What it is
The Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch is a water-treatment project that turned into the best place to see birds in the Phoenix metro. In 1999 the Town of Gilbert, which was growing faster than almost any town in the country, opened 110 acres beside its treatment plant at Greenfield and Guadalupe roads and began pumping its treated wastewater into seven shallow basins so it would soak back into the aquifer. The town planted the basins as wetland, dug a fishing lake, and ran about four and a half miles of flat trail around the whole thing. The birds did the rest.
The list now runs to roughly 300 species recorded since opening. In a winter dawn you will see great blue herons, egrets, black-necked stilts and American avocets in the shallow basins, a dozen kinds of duck in the deeper ones, and Abert’s towhees, verdins and hummingbirds in the mesquite between. There is a public observatory on the grounds, a paleontology dig for children, ramadas, and the Southeast Regional Library at the entrance, which works as the visitor center nobody built.
Why leave Scottsdale for it
Because Scottsdale’s water is in a canal and its birds are in the desert. The Greenbelt has ducks on its lakes and the Preserve has quail, hawks and the occasional owl, but neither has a wetland, and the Valley’s wading birds and wintering waterfowl are here, forty minutes south, in numbers that make the drive obvious to anyone with binoculars. Our wildlife field guide covers what bites in Scottsdale; this is where the things that do not bite are.
The practical version
Thirty-eight minutes from Old Town via the 101, the 60 and Greenfield Road. Free. Sunrise, October through April. Flat trails, stroller-grade, little shade. Two hours, more with a scope. Bathrooms and cold air in the library at the gate.
When to go
Winter mornings are the peak: the ducks are in, the herons and egrets are working the shallow basins, and a sunrise walk between November and February is the best two hours of birding in the metro. Dress for forty degrees; it is colder by the water.
Spring and fall migration, roughly March through April and September through October, fill the trees with warblers and flycatchers passing through. The water birds thin out but the variety goes up.
Summer is a dawn-only visit. The herons stay, the frogs are loud, and by eight the trails are in full sun with almost no shade. The library opens later than the trails, so plan to be done before you need it.
After dark, on observatory nights. The Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory runs public star parties on a posted schedule; the town’s calendar lists them. It is not a dark site, but it is the only observatory in the metro you can walk to from a heron pond, and our stargazing note has the darker options for a serious night.
What to do
- Walk the basins. Counterclockwise from the library lot, about an hour at a birder’s pace; the shallow ponds first, the deep ones at the back.
- The lake. Water Ranch Lake is stocked and fished under a state license; the ducks and turtles are the show for everyone else.
- The dig. A sand pit near the entrance where children uncover buried bones; small ones will spend forty minutes in it.
- The library. Bathrooms, water, air conditioning and a children’s section for the hot half of a morning.
With kids
The best outdoor morning in the East Valley for a five-year-old: flat paths, birds that stand still, a dinosaur dig and a library. Our Scottsdale with kids note has the heat rules; here they are stricter, because the shade is thin and the ponds reflect. Pair it with the Heritage District, ten minutes west, for lunch.
The story
Gilbert went from about 5,000 people in 1980 to more than 100,000 by 2000, and every one of them flushed. The town’s engineers, needing somewhere to put the treated effluent, chose the cheapest honest answer: let it soak back into the ground. Recharge basins, shallow ponds that fill and drain on a rotation, do that, and in 1999 the town opened seven of them on 110 acres beside the treatment plant, planted them as riparian habitat, and called the result the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch. The seventy acres of ponds were the utility; the other forty, the trails, the lake and the ramadas, were the gift.
What nobody quite planned was how good a wetland in a desert would be for birds. Water in the Sonoran Desert is a magnet, and a rotating set of ponds at different depths, ringed by mesquite and cottonwood, turned out to be the ideal buffet for herons, shorebirds, ducks and everything that eats what they eat. Birders found it within a few years, the species list passed 200, then 270, and the town now says more than 300 species have been recorded since 1999. The Gilbert Rotary Centennial Observatory and the Southeast Regional Library came in the years after, making the corner of Greenfield and Guadalupe the odd municipal campus it is: a sewage plant, a wetland, a telescope and a children’s room.
The Scottsdale connection
Scottsdale solved its water problems with a different piece of landscape engineering, the Indian Bend Wash Greenbelt, which turned a flood channel into eleven miles of parks and lakes in the 1970s and 1980s. The Riparian Preserve is the East Valley’s version of the same instinct, a utility made into a park, a generation later and for water going the other direction, into the ground rather than out to the river. The two are worth seeing in the same week if you are new to the Valley and want to understand how cities here think about water.
Getting there
Loop 101 south from Old Town to US 60 east, exit Greenfield Road and go south about three miles to Guadalupe Road; the entrance and the library are on the southeast corner, with the lot off Guadalupe. Thirty-eight minutes with no traffic, fifty-five from North Scottsdale. The trails open at dawn and the lot is big. No transit worth using from Scottsdale; it is a car trip, and the early start is the whole point.