Imagine you’re a phalarope — a female Wilson’s phalarope, to be precise, Phalaropus tricolor. Your tiny, fragile body fits in the palm of a human hand and weighs little more than a double-A battery. You have long, dark legs, a white belly and blue-gray wings that lighten into a ruddy color at your neck. Your face is mostly white, with a dark cap and a black mask leading to a slender, pointed beak.
Your appearance makes you unusual among birds: Female phalaropes are larger and more colorful than their male counterparts. You look good, and you know it; you choose your mates, competing aggressively with other females, and you practice polyandry, taking multiple partners.
You’re exceptional in another way, too: You’re the only bird species that migrates across the entire Western Hemisphere, stopping primarily at inland salt lakes — “freakish habitats,” as ornithologist Margaret Rubega put it.
In spring, you nest in the prairies surrounding Saskatchewan’s Chaplin Lake. Then, you fly south to the U.S. Great Basin, seeking out places like Utah’s Great Salt Lake, Oregon’s Lake Abert and California’s Mono Lake to chow down on flies and their larvae to double your weight before migration. You might be best known for your unusual hunting technique: Sometimes you spin around in the water, shoveling it backwards with your lobed feet to force any fly larvae suspended in the lake up to the surface.
Once you’ve bulked up and molted, you fly south to South America for the austral summer.
But what if you flew to one of your salt lakes, and it wasn’t there?
In 2014, 2015, 2021 and 2022, that happened to the phalaropes and other shorebirds that visited Lake Abert. After a string of dry winters and increasing water diversions for ranching and farming, the lake had shrunk to a puddle of brine. Drought and diversions have also desiccated the Great Salt Lake; in 2023, scientists released a report warning that it could dry up as early as 2028.
Saline lakes are among the world’s most threatened ecosystems, due to the irrigation systems that draw from the freshwater rivers that feed them and the effects of climate change. Without substantial political action, they will continue to shrink.
“If we lose Great Salt Lake, then phalaropes are likely to be on a trajectory towards extinction,” said Ryan Carle, a scientist and co-founder of the International Phalarope Working Group. “If we lose Great Salt Lake and Abert, it’s even worse.”
ON A CLOUDY, WINDY DAY at the end of March, Carle and more than 50 others — including scientists, environmental advocates and writer Terry Tempest Williams — gathered on the steps of the Utah Capitol to announce a petition to list the Wilson’s phalarope as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.
On the podium stood a large jar of water from the Great Salt Lake, filled with swimming brine shrimp. (Though brine shrimp — also known as sea monkeys — are a symbol of the Great Salt Lake, they are not the phalarope’s primary food source.) The human participants donned artist-made phalarope wings over their winter clothes and held long strips of canvas printed with blue cyanotype to resemble waves. A musical trio on soprano saxophone, accordion and tambourine led a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In,” celebrating the phalaropes’ unusual feeding style: “Oh, how I want to be in that water / oh when the phalaropes come spinning in.” The participants sang, danced and cheered.
The news of an endangered species petition for the Wilson’s phalarope came as a surprise, even to many in the conservation community. Until recently, few people studied or monitored the species; when it was last evaluated by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the organization described its population as “stable,” even growing. In Utah, state environmental officials worried more about the declining lake’s impact on snowy plovers and eared grebes. But the goal of the petition isn’t only to serve the phalarope: It’s part of jump-starting the conservation of the Great Salt Lake and saline lake ecosystems across the Americas.
The petition was initiated by the Center for Biological Diversity, or CBD, a group well-known for litigating on behalf of imperiled species. But its focus on the small, unassuming Wilson’s phalarope is due to a hemisphere-spanning initiative called the International Phalarope Working Group and to Ryan Carle and Marcela Castellino, two scientists who have lived parallel lives at opposite ends of the species’ migration pathway.
“If we lose Great Salt Lake, then phalaropes are likely to be on a trajectory towards extinction.”
Carle was born in 1985, the son of two California state park rangers. He grew up on the shores of Mono Lake, a crater-shaped salt lake whose water level was mandated by a landmark 1994 ruling based on the public trust doctrine — the idea that states have to manage the waterways within their borders for the common good — though, despite that ruling, the lake level lies eight feet below its target. Since 2009, Carle has worked at the conservation science nonprofit Oikonos, studying waterbirds in the U.S. and Chile.
Castellino, who was also born in 1985, grew up on the shores of another salt lake — Argentina’s Mar Chiquita, where upward of 50% of Wilson’s phalaropes spend the austral summer after their 3,500-mile flight from North America. She and her sisters, Marina and Mariana, are all named after the lake.
In 2019, Carle decided to organize a phalarope count at Mono Lake. A lifelong kayaker, he had always admired the way the small birds took off from the surface of the lake in large, fluttering groups. But the birds hadn’t been surveyed in nearly 30 years, and no one knew how climate change or Mono’s environmental legislationhad affected them.
