By Joseph M. Dougherty
Deseret Morning News
LAYTON — "The whole morass was animated with multitudes of waterfowl, which appeared to be very wild — rising for the space of a mile around about at the sound of a gun with a noise like distant thunder." That's how John C. Fremont described what he saw when he came to the Great Salt Lake for the first time in September of 1843.
Every spring and fall, migratory birds in the millions pass though the lake's wetlands during their worldwide treks. But because of growth and encroaching development since the mid-1800s, the wetlands have shrunk, and so have bird populations.
"Nearly 60 percent of the historic wetlands in the river basins in and around the Great Salt Lake have already been lost," said Dave Livermore, Utah director of The Nature Conservancy.
The Nature Conservancy is the largest private owner of wetlands in Davis County with the 5,000-acre Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve that runs along 16.5 miles of shoreline.
The preserve is home to a sea of cattails and features a one-mile round-trip boardwalk that leads to an observation tower that visitors can use to spot birds and learn about wetlands habitat.
A recent project on Kays Creek, which feeds about 10,000 acres of wetlands on the east side of the preserve, is working to bring birds back to the wetlands.
So far, it's working.
Kays Creek is a 10-mile stream that drains three canyons in the Layton area. In many spots you can jump over it. It's hidden most of the time by trees that grow along its banks. And you don't see it except when you drive by it or live nearby.
Much of the natural habitat upstream and downstream has disappeared, but downstream is where things have begun to change.
About 60 years ago, the Army Corps of Engineers dredged out a 10-by-10-foot channel for the last mile of the creek to help divert storm water from neighborhoods.
It was a ditch, good for moving water but not much else, says Jeff McCreary, a regional biologist with Ducks Unlimited, a waterfowl conservation organization.
Over the past seven years, Duck Unlimited has been working with The Nature Conservancy to redesign the last mile of the creek to turn it into what it once was: productive habitat.
"If you miss the opportunity to protect these areas, it costs a lot of money to put them back," McCreary said.
With $350,000 in donations from the Hemingway Foundation, Utah Wetlands Foundation, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the Bechtel Foundation, and a federal grant, Ducks Unlimited and The Nature Conservancy got to planning, and they touted their success with a tour of the restored Kays Creek Sept. 15.
Where once was a grassland with a ditch running through it are now five ponds fed by a meandering stream with natural willows and cottonwoods growing in the banks. A bonus for those who worked on the project is that the plant life came back on its own.
McCreary said the stream is "as close as we're ever going to get to what used to be out here."
To get to this point, engineers and managers alike had to play Mother Nature.
They hired a lot of heavy equipment in 2004, said Chris Brown, manager of the conservancy's 5,000-acre Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve in Layton.
With a yellow cavalry of bulldozers, backhoes and dump trucks, workers reshaped the drainage ditch into a natural-looking stream bed with a shallow slope that will still accommodate storm runoff.
They piled earth to make 20 acres of ponds that Brown can raise or lower depending on what species of bird needs a boost.
Mike Terry, Deseret Morning NewsJeff McCreary of Ducks Unlimited speaks with members of conservation groups about the restoration of the last mile of Kays Creek as productive habitat. Ducks like deep water, he explained, but shorebirds, like black-necked stilts, need shallow water. Simply by adding a board to a drainage gate, Brown can raise the water level in a particular pond 18 inches.
Brown said he doesn't expect to take an active part in managing the ponds for the next year or so. He wants to see what happens.
The winter work was so torturously cold, Brown said, that sometimes he wondered why he put himself through it. Now that he sees changes every day in the habitat, the hard work was worth it.
"Where I used to just see birds occasionally flying overhead, this spring I recorded thousands of them nesting and feeding on the newly expanded wetland habitat and ponds," Brown said.
He has counted 176 avocet nests and 5,000 pintails, a species of duck.
Plovers, godwits, avocets, stilts, sandhill cranes and tundra swans use the ponds.
"The bird use has been far more than I expected," Brown said.
McCreary is jubilant.
"The reason this project succeeded is because of a unique collaboration between conservation biology and engineering," he said. "We created a science-based plan to re-create the types of native habitat that Kays Creek would have offered these birds before decades of human impacts."
Bird populations may never reach numbers like what Fremont saw and heard — noise like distant thunder — but McCreary expects populations to skyrocket over the next few years.
Since March 2005, when that first trickle of water began to flow over a small concrete dam designed to not get clogged with debris, Brown has begun thinking of his next project, which he hopes will be similar to the Kays Creek project, only on the north end of the preserve.
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