Nearly 1,000 Acres of Great Salt Lake Wetlands Are on the Block — And Not Everyone Likes What Comes Next
Thirty years ago, Salt Lake City's airport struck a deal with the land. Bulldozers and graders were reshaping the tarmac, carving out a new runway that would inevitably displace swaths of wetland habitat adjacent to the Great Salt Lake. In exchange, the airport set aside hundreds of acres of land nearby, planted native flora, and engineered irrigation systems to replace what was lost. That mitigation parcel — quiet, marshy, and largely off-limits to the public ever since — has for three decades served as a resting ground for millions of birds traveling one of North America's most critical migratory corridors.
Now, that land is about to change hands. And while conservation advocates broadly welcome the goal of protecting it from warehouses and industrial sprawl, a vocal segment of Utah's birding community is raising serious questions about what "protection" actually means when the new landlord is a state wildlife agency with a mandate to expand hunting.
The Proposal: Selling Nearly 1,000 Acres to the State
Under the proposal Salt Lake City is pursuing, the Salt Lake City Department of Airports would sell over 950 acres located northwest of the airport to the Utah Department of Natural Resources. A conservation easement would be included, saving the wetlands from future development, and the land was recently valued at between $3.8 million and $5.1 million ahead of a sale that could be carried out later this year.
Brady Fredrickson, senior planning director for the airport, told the Salt Lake City Council during a briefing on the proposal: "This is a critical area." That description is not hyperbole. The parcel sits at the edge of one of the most ecologically significant saline lake systems remaining in the Western Hemisphere — a place where the fates of species that breed across the Arctic and winter in South America literally come down to a patch of standing water and native marsh grass.
Thirty Years of Quiet Stewardship
The airport acquired the land in 1995 with help from a Federal Aviation Administration grant, which funded planting native flora and constructing irrigation areas as environmental mitigation for a runway expansion completed at the time. In the years since, the arrangement has been a low-key but functional one. Inside the parcel is a mitigation area that was set aside in the 1990s when the airport built a runway, and since then the airport has done some minimal work to battle the invasive plant phragmites and keep birds from encroaching upon the airport.
Salt Lake City currently spends approximately $70,000 annually on personnel, equipment, and other expenses to maintain the property, per a memo sent to the Salt Lake City Council. For an airport whose primary business is moving passengers and freight, that is a manageable annual outlay — but it is also money spent outside the organization's core mission, a fact that airport leadership acknowledges openly.
"It certainly isn't our core competency. We're all about running airports," airport executive director Bill Wyatt said. The candor is disarming, but it speaks to a broader truth about how environmental mitigation parcels often end up in institutional limbo: acquired out of regulatory necessity, maintained at arm's length, and eventually handed off when a more fitting steward comes along.
How the Deal Came Together
Joel Ferry, then the commissioner of the Utah Department of Natural Resources, approached Salt Lake City airport officials about land near the Great Salt Lake in 2024, seeking to expand wetlands protections near the lake. The department owns over 660 acres directly east of the massive airport parcel. The geographic logic is straightforward: the state already controls a substantial adjacent block of land, and absorbing the airport parcel would create a contiguous swath of managed habitat that is far easier to administer as a unified ecosystem.
Utah Open Lands was roped into the discussions as well. The land conservation nonprofit would accept the conservation easement, guaranteeing that the land set aside for wetlands conservation stays dedicated to that cause. If Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall approves the land transfer, it will come with a conservation easement that will be run by the group Utah Open Lands. "Those terms do include protecting the habitat, protecting the wetlands and the associated ecology," said Wendy Fisher, Utah Open Lands' executive director.
Zoning is barred on over half of the airport land through certain provisions, but a conservation easement would extend that protection everywhere. Some small maintenance structures could be permitted, but it would ensure that new developments like warehouses don't reach the wetlands in that space, a growing concern in recent years.
The two-part proposal involves waiving a public-benefits easement fee and the disposition of roughly 900 acres of airport wetland-mitigation land to Utah DNR and Utah Openlands, with public hearings planned and sale and closing expected after FAA and Army Corps review. Federal oversight is required precisely because the land was originally purchased using FAA aviation improvement funds — meaning any proceeds from the sale must follow specific federal guidelines rather than flowing freely into the city's general budget.
The Hunting Question: Conservation or Access?
Here is where the deal gets complicated — at least for the birding community.
The plan is to fold the land into a larger waterfowl management area, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources confirmed. "DWR hopes to expand waterfowl hunting opportunities and protect the wildlife habitat in the area through this purchase. If the acquisition is approved, the DWR would add the parcel to the Blackhawk Waterfowl Management Area to be managed as one WMA," DWR spokesperson Faith Jolley said in a statement.
"Public access points, parking, motor vehicle restrictions, grazing, and other management decisions will be developed once the property is purchased and DWR writes the habitat management plan for the entire WMA." That timeline — decisions to be made after the deal closes — is precisely what worries advocacy groups who fear that once the ink dries, the character of the land could shift in ways difficult to reverse.
