It’s early autumn and the reeds surrounding me are mostly dead, but they still sound very much alive, filled with the rush of the breeze, creaking insects, and the shy songs of birds.

My guide, long-time Utah birdwatcher and Audubon Council president John Bellmon, tells me that my keen ear, which hears elusive bird calls all around us, is a gift. Many people bird by ear, he says—you learn to identify the bird songs then follow the sound to its source for a glimpse of a new feathered friend to add to your “life list.”

I am not so easily convinced I have an aptitude for the hobby given my difficulty in actually locating birds of any note. I detect some movement in the reeds across a pond, prompting Bellmon to set up his sighting scope and peer inside. Mallard ducks, he declares. They’re the most common type of duck in Utah—nothing to write home about.

Not that home, for me, is very far.

I have lived in Utah my entire life, but I have never tried birdwatching—despite the fact that the state’s iconic Great Salt Lake is hemispheric mecca for birds. Millions of them—entire species, in some cases—rely on the wetland habitats that surround the lake. 

This remarkable landscape is rarely celebrated by the locals. Even life-long residents are often unaware of the natural resource in their backyard. Because of this disconnect, few are aware of plans for urbanization that stand to impact 11,000 to 15,000 acres of wetland habitat in northern Utah in the next few decades.

Galvanized by these threats, conservationists have banded together to help the public connect to their surroundings. That’s what has brought me to Farmington Bay on the southeast shore of the Great Salt Lake—the newly opened Eccles Wildlife Education Center, Bellmon had told me, was the perfect place for a first-time birdwatching lesson.

We spotted a blue heron from the center’s parking lot when we arrived, but it was difficult to get a good look at the tall, blue-gray bird, which was perched atop a specially built nesting platform, so we headed down a gravel trail out to the wetlands and to the pond where we stand now.

Most birders have a special “hook bird”—a particular species that captivated them and brought them into the hobby, Bellmon tells me, but he has been an active birdwatcher since he was five years old, so it’s difficult for him to pick just one species. He does, however, remember when he first spotted a robin’s nest near his childhood home in New Mexico.

Serious birders keep a list of every species they have seen in person and will travel to exotic locations to find as many rare birds as possible. Bellmon has traveled all over South America and Africa in pursuit of birds—Costa Rica was fabulous, he says—and anticipation animates his figure when he describes a trip he’s planning to the Galapagos Islands.

Strange as it may seem to a local, visiting Great Salt Lake is on many birders’ bucket lists. Bird enthusiasts from the East Coast will come here to view shorebirds such as tiny snowy plovers, which arrive by the thousands to the lake’s salty mudflats, where they build their nests.

I’ve encountered the snowy plover before, without realizing that to some, such a sighting would be a rare treat. But today, we have no such luck. The ducks are the pond’s only occupants this morning, so Bellmon teaches me to pick out the males by their impossibly green heads—the same shade of bright green my grandfather used to paint on the wooden ducks he carved to pass the time. But Bellmon is unimpressed by the pond’s offerings, so we head back toward the wildlife center. 

There simply aren’t very many birds this year, Bellmon says, probably because of the drought. Utah’s famous snow didn’t fall last winter, leading to the second-driest year in Utah’s recorded history, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The drought has devastated farms, decimated Utah’s water supply, and reduced Farmington Bay to a trickle, interspersed with a few man-made canals and ponds.  

Even some of the managed ponds have begun to suffer. Though the new wildlife center was built at the edge of an impoundment to facilitate indoor birdwatching, the artificial ponds closest to it have also run dry. Once inside, we see a cheery, yellow-breasted western meadowlark approach the large observation windows.

While Farmington Bay and the rest of the Great Salt Lake naturally fluctuate, humans have diverted large swaths of the lake’s natural inflow, reducing the overall size of the Great Salt Lake by more than 40 percent, according to state scientists. Additional development stands to strip away what water remains.

“The loss of the Great Salt Lake is a very real, very plausible thing,” Bellmon says. Having watched the lake shrink over the last 34 years, he says, he doesn’t “see us turning it around, just slowing it down.”

And that does not bode well for the birds, especially migratory shorebirds such as the Wilson’s phalarope. The Wilson’s phalarope descends on the Great Salt Lake en masse, where the birds gorge themselves for several weeks before taking to the skies for their lengthy migration.

Once they leave the Great Salt Lake, Bellmon says, the phalaropes “go out about 100 miles into the Pacific, and the next time they see land is the coast of Chile.” Without the Great Salt Lake, the birds may be unable to complete their migration without starving.

Only a few other visitors are watching the birds from within the Eccles viewing center—which is essentially a giant glass blind equipped with binoculars. But in a few weeks, hundreds of schoolchildren will descend upon the facility to meet, potentially, their first hook bird. Even if they don’t become globetrotting birders like Bellmon, they might still be inspired to put up a bird feeder in the yard, or buy binoculars to watch birds in the city park, he says. 

The meadowlark insists on hiding in a tuft of grass every time I pull out my camera, so I head back toward the pond, thinking I can snap a few pictures of the more outgoing mallard ducks for proof of my little expedition. But when I arrive there, the ducks are gone—replaced, instead, by a trio of American white pelicans. Still a common find, but just majestic enough that they convince me that I, too, might catch the birding bug.