Short Wave - SUPERBLOOM: An Upside To The California Downpours

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

California's wet winter has devastated many local communities. It has also benefited some of the state's endangered ecosystems. Those benefits are on full display in California's largest remaining grassland. Wetlands, long severed from the rivers and streams that nourished them, are being flooded with freshwater. Biologists are seeing baby salmon, fattened by new food sources in flood plains, make their way to sea. Endangered birds and waterfowl are nesting next to flooded fields. Today, NPR climate correspondent Nate Rott takes us on a tour through California's booming natural beauty.To see one of the superblooms and other ecological benefits, check out Nate's story — filled with photos by NPR's ace photographer Claire Harbage: https://n.pr/428xWOB. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, shortwavers, Emily Kwong here. So if you live in California, I don't need to tell you that the weather has been rough. Levy failures in flooding. Atmospheric rivers that could bring more flooding and infrastructure damage to the already reeling state. In California's Central Valley, a once vibrant lake is back, and that's not necessarily a good thing. So yeah, Emily, the state has just been hammered this year by storm after storm after storm. Yeah, and you, Nate Rot, you've been covering California's historic flooding for NPR's climate desk.

Yeah, it's right, I have. You know, everything from river flooding here where I live in Ventura, California to that reborn lake you just heard about, where the flooding, I can say, is definitely not a good thing for many, many people living in the area. But I heard that there is actually a positive side to all of this rain. Tell us about that. Yeah, it's a literal bright side. We've got the Facilia, the purple. We've got the gold fields, which are he. So that voice you hear, Emily. is Gabe Garcia. He's with the Bureau of Land Management. And in case you're not a botanist, I don't think you are. Not at this time. What he's listing there are wildflowers. Wildflowers that are carpeting Carrizo Plain National Monument, California's largest remaining grassland. And then the ones with the

white, these are what, the tidy tips? Yeah. Tidy tips. Tidy tips. Tidy tips. Yeah, they got the little white tips on there, right? Yeah. Did all of the rain cause this explosion in wildflowers? That's right. Yeah. So they, they, they, they got the little white tips. It's a little white tips. I'm They had about 14 and a half inches there. And any year, they get 10 to 15 inches of rain. And Carisa Plain National Monument. You don't just get a bloom. You get a super bloom.

So big that it can be seen from space. Hundreds of species between the flowers and the grasses and the plants. Nate, I'm looking at the photos from your trip and my jaw kind of dropped because the hills are covered with gold and purple and orange. It's like someone took a paintbrush across the valley and just splattered it with flower. It's so beautiful. Yeah, it's like totally stunning. I was traveling with one of our colleagues, Claire Harbage. She's this incredible photographer.

And we were, you know, trying to come up with some word that we could use to try to articulate the beauty of this place to people that are listening to it. Right. And I think what we landed on eventually was sublime. It is just like objectively sublime. But this super bloom is not the only ecological benefit that California is seeing from all of this rain. Today on the show. An upside to California's destructively wet winter. And how that water is now benefiting everything from flowers and bugs to salmon and ducks.

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Okay, Nate, so I've been following the news from California. It has just been walloped by rain. What has that been like for people who live there? It's been rough. California has had historically wet winter. The West Coast was hit by 31 separate atmospheric rivers over this winter and spring, which are these kind of high-level bands of moisture that essentially act as conveyor belts moving water from like the warmer waters of the tropics to a place like California.

That caused roads and rail lines to close hundreds of landslides, power outages from falling trees, billions of dollars in estimated damages. You know, they caused widespread flooding, some of which could last in parts of the Central Valley for years. And there's still a major snowpack in some parts of the Sierra Nevada. of mountains, it is just now starting to melt, which is going to only exacerbate some of these problems. So that's all kind of icky and not great. But, Emily, the reason we're here today is to talk about the bright side of all this. So I'm going to let Carson Jeffries, a researcher at the University of California Davis's Center for Watershed Sciences, make the transition for us. You know, when we see water spread across the landscape as you're driving through the Central

Valley, you think of this as a really negative thing. Right. Those huge fields of crops that are underwater, you know, homes that have been flooded, roads that are cut off. And yet, there are so many benefits that happen because of it. Okay, yeah. What does he mean by benefits? Okay, so let's start with fish, because that's what Jeffrey's focus is on, right? So he says, you might not see it when you look at some of these flooded places. You're probably going to see the vehicle that's half underwater, right? On the surface, all of that stuff looks negative. But if you look just under the surface of the water, oftentimes what you'd see is a place that is teeming with life. When the water falls out of the river, you know, functionally it goes across the floodplains.

