“Want to go to the sewage treatment plant?” my friend asked. “Oh, hell yes!”
Gateway to Paradise — Sunnyvale Water Pollution Control Plant!
For a birder, that’s an invitation that’s hard to pass up. In many places, wastewater treatment facilities include large open ponds of fully treated water. In many inland locations, these ponds can be a rare and reliable source of water in an otherwise dry landscape. In coastal areas, they’re are a source of fresh or brackish water at the edge of saltwater.
Aeration, maybe? There were a few ducks along this stretch of channel, many more in the pond in back (also part of the treatment plant.)
Turns out, people also find water treatment plants useful. They not only take care of the raw sewage that we all generate, they also clean up contaminants before the water is fed back into the ecosystem; contaminants that accumulate on roads and are washed into storm runoff, and of course everything people flush away or pour down the drain.
Vegetation along the edge of the canal, rafts of duck on the pond.
It takes a fairly complex, expensive system to clean up our water. There are lots of them around the country, and when the population grows, more are needed. Old ones need maintenance and upgrades. That’s one reason the infrastructure bill includes a good chunk of money for clean water projects. We need it, birds like it… win-win.
A reed bed at a jog in the canal had some interesting residents, including this Green Heron.
There were also Common Gallinules (formerly Common Moorhen)...
… including this juvenile, who can be told from the adult by the dull orange-brown facial shield and less pronounced plumage markings. But both adults and kids have those amazing feet!
Infrastructure doesn’t just make for good swimming’ holes — Pete Dunne describes it best in Hawks in Flight:
The Eisenhower administration’s lasting gift to mobile America, the interstate highway system, benefitted Red-taileds by creating mile upon straight-cut mile of ideal hunting and wintering habitat from originally unusable forest. The woods’ edge provides hunting perches; the grassy roadsides and wide center divisions are ideal habitat for small rodents.
As propitious for Red-tails as the leveling of trees in the East was the planting of them (or their creosote-soaked remains) in the West. First the telegraph, then the telephone created miles of well-spaced hunting perches.
Redtail and Ferruginous Hawk on the creosote-soaked remains of trees in the West.
Roads sometimes need bridges — like the Golden Gate Bridge — and peregrine love ‘em.
So, roads and communications… two more things that benefit humans and birds too. (Well, highways not quite as much…)
Redtails are really infrastructure fans; they love the perches we build for them.
It’s also a nice place for a teenage couple to hang out together...
The electrical grid could use some help; upgrading aging distribution networks and adding cleaner energy sources is another priority. Again, all of these power sources have their downsides — hydro interferes with river flows, wind has impacts (literally) on birds, and solar plants can cover habitat valuable to birds if not to humans. (And there’s that whole issue with the Ivanpah solar plant frying birds as they fly by.) But even with these problems, the impact of renewable energy pales in significance compared to the wholesale destruction caused by fossil fuels — mining, spills, toxic byproducts and, you know, rendering the planet uninhabitable.
Although I prefer local-source power (solar rooftops, etc) long-distance power grids do offer a lot of really great perches on the towers. This Cooper’s Hawk was at the water treatment plant...
…. as was this high-rise Double-Crested Cormorant perch.
If I’m in an open area that should have Prairie Falcons, I will look hard at every power tower.
This radar tower provided shaded perches to hundreds of starlings.
I have to finish with one of my all-time favorite examples of birds using human infrastructure for their own needs.
(ps — My husband knows some of the people involved. They left the acorns for the woodpeckers.)
Like it or not, people are going to keep building; hopefully birds can make use of some of what’s constructed. How are birds using the infrastructure in your area?
