A Mono Lake success story
There was a time when it was hard to find yellow warblers at Rush Creek.
But on a recent bright and sunny morning, a yellow warbler plunged through a gap in a stream-side cottonwood forest, flying back to the nest where her chicks were hiding. Suddenly, she was stopped in midair, tangled in a mist net.
Field biologist Chris McCreedy found the bird in his snare a few minutes later. "Hi there, sweetie," McCreedy said as he set to work. He untangled the bird, recorded its vitals -- it was a 2-year-old female that weighed 10 grams, about as much as a ballpoint pen -- and gently clamped an identification band to one of her legs.
Then he opened his palm and released her back to Rush Creek, a major tributary to Mono Lake in the eastern Sierra and the focus of an agonizingly complex and decades-long effort to heal a vast wilderness devastated by Los Angeles' insatiable thirst.
Now, 14 years after the city was ordered to reduce the quantity of tributary water it had been diverting into the Los Angeles aqueduct since 1941, Rush Creek has among the highest concentrations of yellow warblers in California -- roughly three pairs per 2 1/2 acres.
"Restrict grazing and bring back the water and things really start hopping," McCreedy said.
That's the good news. Orchestrating the restoration continues to be a challenging process for the http://http: www.monolake.org/ "> www.monolake.org/ , a nonprofit group of environmentalists and concerned citizens organized in 1978 to save and protect a bowl-shaped ecosystem roughly half the size of Rhode Island.
Nonetheless, Geoffrey McQuilkin, executive director of the 16,000-member group, said he is often asked, "Why is the Mono Lake Committee still around? You got the water you needed years ago. Isn't Mono Lake saved?" His stock response: "We still have a long way to go."
Over the years, the committee has stopped city water diversions, potentially damaging highway widening projects and proposed lake-shore development. But its biologists still can't explain why Rush Creek's trout are not growing as large as expected.
Then there are the endangered willow flycatchers, whose population soared with the return of Rush Creek's riparian vegetation but who are now being hit hard by an unforeseen threat: nest-invading brown cowbirds attracted by the rising brreet songs of the flycatchers' mating rituals.
