Volunteers Save 283 Young Flamingos in Algeria

Free photo by Omm-on-tour from Getty Images

Volunteers rescued 283 flamingos from an Algerian lake that dried up in the matter of a month.

Lake Tinsilt, located in the northeast portion of the country and approximately 280 miles southeast of Algiers, is a common breeding ground for flamingos. Thousands of them are attracted to the wetland’s waters every year. But dry conditions dating back deeply have finally come to a head, decimating the salt lake to the point of forced flamingo relocation.

Adult flamingos that could ditched the dirt at Lake Tinsilt for bluer pastures. They couldn’t bring their hundreds of eggs or hatched chicks with them. Many of the defenseless young died from thirst, hunger, poaching, or wolf attacks, according to an AFP report.

But many unhatched eggs and young flamingos were saved, thanks to local good Samaritans. A group of charitable folks rolled up in cars and trucks and transported 283 pink flamingos to a different body of water, Lake Mahidiya, about 30 miles away.

Tarek Kawajlia, a local amateur photographer who took notice of the shrinking lake and bird behavior, initiated the mission. He rallied other concerned community members of the situation, and they came rolling in.

“(The volunteers conduct) morning and evening patrols to follow the chicks until they recover and are able to fly, so that they can return next year to the sabkha (marsh) and life can resume its normal course,” he said to AFP.

Lake Mahidiya appears to have been a popular destination for the adult flamingos that made it out of Lake Tinsilt on their own accord, and some of the rescued chicks have reunited with their parents already since being dropped off at their new home, Kawajlia announced on Facebook.

Lake Tinsilt is among the 50 bodies of water in the country that the Ramsar Convention distinguished as Wetlands of International Importance. The lake and the many other wetlands across our world provide critical habitats for tons of wildlife, including flamingos. As climate change takes a stronger grip on our planet, stories like this are likely to not only continue but increase in volume.

An international study from May 2023 discovered that more than half of the world’s largest lakes have shrunk since the early 1990s. That trend includes the United States, where bodies of water like the Great Salt Lake are losing to land on a steady basis.

Those specific changes in America aren’t directly affecting flamingos the way they are elsewhere in the world. Fortunately in this instance, volunteers had the opportunity, ability, and interest in saving almost 300 young flamingos from a premature meeting with their maker. But that’s not a sustainable way to maintain healthy wildlife.

“Barely a month ago there was water here,” Mourad Ajroud, a flamingo rescue volunteer, told AFP, standing in the middle of where should have been underwater. “We couldn’t transport them all.”

Algeria has a long history of housing flamingos, as does much of the land near to the Mediterranean Sea. Greater flamingos are the species of the region, and their habitats span from Algeria, France, and Morocco to Turkey. A 2012 study in the Journal of Avian Biology determined that greater flamingos across the Mediterranean all share a common interbreeding population and story.

This could bode well - at least, better than otherwise - for the flamingos in Algeria if it means that opportunities for healthy, vibrant habitats and similar flamingo communities are still available and attainable despite the disappearance of long-standing homes like Lake Tinsilt. There is no guarantee of that, but it does put the greater flamingos of the Mediterranean in a more preferable position than many other animals that are affected by these climate changes.

This story is both gut wrenching and heartwarming. It’s terrible for living things to experience famine and desertion, and it’s terrible for habitats that living things depend on to disappear. Climate change offers much to despair over.

But there is a second side here: a collection of individuals, unattached to a non-profit or government entity, volunteered their time and resources to save the lives of hundreds of young flamingos. That’s a wonderfully kind and selfless thing to do. It will make any volunteer a dollar richer or an ounce more powerful. Clearly, that was not their motivation.

Even in an empty glass, one drop holds over.