areas of society and nature.
Seeking refuge : birds and landscapes of the Pacific flyway
Each one fall and spring, thousands of birds shuttle the Pacific Flyway, the westernmost of the 4 significant North American chicken migration routes. The landscapes they pass fluctuate from wetlands to farmland to concrete, inhabited not just by means of flora and fauna but additionally through farmers, suburban households, and significant towns. within the 20th century, farmers used the wetlands to irrigate their vegetation, reworking the panorama and placing migratory birds in danger.
- Cities Called Athens: Studies Honoring John McK. Camp II
- Vietnam: A Global Studies Handbook
- Vietnam: A Global Studies Handbook
- Lived Experiences of Public Consumption: Encounters with Value in Marketplaces on Five Continents
- Diversity, Globalization, and the Ways of Nature
Additional resources for Seeking refuge : birds and landscapes of the Pacific flyway
Sample text
32 Defining migration is not as easy as it seems. Although most people use the term loosely in reference to the movement of someone or something from one place to another, biologists employ more precise definitions. Migration is a coping mechanism for dealing with the uneven distribution of resources across time and space. Birds can exploit the often seasonally available resources in northern latitudes even though such places cannot support them throughout the entire year. 34 The biologist Hugh Dingle offers a more nuanced view of migration.
20 East of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, extensive marshes were less common, but two lakes—Mono and Owens —were of particular value for migratory waterfowl. Marshes rimmed the margins of both lakes and the rivers that emptied into them. Although the Owens Valley Paiute had practiced small-scale irrigation, large-scale water development occurred in this area only after the arrival of non-Native settlers. As their counterparts had done upstream of Tulare Lake, farmers in the Owens Valley reduced the size and depth of Owens Lake by diverting river water for irrigation.
Army Corps of Engineers, the state constructed the large dikes and bypasses necessary to control flooding on the Sacramento River. The Sacramento Flood Control Project took decades to finish, but the completion of each dike or levee eliminated more wetlands and made large floods less common. The completion in the 1940s of the Shasta Dam near the headwaters of the Sacramento River reduced the threat of flooding even further. The frequent flooding of the Sacramento River had sustained many of the freshwater marshes; now enormous levees and bypasses confined the flow.