Bird Safe Utah Pushes Back
The group Bird Safe Utah is pushing back on the land sale, questioning why the existing agreements that have largely kept humans out of the area can't continue to be honored. Their argument is less about the conservation easement — which they largely support in principle — and more about the transition from a space that has operated as a de facto refuge to one that will be formally managed for waterfowl hunting access.
"With the lake shrinking? We're losing space to begin with, and now with some of these areas that have been left to flourish a little bit? We should be keeping those precious areas under wraps so they can't be drained or damaged in the future," said Punita Koustubhan with Bird Safe Utah and the Great Salt Lake Audubon Society.
The concern runs deeper than sentiment. The Great Salt Lake has been shrinking for decades, a victim of upstream water diversions, regional drought, and climate-driven aridification that has turned a vast inland sea into a fraction of its former self. The area is surrounded by some private property and state lands that have already been preserved to help the Great Salt Lake, which has dropped to historic lows in recent years. As the lake recedes, the wetland margins that ring it become proportionally more valuable — not just to birds, but to the entire food web that depends on the Great Salt Lake ecosystem.
Biologists say the surge in bird concentrations at the lake is less a miracle comeback and more a reshuffling of the deck: as other saline stopovers disappear, the birds that used to spread out are now squeezing into Utah's last, working wetlands. That dynamic gives the airport parcel an outsized ecological importance that goes well beyond its 950 acres. It is not just a piece of marshland — it is part of the remaining infrastructure that keeps an entire flyway functional.
The Hunting-Conservation Tension Is Nothing New
The friction between hunters and non-consumptive wildlife users along the Great Salt Lake is a long-running feature of land management in Utah, not a new development. The Great Salt Lake is recognized nationally and around the world for its extensive wetlands, which provide tremendous — often unparalleled — value to migratory birds. Currently, the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources oversees nine Waterfowl Management Areas around the Great Salt Lake, including Farmington Bay, Howard Slough, Locomotive Springs, Ogden Bay, and Public Shooting Grounds. Such areas were first designated in the 1930s to restore aquatic habitat for birds and help reduce the spread of avian diseases.
The dual-use model — managed habitat that serves both hunters and wildlife observers — has deep roots in American conservation history. Federal duck stamp revenue, generated by hunters, has funded wetland acquisition for nearly a century. Birders travel from across the country to witness the spectacle of shorebird migration. Hunters have pursued waterfowl in the lake's marshes for generations. These communities share more common ground than their occasional disputes suggest, but the question of where hunting is introduced and how intensively it is managed can dramatically alter the experience for non-hunting visitors and, potentially, for the birds themselves.
What makes the airport parcel unusual — and what makes Bird Safe Utah's concern legitimate — is its history of near-total human exclusion. The proposed sale involves hundreds of acres of wetlands near the Great Salt Lake that have been largely untouched by humans for decades. A parcel that has functioned as an accidental refuge — undisturbed simply because an airport had no particular reason to open it up — carries ecological value that is difficult to replicate once it is lost. Birds that breed in remote Arctic habitats are keenly sensitive to disturbance at stopover sites, and areas that offer reliable quiet are increasingly scarce along the Wasatch Front.
The Ecological Stakes: What the Great Salt Lake Means to Migratory Birds
The Great Salt Lake supports between two and five million shorebirds, as many as 1.7 million eared grebes, and hundreds of thousands of waterfowl during spring and fall migration. Those numbers are staggering by any measure, placing the lake on a short list of the most ornithologically significant inland water bodies in North America. Wilson's phalaropes, American avocets, long-billed dowitchers, and western sandpipers funnel through in numbers that make even hardened birders stop and stare.
The scale of the lake's importance means that even marginal degradation of habitat quality — a spike in human disturbance during peak migration, a reduction in the quiet refugia where exhausted birds can rest and feed without flushing — can have consequences that ripple across the entire continent. Birds that fail to refuel adequately at the Great Salt Lake may not survive the journey south. Species that breed at reduced rates because of stress during migration compound population declines year over year.
The lake itself is surrounded by roughly 350,000 acres of wetlands — managed ponds, seasonal mudflats, emergent marshes, rain-fed playas, and wet meadows that together form a diverse mosaic of bird habitat. The airport parcel is a small piece of that mosaic, but given the shrinking lake and the encroaching development pressure from Salt Lake City's booming logistics sector, it is a piece that cannot easily be replaced.
Drought Is Compounding the Pressure
Utah's 2026 waterfowl hunting season comes as state wildlife officials warn that hunters should expect dry conditions, reduced wetland habitat, and tougher hunting across the state. Conditions around the Great Salt Lake remain particularly dry, with fewer wetlands available for migrating birds. That reduction in available habitat makes every remaining undisturbed acre more precious — and raises the stakes for decisions about how newly acquired parcels will be managed.
