Salt River Birds

Hats off to the Salt River Project

These photos were taken right along the Salt River, on the walkway next to Tempe Marketplace — about as urban a setting as you can imagine for wildlife photography, with shopping centers and traffic just steps away. Just downriver from here is Tempe Town Lake, a reservoir created by inflatable dams across the riverbed in the middle of the city.

What makes this spot for birds a bit surprising is that the Salt River through Phoenix and Tempe is naturally dry most of the year. Roosevelt Dam, completed in 1911 as the first of several dams built by the Salt River Project, was built to store water for irrigation and the growing Phoenix Valley, and it (along with the dams built after it) diverts nearly all of the river’s natural flow upstream. Below the dams, the riverbed is usually just sand, except after heavy rain. That makes places like Tempe Town Lake, where water actually reaches the surface, a real magnet for birds and other wildlife in an otherwise dry, urban stretch of river.