How paying farmers saved the tricolored blackbird
Show me the money: Market-based solutions are key components of the conservation toolbox.
A program that pays farmers to delay harvesting crops in California’s San Joaquin Valley has saved half a million endangered tricolored blackbird chicks in the past decade, according to the National Audubon Society, bringing the bird back from the brink of extinction.
Known as “trikes,” males flash distinct red and white stripes on their shoulders. Females fly in flocks of 10,000 or more looking for protected nesting grounds. Sometimes they decide on a farmer’s silage1 field, but they’ve also adapted to new habitats, such as invasive blackberry thickets, and taken advantage of marshy wildlife refuges to stage their comeback.
From Audubon reporter Alastair Bland:
Not long ago, dairy producers routinely motored their harvesters through fields where the blackbirds were nesting, sometimes killing thousands of flightless chicks in minutes. This carnage threatened the survival of the species, whose numbers, historically 2 million to 3 million, plunged through the 20th century, bottoming out at an estimated 145,000 in 2014.2
Show me the money
For a decade, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and partners such as Audubon California have spent nearly $2 million to compensate farmers for losses they incur when they delay harvesting or planting to protect trikes.
The program’s success is an example of how a market-based solution can play a key role in conservation. Though controversial at times3, incentive programs have proven instrumental in saving a lot of wildlife, from bobolinks in New England to gopher tortoises in Georgia to bobwhite quail in Tennessee. In other words, while we can enact protective regulations, mobilize volunteers, and create wildlife refuges to bolster success, sometimes good old-fashioned money goes a long way.
This isn’t the only market-based program in California’s farmland that’s working to save birds. BirdReturns, a partnership between The Nature Conservancy, Audubon California and Point Blue Conservation Science, pays over 100 rice farmers each year to flood their fields during spring migration season, creating 60,000 acres of temporary wetlands for birds to refuel while traversing the Pacific Flyway, which stretches from Alaska to South America.
The program, which operates a reverse auction whereby farmers submit a price and flood their field if they win, received a $15 million grant from the state of California this year, ensuring its survival and possible expansion.
BirdReturns benefits tens of thousands of:
Shorebirds, including western sandpipers, American avocets, and white-faced ibis
Ducks
Geese, including snow geese
Cranes, including sandhill cranes
Collaborative work with farmers
In these examples, both farmers and birds are able to thrive. Rice growers must allow fields to lie fallow every five years, regardless of whether they are paid. Since tricolored blackbirds were listed as threatened under California’s Endangered Species Act in 2019, farmers aren’t supposed to harm the protected birds, but there’s less of a sting when compensation is available for delaying a harvest. A carrot-over-stick approach has worked for all.
Again, from Audubon:
The collaborative work with farmers has all but eliminated that once-existential threat. There were no known silage mortality events in the past three years, marking a promising change of course for a species that, until just a decade ago, was trending toward zero. … [T]he comeback is real, and it’s a sign that conservation measures are working.
What’s happening in your community?
How is your community innovating to improve conservation? I’d love to hear about it.
Tricolored blackbird interesting facts:
Trikes form the largest colonies of any passerine (perching birds that comprise half the bird world). In the 1930s, a colony of 300,000 birds was recorded breeding across 59 acres. Now, colonies of up to 25,000 birds might colonize 10 acres of farmland.
Trikes are year-round residents, mostly of California, with a few populations in Oregon, Washington and Baja, Mexico.
The bird was first categorized in 2006 as endangered by IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources), with the last assessment taking place in 2020.
Morning has broken
Like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken
Like the first bird.
— Christian hymn by Eleanor Farjeon, popularized by Cat Stevens/Yusuf Islam
Why do birds need wetlands? The short answer
Wetland = water + decaying plant matter = great habitat for bugs, i.e. bird food. Since many insects must lay their eggs in water, wetlands are bug factories. “Yum yum,” say the cygnets! Birds also find safety in water, since many predators, like foxes, coyotes and cats, don’t swim.
About Earth Hope:
Earth Hope highlights environmental success stories from around the globe, because hope is the foundation of progress. We’re not interested in “neat” or unproven ideas, but in solutions that are working right now on the ground in communities across the world. Fear-based headlines and conflict-based journalism leave us feeling paralyzed. While we must know and understand the bad news, we should also remind ourselves frequently that progress happens every day. Therefore, in some ways, this is not just a journalism project, but a mental health project. Thanks for reading.
About me:
I’m Amanda Royal, a former newspaper reporter who covered wildfires, invasive species, water quality, wildlife and other environmental topics in California and Nevada (while writing under my maiden name and byline Amanda Fehd). The byline “Earth” was a bit accidental. It grew on me quickly, so I thought I’d keep it for a while.
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Silage is fermented grass, which is fed to dairy cows. Timing is key for silage harvesting, with farmers taking into account weather, moisture, maturity and nutrient content. Delaying harvesting by just a few weeks can disrupt feed availability and crop planning for the rest of the year.
Yikes, right? This reminds me of Michael Pollan’s argument in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” that the harvesting of salad greens kills so many voles that it results in more loss of life than eating meat.
This newsletter is aimed at ordinary people so I want to keep it simple. “Market-based” solutions create an altogether new market or manipulate an existing economic marketplace by inserting monetary incentives for good deeds or penalties such as fees or taxes for bad deeds. In a nutshell, they are the opposite of “regulations” or a command-and-control approach. Trading carbon credits falls into this category of solution. The carbon trading market allows polluters such as power or oil companies to continue their “bad deed” if they pay (incentivize) a landowner, often far away, for instance, to forego harvesting timber and thereby retaining the carbon stored in the forest. Since market-based solutions sometimes “allow” bad deeds to continue, they are often controversial. However, they’ve also produced irrefutable successes: In the 1980s, Costa Rica enacted a tax on petroleum sales that it used to pay landowners to reforest the country. Costa Rica’s forest cover has more than doubled to 57% since the program went into effect. More on this in a future post!
Their song is in my head now .
I remember these birds .
As a retired environmental science teacher and a member of Audubon, your post makes my heart sing. Thank you for this and for your other bits of positive news about our flora and fauna!