Clouds of toxic dust. Piles of dead fish and birds. Selenium-laced waters.

Observers often wax apocalyptic when talking about the Salton Sea, and part of that narrative is the inevitable reminder that this blight isn’t natural, that the sea only exists because the Colorado River breached a man-made canal in 1905.

But to millions of birds, the Salton Sea’s creation was a godsend. We see more than 400 bird species at the Salton Sea. Hundreds of thousands of sandpipers migrating between Alaska and South America stop there, and up to 90 percent of the world’s Eared Grebes descend on it every winter.