Thousands of Flamingos in Turkey Killed in Devastating Drought

An enormous flamingo colony in central Turkey’s Lake Tuz has been devastated by a regional drought over the past two weeks. The extreme dry spell turned the UNESCO-protected Lake Tuz (which interprets to “Salt Lake”) right into a sere, cracked wasteland, with clumps of unevaporated salt and the useless birds being the primary proof a large water physique was solely lately there.

Environmentalists stated that the drought was on account of native irrigation strategies and local weather change, citing a report by the Turkish Foundation for Combating Soil Erosion that discovered water demand considerably outstripping provide. The Turkish Minister of Agriculture and Forestry Bekir Pakdemirli told Reuters that about 1,000 birds had been thought to have died, however denied that agricultural practices had been the issue. Pakdemirli added that the useless birds had been younger flamingos—flaminglets—that couldn’t but fly, and so had been caught with water that grew to become more and more salty till it fully evaporated.

Ordinarily, the lake is a hatching floor for the water birds. More than 12,000 flamingo chicks hatched in Lake Tuz in 2018, according to the Daily Sabah; this yr, solely 5,000 hatched, in response to an area environmentalist who spoke to Reuters. In 2015, Vice reported that agricultural improvement within the space might spell doom for the lake, a booster for the native economic system for its outstanding look and the salt that may be harvested from it. Now, it seems to be like that actuality might be upon us.

The photos out of Lake Tuz are a stark departure from the whole lot you recognize about flamingos. Normally, a riotous cluster of pink birds (generally known as a “flamboyance”) would cluster on the huge inexperienced and blue background. But the current photographs out of Turkey have none of that colour. They are only a boring brown-gray; the birds’ desiccated corpses sprawled alongside the dried-up lake.

Though the chook carcasses are the identical colour because the parched Earth, younger flamingos are usually that colour. Flamingos solely tackle their iconic pink coloration from their weight-reduction plan, which incorporates pigmented algae, mollusks, and crustaceans, which in flip colour the birds. In Lake Tuz, the algae is the primary wrongdoer for colorizing the flamingos; the algae may even turn the whole lake pink (not less than when the lake has water).

Even being labeled a protected space doesn’t imply a lot to local weather change, which has made this pure marvel vanish into skinny air. The drought comes as different components of Europe are underwater on account of record-setting floods, exhibiting that local weather extremes can have an effect on the identical continent in equally horrible methods.

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