He contacted Rubega, the ornithologist who conducted those past studies. Rubega proposed holding an international meeting of everyone studying phalaropes, and she and Carle hosted it at Mono Lake in June 2019.
The relatively small group quickly identified the need for increased research and monitoring. The most frequently cited world population estimate dated to 1988; the Utah Division of Wildlife stopped doing phalarope-specific counts at Great Salt Lake in 2001.
“It’s such a small bird, it’s often far away (from observers), and it’s gray and white, so it doesn’t attract a lot of attention,” explained Castellino.
Castellino got interested in phalaropes while studying biology at Argentina’s National University of Córdoba. She participated in an exchange program at Utah’s Weber State University that brought students from Argentina, Chile and Mexico to the Great Salt Lake to develop research projects oriented around the birds that migrated between Utah and their home countries. For Castellino, that meant studying the phalarope — or, as it’s known fondly in South America, the chorlito.
Neither Carle nor Castellino remembers who put them in touch. Carle’s email inviting Castellino to the Mono Lake meeting was initially sent to an old address, and when Castellino finally received it, she wavered about going. Fortunately, she decided that it was too good an opportunity to pass up. “It’s good she did, because she became, like, the most important person,” said Carle.
By the end of the three-day meeting, the attendees had founded the International Phalarope Working Group. That summer, they initiated simultaneous surveys at six of the species’ important stopover sites in North America: Lake Chaplin, Mono Lake, Lake Abert, Great Salt Lake, Owens Lake and the San Francisco Bay Salt Ponds. They wanted coordinated counts so that they could see how the phalaropes distributed themselves across the continent’s entire habitat, not just the individual lakes. When Lake Abert dried up in 2021, for example, they saw a spike in phalarope populations at Mono Lake.
“It’s such a small bird, it’s often far away (from observers), and it’s gray and white, so it doesn’t attract a lot of attention.”
At Great Salt Lake, two state Division of Wildlife Resources employees, John Luft and John Neill, restarted phalarope counts by plane. They flew counterclockwise around the lake, one John looking out the left window and the other out of the right. They noticed that the birds congregated differently now than they did when the surveys ended a decade before. Previously, large flocks stationed themselves in Great Salt Lake’s shallow and relatively fresh bays. Now, some of those bays were nearly dry, Luft said, so the birds formed a ribbon around the west shore of the lake.
Working-group members began to fit birds with nanotags — lightweight solar-
powered trackers that allow scientists to trace their individual flight paths. Carle’s supply of trackers is organized in a translucent plastic case. When scientists capture the birds, he explained, they slide their tiny shorebird legs through two loops of fishing line “like a pair of underwear.” The tag rides on the bird’s rump with its long, practically weightless antenna sticking out behind them.
But phalaropes aren’t easy to tag; they often spend their time swimming far away from shore or in shallow water that is inaccessible by boat. In March 2024, Carle, Castellino and others spent a week unsuccessfully trying to tag phalaropes at Laguna Mar Chiquita using mist nets. The previous year, they faced similar problems while trying to net phalaropes in California and resorted to using bright lights at night to confuse the birds. The working group has had the most success at Chaplin Lake, tagging males guarding their nests.
WHEN I FIRST MET CARLE over Zoom in October 2023, the working group’s first 25 tagged birds were on their way to South America. He’d just seen the preliminary map of their flight paths and was surprised by the results.
“Our understanding for 30 years was that they go to Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake, and they eat a lot, and then they fly straight to Ecuador over the ocean,” he said. In Ecuador, the salt company Ecuasal’s man-made evaporation ponds host some of the world’s highest densities of phalaropes.
But not a single phalarope traveled as expected. Instead, they stopped at small intermediate sites — “coastal lagoons in Baja California and interior salt lakes in central Mexico and the Salton Sea and little crappy ponds on military bases in the Mojave Desert,” Carle explained — sites that had never been on scientists’ radar.
After Northern Hemisphere monitoring got underway in summer 2019, Castellino and others organized a coordinated survey of the birds’ non-breeding range in South America. It was a daunting prospect: They had to survey saline wetlands in the Andes as well as large lowland salt lakes like the Mar Chiquita, developing tailored protocols for each site.
The phalarope working group joined forces with the Grupo de Conservación de Flamencos Altoandinos, or the High Andes Flamingo Conservation Group, whose members knew the terrain well from conducting annual flamingo counts for nearly three decades. Flamingos also flock to salt lakes; in fact, the birds get their pink color from eating brine shrimp.