It slows down. When it slows down, the sediment that's in the river settles out. It warms up a little bit. And when you have slower, slightly warmer water with sunshine, you have photosynthesis. And you've functionally created a large solar panel that is taking in that solar energy. It's turning CO2 into algae, which is food for zooplankton and small insects that ultimately are the food for the fish. we see hundreds of not thousands of times more food on the floodplains than we see in the river. Wow.

That's pretty incredible. It's wild. I mean, Jeffrey says already this year they're seeing some of the biggest, fattest baby salmon they've ever seen in this area because of all this flooding. Love me a big fat baby salmon. It grows up to be a delicious adult salmon. It truly does. And it's not just like the critters and bugs and invertebrates that are growing under the water that are benefiting from this. It's the animals and birds.

You know, we saw shorebirds feeding and nesting near this newborn lake and then flooded wetlands further south. California Central Valley is a key part of the Pacific Flyway, this major migration corridor for birds that travel back and forth from, you know, Mexico and South America to Alaska and Canada. And little wetlands, like the one you're probably hearing a little bit of now, are critical for that flyway. Is this the sound of a wetland? Yeah, so it's actually a duck club. The southern end of the Central Valley used to be chock full of them in the roaring 20s. Wait, you mean clubs where people get together to hunt ducks in the wetland? Yes, so that's definitely part of it. I mean, the idea is to provide good, you know, as close to natural habitat for waterfowl that migrate through here as possible. And it's a way to essentially keep these waterfowl coming because this whole Central Valley has really, really changed.

To give you an idea, we drove around the border of this wetland you're hearing with a biologist from the conservation group Ducks Unlimited. His name is Matt Kaminsky. And I was really struck as we were driving by the contrast. On one side, you've got this glistening pool of water filled with cat tails and chirping birds. And on the other, there are these straight, gridded lines of Alpha all the way to the horizon. It's wild to look at how different it is on that side of the road versus the other. Right. And this is all within the last, probably since the 90s has this changed.

Into farmland? Into farmland. That's a striking visual. Over the years, the historic wetlands on one side have been turned into the farmland on the other side. And that's kind of one of the things drying out the whole region. Yeah, totally. I mean, so basically nearly every drop of water that typically comes out of the Sierra Nevada Mountains as the snow starts to melt.

and as we get winter storms, by the time it gets to the valley, it's accounted for. It's earmarked, essentially, for agriculture because these big farms down here have the first rights to surface water. So duck clubs, which are owned by private landowners in most years, they don't get any surface water. I mean, years like this, you know, there will be surface water that's available for purchase to flood these wetlands, which makes a lot cheaper and it's a lot better for brownwater resources. but on most years, these guys, the only way to flood this wetlands is to pump it out of the ground. Wait, what does he mean pump it out of the ground? Yeah, so, I mean, like literally putting a giant hydraulic pump on the landscape,

drilling a hole, and pumping water out from the aquifer underneath onto the surface. So it is a super expensive process, right? It takes a lot of electricity. It takes a lot of fuel. And so a lot of these duck clubs have fallen under in recent years. I had no idea that duck clubs were sneaky wetland architects in the West. Yeah. It's so, it's so, I mean, driving around and just thinking like, okay, so there's this like natural-ish ecosystem that is truly only being maintained by people who want to hunt ducks. Got a wild connection.

Yeah. So, Nate, what is it meant now with all the rain? Because now there's like surplus water running across California. it sounds like the wetlands could be like in a prime position to take on more water that is messing things up elsewhere. Totally, yeah. So wetland managers, you know, private and government, right? Like there's federal wildlife refuges down here. You know, they're basically saying bring it on. Let us help alleviate flooding in places like Corkeran, this town of 22,000 that's got floodwaters all around it. You know, we will take all of the water that you can give us because these are places that need the water. This whole valley used to be filled with ephemeral wetlands and lakes that would shrink and grow with the changes in weather patterns. It really gives you an opportunity to look back in time and sort of see what this area used to look like.

