Wildlife vanishing in the barren ‘Pocket’
At a place called “the Pocket,” three California rivers — the Tule, the Kaweah and the Kings — meet near the end of their journey from their Sierra headwaters to the bottom of the San Joaquin Valley.
It is a stark and barren place of pale dirt and blue sky, a moonscape but for the water. The three rivers are now canals that intersect in a T.
A burrowing owl perches briefly on top of an irrigation structure, catching the eye of ecologist Rob Hansen. “One of the few living parts of the wildlife system out there,” he said.
Nowhere is the environmental cost of food and the scourge of drought more stark than here in the Tulare Basin. People use nearly all the water and land, leaving little for wildlife.
The desert species have it best. “There’s still almost 5 percent of their landscape here,” Hansen said. “The prairie, the forest, the wetlands, those are down to 1, 2, less than 5 percent.” It’s all farmland now, with cities encroaching.
Hansen, an ecology professor at the College of the Sequoias, president of the nonprofit Tulare Basin Wildlife Partners and a private consultant, doesn’t want to see farming leave the valley. Yet he fears that the tiny fragments of nature that remain are being pushed to their last edge.
He spots an American white pelican, an inland freshwater bird with a 10-foot wingspan that used to nest here in the thousands. Now only a handful visit, flying from Nevada and alighting near irrigation canals.
Dozens of common tree swallows swarm a tiny patch of tule rushes at an irrigation pump. The swallows were native here, but now they just pass through.
“All they can do here today is cross this landscape, feeding as they go,” Hansen said. “They need the tules to stop and rest for a while.”
Last year there were more tules and small willows. Someone has since bulldozed them.
“There’s so little left here,” Hansen said. “It’s not like we have much to protect.”