The Nature Conservancy started the pilot program last year, to help the cranes survive in a shifting environment. Farmers are increasingly converting land, switching from rice to more lucrative crops such as peaches and grapes. But these crop types offer no habitat value for cranes, says Greg Golet, a senior ecologist at The Nature Conservancy working on the pilot program. “There’s a lot of concern about conversion of the crop landscape that the birds have come to depend upon,” he says.

While the available information suggests that sandhill crane populations are increasing, there’s still a great deal of uncertainty. Even with a stable or growing population, the species—which is listed as threatened by the state of California—is dependent on key stopover sites, making the birds vulnerable to habitat loss. Golet says he wants to see if birds will use sites that are at the periphery of where they’ve been historically, or in areas that can be much more resilient in the face of changing conditions.

The crane conservation pilot project is part of The Nature Conservancy’s larger BirdReturns program. Now in its third year for shorebirds, the program creates habitat-on-demand for the millions of birds that use the Central Valley each year as a critical pit stop along the Pacific Flyway, which extends from Alaska to Patagonia. Depending on the season and species targeted, the Conservancy might ask farmers to flood fields earlier or drain them later to create optimal habitat.

It’s like pop-up habitat—making conservation the next frontier for quick, nimble short-term services.

Like the farmers in the BirdReturns program, Anderson is making slight adjustments in the timing, allocation, and depth of water on his land. The cranes prefer roosting grounds in close proximity to good foraging grounds, to minimize the distance they must travel between the two. Without sufficient flooding, the birds won’t have easy access to both types of habitat they need. The combination is essential—and with four years of drought, Golet was concerned that there would be too little flooding of the rice fields, particularly during the critical winter months. “As it turns out, there’s quite a bit more acreage flooded than we anticipated,” he says. “But we wanted to make sure that if that worst case scenario came to pass, we could provide habitat in some of these historical use areas for the crane.”

Using crowd-sourced bird observations from Cornell University’s eBird database along with real-time satellite data on water availability, the BirdReturns team can determine where there’s likely to be an abundance of birds but not a lot of suitable habitat. “Then we go out and try to create additional habitat in those times and places,” says Paul Spraycar, who directs TNC’s crane program.

TNC runs a reverse auction, asking farmers to put a price on creating crane habitat. They compare predictions on where the highest-value habitat will be against each farmer’s bid, and select the farms that can create the greatest-value habitat per dollar invested. The farmers are compensated for maintaining certain field conditions and water levels, for anywhere between four and ten weeks. Simply getting a farmer to draw the water level of a flooded field down to a shallower depth, and hold it there for longer into the spring, can achieve dramatic results, says Golet.

More than 50 different species of birds have been spotted in fields enrolled in the shorebird program, with densities 30 times greater than in the surrounding landscape. “It’s just remarkable how readily the birds respond,” he says.

As winter winds down, the BirdReturns team continues to monitor bird locations and habitat conditions across the valley as they transition from the crane program to the spring shorebird program.

The short-term nature of the arrangements is a major part of BirdReturns’ success. Over the past two years, the program has created over 20,000 acres of habitat for shorebirds.