Blog: Balancing birds, water and farms in California’s agricultural heartland
This year though, those cranes, geese and the millions of waterbirds that have followed the same pathway for thousands of years, are finding a stark landscape in the Central Valley, which stretches nearly 450 miles up California’s middle and hosts some of the nation’s richest farmland. With the vast majority of the state in “extreme” or “exceptional” drought, the habitat that these birds rely on in the Central Valley – our last remaining wetlands and the surrogate habitat created in agricultural fields like rice and alfalfa – have seen major cutbacks in water.
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