So I got another example for you involving birds, right? So a little ways down the road, we get out on top of this dirt levee that basically walls the wetland from a neighboring canal. It had blown out in a couple of places nearby during the big pole. of water that came through earlier this year. What's amazing is some of these wetland complexes, when they get flooded like this after five years, so many the ducks gravitated to them because there's such a burst of food resources

that have just exploded when they get flooded after five years of being dry. So as with the salmon, like the flooding is restoring the conditions needed for all of these wetland species to return and to thrive. Totally, yeah. So, you know, when we walk down onto these mudflats by this big pool of water.

What did you see? Birds. Kaminsky does a better job of describing the wildlife than me. Abasets. And then blacknats stilts. Wrong. Yeah, I'm not an ornithologist. Later on, we saw tricolored blackbirds, which are federally endangered.

So there are hundreds of species that are dependent on these little ecosystems. And they're getting water in some cases for the first time in years. Listening to this whole story feels like tide pooling. You're just like walking us. around California, like, oh, look at that. Oh, look at that. There's all this new life that's returned. I mean, on the one hand, nature's having this big upswing. Wildflowers are blooming in the desert and salmon and birds are getting fat in the floodplains. But, you know, at the same time, towns and farms are being flooded. For some, that is devastating. Yeah, I mean, there are

tens of thousands of people, many of them, like undocumented farm workers who are living, in some of these communities in the Central Valley and basically living in fear of being flooded because this big snow melt, the big melt is just starting right now with warmer temperatures. But I think it's important, you know, a lot of the ecologists we talk to like Julie Kalanski, a climate scientist over at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. You know, she says it's important to remember that these storms have benefits to. California of anywhere in the U.S. has the most variable year to year. and that high variability is only projected to become more variable in the future with climate change.

So what can Californians honestly expect moving forward, knowing the weather is just going to be so erratic, right? Yeah, I mean, California has always been this land of extremes. Sure. But under climate change, as you're hearing there, right, the highs and lows are going to become even more extreme. So you're not just going to get like a kind of wet winter. You're going to get a deluge. and not just a couple of dry years here and there, but a full-on drought. So, you know, remember, just like six months ago, nearly all of the state was in some version of severe or extreme drought.

What is this pendulum swing kind of back and forth, back and forth? What is it going to mean for local wildlife, birds, fish, flowers? Yeah, it's a good question. I mean, roughly 250 California species are already listed as endangered by the state. You know, just this year, California canceled the state. salmon fishing season, which is like a super rare step. And that was because of the drought that impacted the fish over the last few years. But I think what we saw driving around looking at these flowers, looking at these wetlands, it was so neat because it shows how fast some of these places

can thrive or literally bloom when they get water again. And you know, you guys have done a lot on this on this show. You ask any ecologists, what's the most important thing for species in the long term and it's habitat. And as bad as the flooding is for some, there is a lot of habitat on the landscape again right now. Well, thank you for taking us to it and showing us what it looks like and sounds like. It's been really cool to hear about. Heck yeah. Thanks for letting me get on and talk about it. Before we head out, we want to take a minute to talk about Shortwave Plus.

Plus subscribers help make shows like this one even possible. And they also get to listen to all of our episodes without any sponsor breaks. Find out more at plus.npr.org slash shortwave. And to everyone who's already subscribed, we appreciate you, we see you. Thank you so much. If you want to see photos of this super bloom and some of the other positive impacts of California's wet winter, check out Nate's story with photos from NPR's ace photographer, Claire Harbage, at npr.org. We'll also put a link in the episode notes.

This episode was produced by Burley McCoy. It was edited by our managing producer Rebecca Ramirez and fact-checked by Nate Rot. Robert Rodriguez was our audio engineer. Beth Donovan is our senior director and Anya Grundman is our senior vice president of programming. I'm Emily Kwong. Thanks as always for listening to Shortwave from NPR.