Salt Lake City Feature

Although it's too salty for fish, the Great Salt Lake teems with algae and bacteria. These provide food for brine shrimp and brine flies, which must seem like caviar to the millions of shore birds that stop here during their migrations. The following is a list of some of the more than 250 species that you can spot at natural saltwater marshes, man-made freshwater marshes, and wetland refuges around the lake: avocet, bald eagle, black-necked stilt, California gull, common snipe, cormorant, egret (great and snowy varieties), grebe (eared and western), heron (great blue and black-crowned night), killdeer, long-billed curlew, long-billed dowitcher, marbled godwit, merganser, northern phalarope, plover (black-bellied, lesser, golden, snowy, semipalmated), red knot, sanderling, sandpiper (baird's, least, pectoral, semipalmated, solitary, spotted, stilt, western), tern (caspian and Forster's), white-faced ibis, willet, and the yellowlegs (greater and lesser).

It's a bird-watchers paradise, so bring your binoculars!