Utah Lake bird habitat near Provo Airport is thriving. Is it a threat to air safety?

Provo • Airplanes and birds don’t mix. So why did the federal government pay millions to renovate and restore wildlife habitat less than a mile from Provo’s bustling airport?

It all started with a fish. Large with wide-set eyes and a mouth that works like a vacuum, the June sucker is unique to Utah, only found in the Provo River and Utah Lake.

Utah Lake, though, long had a reputation of being “gross,” said Luke Peterson, executive director of the Utah Lake Authority. It was muddied by invasive carp and polluted by contaminants, its surrounding ecosystem siphoned off as tributaries were rerouted either for irrigation or to eliminate flood plains.

And it wasn’t a good place for the June sucker, which the Environmental Protection Agency labeled “endangered” nearly 30 years ago. Thus began the $50-million Provo River Delta Restoration Project in 2020.

The federally funded work transformed the area near the airport into a free-flowing river channel with a marshy bay full of native plants. It happened as data shows an increase in airplanes there striking animals over the last three years, on pace with the airport’s record-breaking growth.

The risk wasn’t unknown. A federal document detailing the project noted it would have some influence on the number of birds in the area, but, it stated, “Abundance alone is not necessarily the sole, or sometimes even the major, factor in risk assessment.”

Read more: Inside the 24/7 fight at Utah’s 2 busiest airports to keep migrating birds out of airplane engines]

“Birds only become a potential hazard to aircraft if/when they fly through the aircraft operating air space,” it read.

Last year, Federal Aviation Administration data showed 29 wildlife strikes at the airport, up from 23 the year prior and 11 in 2022. Of those 29 most recent strikes, 83% involved birds.

Crews at both Provo Airport and Salt Lake City International Airport constantly work to prevent such collisions. Both airports are located on wetlands in prime migratory bird habitat. Both were also once cheap, flat land.

It’s why Provo officials were drawn to the site nearly a century ago. The city didn’t want anything fancy, the Provo Evening Herald reported in October 1929. Just a station that would “be a credit to the city,” as the United States was becoming “more and more air-minded.”

By then, the newspaper noted, even Logan — “a smaller city than Provo” — had one.

Construction began near Utah Lake’s eastern shore in the early 1940s, setting up a battle for clear skies between its airplanes and the birds that called those shores home for millennia, said Jack Ray, Utah Waterfowl Association president and chair of the Great Salt Lake Alliance.

The official who oversees the Provo River Delta Project said its framers understood there was “potential for the airport to be concerned.” Altering the area’s habitat not only stood to impact the number of birds, but also what species stopped in and when.

To help inform decision-making about how best to handle that risk, the federal government and Provo city hired an airport biologist, said Michael Mills, executive director of the Utah Reclamation Mitigation and Conservation Commission.

Since 2017, Mills added, a Brigham Young University professor and a troop of students have also monitored birds around the project site — 22 locations that stretch north of the project, south of the airport and even across Provo Bay near Spanish Fork.

Their data shows bird counts have increased some, especially if you toss out 2018, when bird tallies spiked in accord with low lake levels and a marina dredging project. They apparently liked the mud flats, Mills said, because their numbers plummeted as lake levels swelled in 2019 and 2020.

“So many more birds came in response to that than anything else that has happened over the last eight years,” Mills said, “And we never would have guessed that.”

In 2017, observers recorded 235,000 birds across the project area. Last year, they spotted 263,000, down about 30,000 from the year before.

But most of the observations came as the delta was under construction. It opened to visitors in October with a host of new human amenities, like trails and boat ramps. Mills said researchers are looking forward to seeing how that affects the number of birds, too.

And the June sucker? It appears to be doing fine. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service moved it to the lower-risk “threatened” status in 2021 as efforts to revitalize Utah Lake continue.