Bill Williams River provides valuable wildlife refuge

From Today’s News-Herald from Lake Havasu & Lower Colorado River, the annual Audubon Society Christmas bird count takes place in over 2000 locations throughout North America & the world, one of those being the Bill Williams Wildlife Refuge along the Lower Colorado River:

While only about 6,000 acres in size, the Bill Williams refuge is incredibly rich in wildlife, Blair said. “We’re the littlest refuge on the river, but we’ve got more biodiversity than all the others put together,” she said.

Blair led a small group up the Bill Williams River itself, sloshing upstream through ankle-deep water and occasionally hacking through thickets of invasive salt cedar. Joined by husband and wife Barbara and Dick Todd, volunteers at the refuge, the Blairs stopped every few minutes to listen to the whistles and clicks of birds flitting through the trees. Shallow enough to walk across, the river is nevertheless unique for the state. “This is a live river in Arizona,” Blair said. “It’s one of the last ones left.”

Created by the merging of the Big Sandy and Santa Maria rivers, and held in check by the Alamo Dam, about 40 miles upstream, the Bill Williams river is one of only two tributaries that flow into the Colorado River below the Grand Canyon. Its flow sustains one of the last remaining stands of native willow and cottonwood trees along the Colorado River, vital habitat for a variety of species that are found virtually nowhere else.

Those forests once formed a corridor 280 miles long and several miles wide, all along the length of the Colorado River. But beginning with the construction of Hoover Dam in 1933, most of these forests were either drowned under reservoirs, or dried out and destroyed by the lack of water. “That forest is now 99 percent gone,” Blair said.

What remains is sustained by the flow of the Bill Williams River, which peaks in the winter and swells in times of flood, bringing vital water to the fertile land and allowing new stands of willow and cottonwood to be seeded. “It’s amazing out here,” said Dick Todd. “You just add a little water and watch it grow.”

To read the full text of this article from Today’s News Herald, click here.

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