Based on data from those February 2020 surveys, the working group estimated that the entire Wilson’s phalarope population numbered 1 million — a decline of one-third from the 1988 count of 1.5 million. Though Carle pointed out that it’s hard to compare their total to the 1988 number because census methods have changed so much, the more data the group collected, the more the members saw a clear downward trend in the population.
“Our understanding for 30 years was that they go to Great Salt Lake and Mono Lake, and they eat a lot, and then they fly straight to Ecuador over the ocean.”
In 2021, the urgency of the saline lakes’ plight became even clearer. Abert dried up, Great Salt Lake was dropping, and Mono remained significantly below its court-mandated level. Many of the Andes’ saline lakes were being drained by lithium mining, and the Mar Chiquita was at its lowest level in years.
“What’s the species that connects them all up?” Carle asked rhetorically. “The Wilson’s phalarope.” He and Castellino began writing a species conservation plan. Not long after, its material — an estimate of the species’ population and its declining trend, an analysis of the threats it faces and identification of the sites key to its survival — would become the core of the Endangered Species Act petition.
During the summer of 2022, as Great Salt Lake’s record-low water level prompted national attention and a surge of grassroots activism, the Center for Biological Diversity began formulating a legal strategy to save the lake. It joined a public trust lawsuit initiated in September 2023 and began considering Endangered Species Act petitions, either for the phalarope or for the eared grebe — two species that rely so much on the Great Salt Lake that losing it would be “game over,” according to CBD Great Basin Director Patrick Donnelly.
They could have chosen either species, but the decision was easy once another scientist put Donnelly in touch with Carle. “We had a young, hungry expert who was deep in the species and willing to put his name on the petition,” said Donnelly, adding that the organization still plans to submit a petition for the eared grebe, up to 90% of whose population also relies on Great Salt Lake.
“I got a call out of the blue from the CBD to see if I would be interested,” said Carle. He had been thinking about ways to use what he and the working group members had learned to help save phalarope habitat. “This was really aligned with that.”
In Utah, news of the impending petition began to spread in fall 2023. The organizations Utah Youth Environmental Solutions and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment quickly signed on.
For others, the proposal raised concern. During the state’s legislative session in January 2024, Republican State Sen. Ronald Winterton introduced a $2 million budget appropriation for the state’s wildlife management agencies — not simply to prevent new endangered species listings but to help de-list currently protected local species — increasing the small annual appropriation established in 1997. Though the extra funding wasn’t directly aimed at the phalarope listing, it was intended for similar situations.
“It’s very costly to have things listed and to have to do environmental impact studies and to have to mitigate around those,” Winterton said. “If we can do our part on the state level, there’s no reason the feds need to step in and say, ‘You’re not doing a good-enough job.’”
Some members of the advocacy community sympathized with Winterton’s ambivalence. “There’s an intangible reputational cost if it’s not Utah in charge of (Great Salt Lake’s) rescue,” said Ben Abbott, a Brigham Young University ecosystem scientist and the executive director of the organization Grow the Flow, in February 2024.
“We love to pride ourselves on what we call the ‘Utah way’ of doing government that isn’t as acrimonious,” he continued. “This would represent a failure of the Utah way — we couldn’t get our act together, we couldn’t save enough water.” Still, Grow the Flow signed onto the petition, recognizing that it was based on sound science.
The National Audubon Society, however, declined to take a position on the petition. Instead, it released a statement emphasizing the need for increased monitoring at saline lakes and voluntary water transfers. Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, R, told Salt Lake City reporters that the state would push back on the petition. Sen. Winterton told High Country News, “We’ll do everything we can to keep this bird from being listed and to see that it has what it needs to survive.”
AS THE UTAH LEGISLATIVE SESSION adjourned in late February, the International Phalarope Working Group met at the Laguna Mar Chiquita in Argentina. About 30 scientists and environmental managers from the countries on the phalarope’s long migratory path — Canada, the U.S., Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina — attended, staying at a hotel in Castellino’s hometown of Miramar de Ansenuza, on the lake’s southern shore.
For visitors from the Great Basin, the location was surprisingly verdant. Yellow cuckoos — locally called pirinchos — and masked gnatcatchers, or tacuaritas azules, perched on subtropical jacaranda trees; saffron finches, or jilgueros, balanced on the long-stemmed pampas grass. The scientists added birds to their “life lists” during the two-block walk from the hotel to the meeting location, the town’s SUM, or sala de usos múltiples, a municipal multipurpose room. There were also familiar sights: The Utahns were excited to find pickleweed (Salicornia spp.), which grows along the shore of the Great Salt Lake and can be used for cooking. In Argentina, it’s known as jume.
