- About 5,000 greater flamingo chicks have hatched at Lake Tuz in central Turkiye, a key breeding ground that nearly dried up five years ago.
- Drought and heat killed thousands of chicks in 2021; a 2022 project now pumps water into the wetland’s nesting areas to protect them.
- Conservationist Fahri Tunc says this year’s count is “more than double that of last year, which was more than double that of the year before.”
Five years ago this Turkish salt lake cracked into a graveyard, and thousands of flamingo chicks died in the dried mud. This month, drone cameras caught 5,000 new chicks wading its shallows as the lake rebounds.
Lake Tuz, once the second-largest lake in Turkiye, sits on the Central Anatolia plateau and is one of the country’s most important wetlands. In 2021, high temperatures and a lack of rain dried it out and killed thousands of greater flamingo hatchlings.
Drone footage from June 10 shows how far it has come back: roughly 5,000 young birds, shielded by their parents, learning to feed and to dodge threats in the wild.
The lake’s decline had been brutal to watch. Water covered 98% of the lakebed in 1988; by 2001 only 20% remained, and in 2016 and again in 2021 it dried out completely. NASA flagged the surrounding Mediterranean Basin as a climate change hotspot, warming faster than the global average.
The fix has been pointedly practical. In 2022, Turkiye’s general directorate for the protection of natural assets launched a water supply project at the lake, 90 miles southeast of Ankara, pumping water into the areas where chicks nest. In 2024 it paid off, with no mass deaths reported.
This year, the man who tracks the birds is jubilant.
“We will more than compensate for the losses of previous years by raising the population with these chicks during the season,” said Fahri Tunc, president of the Bird’s Eye View and Ecology Association. “This is great news.”
And the trajectory is steep. “The current number is more than double that of last year, which was more than double that of the year before,” Tunc said.