"Food resources and access around the associated wetlands of the Great Salt Lake are still suffering, due to long-term drought conditions," said DWR Waterfowl and Migratory Game Birds Coordinator Jason Jones. "Because of that, waterfowl may migrate through Utah quicker this year, which will make hunting more difficult later in the season." The irony is that the same drought conditions that are motivating conservation acquisitions are also making the hunting case harder to argue on pragmatic grounds — there are fewer birds to hunt, and the habitat they depend on is shrinking.
The Broader Conservation Picture
The airport parcel sale does not exist in isolation. It is one piece of an accelerating push to ring the Great Salt Lake with protected land before development pressure makes that impossible. The push to sell the land comes as the city and state have explored more "buffers" between Salt Lake City development and its namesake lake. For instance, the Utah Inland Port Authority announced in July that it will direct $7.5 million toward land conservation funding this year.
Separately, after more than 20 years of dispute, the state of Utah and officials in Washington agreed to transfer more than 22,300 acres of wetlands northeast of the Great Salt Lake adjacent to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge to federal control — a deal that resolved a decades-old boundary conflict and substantially expanded the protected buffer around one of the lake's most critical bird areas.
Salt Lake City is also seeking to acquire 200 acres of wetlands south of Farmington Bay near the Salt Lake-Davis county line, part of a slate of eight projects that received a total of $8.5 million in grant funding, all aimed at protecting and enhancing more than 13,000 acres of the Great Salt Lake's wetlands. Against that backdrop, the airport parcel sale looks less like an outlier and more like another brick in a conservation wall that Utah is trying to build before the window closes.
The Conservation Easement as a Legal Firewall
The inclusion of a permanent conservation easement — to be held by Utah Open Lands — is the key structural protection that separates this deal from a simple government-to-government land transfer. What the conservation easement will do is lock up the land from development forever. While there will likely be some limited public access to the property in the future, Utah Open Lands will be able to block development and set some terms about the use of the property.
Conservation easements are among the most durable tools in American land protection law. Unlike zoning ordinances, which can be amended by elected bodies, a conservation easement runs with the land in perpetuity and is enforceable by the holder — in this case, a nonprofit organization whose sole mission is land conservation. That structure gives the birding community a genuine legal backstop against the worst-case scenarios they fear, even if it does not resolve every question about hunting access and disturbance levels.
The real debate, then, is not about whether the land will be developed — the easement forecloses that — but about what kind of public use will be allowed and how the DWR will balance its dual mandate of wildlife management and recreational access. The DWR hopes to expand waterfowl hunting opportunities through this purchase, but the specifics of how many hunters, during which seasons, with what gear restrictions, and with what quiet corridors preserved for non-hunting wildlife observation — none of that is settled yet.
What This Means Going Forward
For the men who hunt Utah's waterfowl management areas every fall, the addition of the airport parcel to the Blackhawk WMA is unambiguously good news. Access to high-quality public hunting land in the urban Wasatch Front corridor is limited, and a nearly 1,000-acre addition that sits adjacent to existing managed habitat represents a meaningful expansion of opportunity. The lake's surrounding marshes, bays, and impoundments attract millions of migrating and wintering waterfowl along the Pacific Flyway, and hunters who know this terrain understand that an additional managed parcel in a productive location can change the calculus of an entire season.
For birders and wildlife photographers, the picture is more nuanced. The conservation easement provides genuine protection from the industrial development that has consumed large portions of Salt Lake City's northwest quadrant — the sprawling warehouse and logistics parks that now crowd the lake's southern and eastern margins. But the shift from benign neglect to active management brings with it the infrastructure of hunting: parking lots, access roads, regulated shooting areas, and the seasonal presence of hunters and dogs in areas that birds have used without interruption for three decades.
The coming public hearing process — with hearings planned in early October and sale and closing expected after FAA and Army Corps review — will be the moment when these competing interests get their clearest airing. Utah Open Lands, the DWR, the airport, the City Council, Bird Safe Utah, and the hunting community will all have a seat at the table, and the habitat management plan that eventually emerges from the DWR will be the document that determines the character of this land for generations.
What is not in dispute is the urgency. "This is an area that is under threat," former Salt Lake City Mayor Erin Mendenhall said. The Great Salt Lake has been contracting for decades, its shoreline retreating and its wetland margins thinning. Every acre that falls into the wrong hands — or the right hands but with the wrong management plan — is an acre that cannot be recovered. The airport parcel sale, whatever its final form, is a reminder that the contest for the American West's remaining wild places is not over. It is just moving to smaller and smaller stages.
For now, the marsh sits quiet, the phragmites rustling at its edges, and somewhere overhead, birds that have flown thousands of miles from Arctic nesting grounds are banking toward one of the last reliable stops on their journey south. What greets them next fall may look a great deal like what is there today — or it may look quite different. That depends on decisions being made right now, in city council chambers and state agency offices, by people who will never see the birds they are deciding the fate of.
