The Birds

Millions of flies, trillions of shrimp: food by the ton for something or someone. But who'll play top-of-the-food-chain? The lake is not just too salty for fish; it is also too salty for the liking of most water birds. So the harvest is left to a few bird species adapted to fill this peculiar habitat niche.

The bird you can't miss in the summer, anywhere in the basin, is Larus californicus , the raucous California gull. Unlike most of the twenty-five North American species known as "seagulls," this species leaves the coast in summer for breeding sites far inland. The largest breeding population is at Great Salt Lake, the second largest at Mono.

Image not available.

The food chain at Mono Lake is short and
simple. Brine shrimp and alkali flies eat algae.
Birds eat shrimp and flies (the latter are
scarcer but nutritionally superior). Nitrogen
and other nutrients return to the algae by
way of excretions and decay. Available
nitrogen appears to be the main limit on
productivity. High salinity makes algae less
efficient at "fixing" nitrogen from the air and
slows the whole system down.
(Adapted from a drawing made by Rebecca
Shearin for the Mono Lake Guidebook.)

The Mono gulls nest on various islets, almost invisible from the shore, and on the prominent "black island," Negit, when it is available. But when the lake is low enough, first Negit and then the larger of the islets fuse to the shore, and coyotes prey on eggs and young, soon driving away the birds.

The gulls range far from the lake. One of them once scooped a trout out of a tarn near Koip Peak Pass, far up among the Sierra summits, and lost it onto the grass at my unlicensed feet. I had fish for dinner anyway. Gulls also haunt garbage dumps and

Image not available.

Bird Migrations.
(Birds drawn by Joyce Jonté.)

scavenge on the streets of Lee Vining. "Rats of the air," somebody called them. But the landmark Ecological Study of 1977 has it right: "In winter, when the gulls have returned to the oceans where most of their congeners breed, the inland sea at Mono seems barren without them."

The eared grebe, Podiceps nigricollis , might be the totem creature of Mono. It is a small, dark bird with patches of gold on each side of the head (the "ears"). Grebes are specialists. They dive superbly, fly unremarkably, and barely walk at all. They feed, sleep, court, and mate on water. Though grebes don't breed at Mono Lake, up to a million birds stop off here in summer and fall. They arrive scrawny, with worn and damaged feathers; here, floating safely well out on the lake, they molt and feed, and feed, and feed. At its peak, the throng consumes brine shrimp at the rate of sixty tons a day. When cool weather comes and the shrimp supply crashes, the grebes move on to the Salton Sea and the Gulf of California, 350 miles to the south. The overfattened birds must work off some of their weight in futile takeoff attempts before they can actually get into the air.

Phalaropes are delicate, diminutive sandpipers. They have sharp, straight beaks and black-and-white markings touched with brownish red. The females are larger, more brightly colored, and dominant. There are just three species of phalaropes in the world; Mono Lake is important to two of them.

The northern or red-necked phalarope, Phalaropus lobatus , breeds in the far north and winters at sea, on the open subtropical oceans. Mono and Great Salt Lake are major stopover points in between. Red-necked phalaropes at Mono eat, almost exclusively, alkali fly larvae, pupae, and adults. They feed on the open water.

Then there is the Wilson's phalarope, Phalaropus tricolor . Of all these birds it is the Tuesday's child, the one with far to go. After breeding in a widespread North American range, up to 60,000 birds—perhaps 10 percent of the adult world population—converge on Mono Lake. Like grebes, they arrive worn and depleted, molt and regrow their pelages, and rebuild their fat reserves with flies and shrimp. You sometimes see the birds charging through the lakeside cloud of flies, beaks wide open, swallowing as fast as they can. (Gulls feed in the same manner.) The phalaropes double their weight during an average five-week stay and waddle back into the air.

They need every calorie for the second, longer, nonstop leg of their journey: 3,000 miles, largely over the open Pacific, to winter quarters at saline lakes in Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. Returning to North America in the spring, they fly in more moderate stages, east of the Andes and the Rockies.

Another very noticeable migrant is the American avocet, Recurvirostra americana . This large, long-legged, long-billed wader has been called "the most graceful of all shorebirds." It has black-and-white markings and, in summer, a cinnamon-colored head and neck. Several thousand avocets stop off at Mono in the spring (northbound) and summer (southbound); a few nest on Paoha Island.

Because Mono Lake lies in a region of scanty aquatic habitat, the arid Great Basin, its importance to these migratory birds is magnified. The lake is one of the three or four most significant shorebird habitats in the western United States; it is internationally recognized as a unit in the Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network.

Another notable bird at Mono Lake is one you need luck, and probably a birder's telescope, to see. The snowy plover, Charadrius alexandrinus , is a bulbous sort of shorebird, white-bellied and brown-backed, that nests on dunes and alkali flats on the lake's east side. Mono Lake's population of several hundred birds is one of the largest in the state. Plovers primarily eat alkali fly larvae and adults and a couple of kinds of beetles.

Still other species, rare today at the lake, used to be as numerous as grebes and as ubiquitous in their season as gulls: the various types of ducks. Before Los Angeles took the creeks, a long-time local resident remembers, "There were so many ducks along the shore sometimes that when they'd move out all together [it was] like the shore itself was moving out." As late as the 1940s, the lake was a fine place for migrating northern shovelers, mallards, green-winged teals, redheads, and numerous other duck species—and a correspondingly popular place with hunters. At times in the fall a million birds would use the region, feeding on the flies and shrimp as well as on land insects and vegetation. Mono water was too salty for them even then, and the lake too choppy when the wind blew, so they gathered in sheltered spots where the surface layer of water was fresher: near creek mouths, in coves, and on the brackish lagoons that bordered the northeast shore of the lake. When those habitats disappeared, so did the great flocks, though there are still a few thousand ducks at Mono Lake today.