While it’s been nearly a century since popular resorts dotted the shores of the Great Salt Lake, Mar Chiquita’s beach was swarming with flocks of tourists as well as shorebirds. An esplanade lined with hotels, restaurants, and beach-themed bars ringed the shore. A “flamingo train” — a flamingo-shaped open-air car that pulled two additional open-air passenger cars — carted tourists on loops around the town and the surrounding lakefront. Four of the meeting participants rode it to their final dinner, stopping to pick up a fifth attendee they passed along the way.
Castellino had experienced this culture shock in reverse: During her first weekend as an exchange student in Utah, she and her friends decided to have a beach day at the Great Salt Lake. “We got there and spread out our blanket — and we were the only ones!” she said. Outside of Miramar, however, much of the Mar Chiquita’s shoreline is difficult to reach.
An endangered species listing of the Wilson’s phalarope “would represent a failure of the Utah way — we couldn’t get our act together, we couldn’t save enough water.”
Unlike the Great Salt Lake, the Laguna Mar Chiquita also has high-level protection: In 2022, after a campaign by the organization Aves Argentinas and other groups, the majority of Laguna Mar Chiquita was designated as a national park and reserve, Parque Nacional Ansenuza. (Back in 1967, Congress considered a proposal to designate a portion of Great Salt Lake as a national monument. Utah Sen. Wallace F. Bennett objected, however, calling the site a “more-or-less barren desert island” and writing that, compared to Utah’s other national parks, it was “nowhere near their class in any way, shape or form.”)
The SUM was decorated for the event by high school and college students from Experiencia Ambientalia, an environmental education and leadership program directed by Castellino’s sister Marina. A large wooden cutout of a phalarope stood on the small stage. The students sold mugs, stickers, yerba mate gourds and other merchandise to raise money to visit Mono Lake during the summer and meet their pen pals in Lee Vining, California, near Mono Lake. The students communicate with one another in Spanish via WhatsApp; the majority of the Californians come from Spanish-speaking households.
The language barrier is one of the greatest obstacles to international collaboration, and the phalarope group worked hard to overcome it. At one point, Pablo Michelutti, the Laguna Mar Chiquita park ranger who has conducted the lake’s aerial bird counts since 1992, wordlessly presented Great Salt Lake’s John Neil and John Luft with a copy of his thick spiral-bound census manual, written in Spanish. The two Johns, who had come to the meeting to help standardize the lakes’ survey protocols, paged through it but were unable to read the contents. Later, a translator helped them.
Though the working group’s efforts initially focused on large sites like Great Salt Lake and the Mar Chiquita, Rubega said that the international meeting showed her the importance of conserving both large and small saline sites.
“If you look at the history of conservation, it’s about conserving one special place that’s important to a species,” she said. But just because the large sites are crowded with phalaropes, she continued, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the favored sites — they might simply be the only options left. “Seeing how the birds use (salt lakes) tells us that the birds know something we don’t know about what is good.”
THE SCIENTISTS AND ADVOCATES behind the phalarope petition recognize that the species may not get listed. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency that oversees the endangered species list, adds relatively few species in any given year. But even when a species isn’t listed, the petition process can prod states to take significant conservation action.
“Once the petition is filed, the whole process begins to determine whether (the species) should be listed,” said Abbott. “And that’s where people are actually motivated. … The advantage of an endangered species listing is that it creates an alignment of interests.”
Rubega added that these alternative approaches are often more expeditious than fighting for listing. “Litigation takes a lot of time, and sometimes that’s time the birds don’t have,” she said. “There are people in the conservation community who think that there are less contentious ways to accomplish the same ends.”
All of them agree on what’s necessary to save the phalarope, the eared grebe and the rest of the 10 million migratory birds that visit Great Salt Lake: There needs to be more water in the lake — 1 million additional acre-feet each year over the next decade, by Abbott’s calculation. But accomplishing that would require the Utah Legislature to make complex changes to state water law and allocate funds to purchase water rights from willing sellers — neither of which it has done at the scale needed.
Humans can change our behavior in ways that birds can’t, Rubega noted. And some changes are already underway: For decades, few people paid attention to saline lakes, even in Salt Lake City, where the nearby lake was ignored for decades, even scorned. But as the rally — with its phalarope-head hats, foam wings, and songs and dances — indicated, appreciation of the Great Salt Lake and the species it supports is growing and deepening. Donnelly called the petition “a love letter to saline lakes.”
If, one day, Wilson’s phalaropes “come spinning in” to their ailing saline lakes and find them refilled with water — whether by state action, national intervention or the work of a diverse international coalition — they’ll feel that love, too.
This story is part of High Country News’ Conservation Beyond Boundaries project, which is supported by the BAND Foundation.
Travel for this article was supported by the Oregon State University Public Humanities Collaboratory Watershed Fellowship. Brooke Larsen contributed reporting.
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This article appeared in the July 2024 print edition of the magazine with the headline “The tiny bird that could save an ecosystem.”
