On the 12th and 13th of March, La Tour du Valat hosted an international workshop dedicated to flamingos. This event brought together over 30 experts from 11 countries, facilitating the sharing of recent knowledge about flamingo colonies distributed around the Mediterranean basin, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.
The flamingo is a bird capable of travelling thousands of kilometres throughout its life, spending significant portions of its existence in different countries. Since 2002, an international database has enabled the tracking of banded flamingos during their movements. Antoine Arnaud, a research engineer at la Tour du Valat, explains that this database allows “each researcher or banding organisation to consult and analyse all the observations of banded flamingos within the network.”
The workshop aimed particularly at optimising the operation of this database among various partners and including new members such as the Nature Conservation Centre / DMK (Turkey).
Hichem Azafzaf, a member of the Tunisian Association “Les Amis des Oiseaux”, emphasises the importance of international coordination to ensure the species’ proper conservation. While the flamingo “is doing well on the Mediterranean basin scale“, “the wetlands around the Mediterranean are heavily impacted“, which can affect the bird’s nesting.
Indeed, the number of breeding colonies remains quite limited (fewer than 10 permanent colonies in the Mediterranean), making it crucial to identify new colonies for their integration into the monitoring network. In this regard, one of the highlights of the Flamingo Workshop was the presentation of a new flamingo colony in Ukraine by Ukrainian researcher Ivan Rusev.
Özge Balkız, programme coordinator at the Nature Conservation Centre / DKM (Turkey), explains that the impact of monitoring and conservation actions for flamingos benefits much more than just this single species. According to her, the flamingo serves as a “flagship species” in the Mediterranean basin, and “all efforts deployed in favour of flamingos will also benefit other species associated with wetlands“.
Partners :
Badji Mokhtar University Annaba (Algeria)
Ege Üniversitesi (Turkey)
DKM, Nature Conservation Centre (Turkey)
ISPRA, Italian Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (Italy)
Association “Les Amis des Oiseaux”, AAO/BirdLife (Tunisia)
ESAC, Escola superior agricola de Coimbra (Portugal)
Game & Wildlife (Cyprus)
GREPOM/Birdlife Maroc (Morocco)
Lagos Zoo (Portugal)
Max Planck Institute (Germany)
Doñana Biological Station – CSIC (Spain)
UAE agency (United Arab Emirates)
