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An Island for the Birds
Change often makes folks nervous. But Sally Shanks says that having a new owner for the Delta farm she and her husband, Jim, manage is a relief. It means that they’ll be able to keep doing what they’ve done for decades — run a profitable farm and at the same time provide habitat for the thousands of sandhill cranes, waterfowl and shorebirds that stop by every winter.
The couple, along with seven employees, operate the 9,100-acre farm on Staten Island, along the Cosumnes River near the town of Galt. Last November, the Nature Conservancy used a $30 million CALFED grant to purchase the property from the real estate trust that had owned it for 17 years. The Conservancy could have knocked down the levees protecting the farm and turned the whole thing into a nature preserve. Instead, it decided to keep things pretty much the way they are and, rather than tell the Shanks what to do, it will listen to them.
The Shanks aren’t scientists; they’re farmers who happen to love birds. They’ve educated themselves by watching the various species as they arrive each year, and they've tailored the farm's operations to the birds' needs as much as they can.
At the peak midwinter season, more than 15,000 sandhill cranes (both the greater and lesser species) roost on the island every night. In addition, up to 20,000 Aleutian geese forage there, along with large numbers of mallards, pintails, snow geese, swans, sandpipers, dowitchers and more. Sally Shanks estimates that the island plays host to over 100,000 birds a year.
She outlines some of the things they do to accommodate the birds. In the fall, after harvesting corn, farmers routinely flood their fields to reduce oxidation of the peat in the soil and to drive accumulated salts down below the root zone. When cranes arrive in the early fall, they eat the leftovers from the newly harvested corn crop, along with some of the sprouts of winter wheat that are just beginning to emerge from the ground.
Each night at sunset, the tall birds return to the same fields to roost, doing their strange, noisy dance as they land. They sleep standing in water several inches deep so they are protected from land-based predators, and they prefer freshly flooded fields rather than those where water has been standing for weeks. The Shanks selectively flood and drain each of the island’s 53 diked-off fields so that the cranes have both feeding and roosting areas.
There’s no formula or computer program that tells the farmers when to do what. They watch the visitors, she says. "The birds tell us what to do. We never follow the same pattern twice." In September, the first arrivals "are bouncing up and down, asking, ‘Where’s the water?’" In spring, the birds’ northern breeding grounds beckon. "They aren’t there at night. Then we say we can farm."
The Shanks also do less obvious things to help their avian visitors. They leave as much growth as possible on the banks of the farm levees, giving pheasants and other ground-dwelling birds more cover and better nesting sites. They also gently slope the banks of their drainage ditches, making it easier for baby birds to scramble in and out of the channels.
Sally Shanks will confess to a bit of favoritism. When harvesting corn, the farmers sometimes leave a high stubble in the field. The cranes have no problem getting to the leftover kernels, but geese, which Shanks likens to "locusts," have a more difficult time. "We’re kind of anti-duck, we’d rather be home to cranes, swans and shorebirds," she says, adding that ducks inevitably attract hunters — definitely not a welcome species.
But perhaps the biggest reason the farm has remained such good wildlife habitat is that the Shanks are still raising the same corn and wheat crops that they always have. Over the last 20 years, most of their neighbors have converted their lands to more lucrative, but less eco-friendly, vineyards and orchards. "We haven’t changed. Everybody else has," she says.
In recent years, the Shanks have participated in several restoration efforts on Staten Island, working with the State Lands Commission and Cal Fish & Game to plant riparian vegetation along the south bank of the Cosumnes and to build several small islands in the stream.
Mike Eaton, the Conservancy’s project manager, has become the Shanks’ avid pupil, touring the farm with them in order to learn from the couple’s expertise. "What’s been an eye-opener for me is how every aspect of the farm operation is tuned to deliver habitat benefits," he says. "It’s not just ‘add water and they will come.’ It’s a year-round effort."
The Conservancy doesn’t plan to make any major changes in the farming routine. Shanks credits the previous owner with allowing them considerable latitude to accommodate the birds, but notes they always had to keep an eye on the bottom line. "When you cut costs, it invariably has to be from the wildlife side," she says. "Now that the Nature Conservancy owns it, we don’t have that conflict."
"We have been and continue to be a profitable farm," she hastens to add. "It’s not like they bought a losing company."
Eaton says the farm will be run as an independent operation, hopefully not a money-losing one. That fact has generated criticism from some environmentalists, who believe that, because the farm was bought using public funds, it should be opened up to the public. Eaton notes that virtually all the "natural" areas in the Delta are actually highly managed, and that it would take millions more dollars to turn the island into a wildlife refuge.
Shanks points out that the island already hosts more sandhill cranes than any designated wildlife refuge in the state. If the Conservancy hadn’t bought the property, it could easily have gone to a housing developer or someone looking to put in trees or grapevines. "This was here to be lost," she says. O'B
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