About 5,000 greater flamingo chicks hatched at Lake Tuz in central Turkey, offering a notable recovery at a breeding ground that suffered mass chick deaths when the salt lake dried out in 2021. Drone footage recorded on June 10 showed the young birds gathered with adults and beginning to feed and respond to threats in their habitat.
Fahri Tunç, president of the Bird’s Eye View and Ecology Association, said the count was more than twice the previous year’s level, which itself had been more than double the year before. He said conservationists hoped the season’s young birds would offset losses recorded in earlier years. The figure is an early-season observation rather than a guarantee that every chick will survive to adulthood.
Lake Tuz, on the Central Anatolian plateau about 90 miles southeast of Ankara, is one of Turkey’s most important wetlands. The closed-basin lake has no outlet and receives water from groundwater, two major streams and rainfall that falls mainly in spring. Flamingos depend on its shallow, productive habitat for feeding and nesting.
The lake’s water coverage has contracted sharply over recent decades. Research cited in the report found water across 98 percent of the lake bed in 1988, compared with 20 percent at the beginning of 2001. The bed was dry in 2016 and again in 2021. During the latter episode, high temperatures and scarce rainfall coincided with the deaths of thousands of flamingo chicks. NASA has described the broader Mediterranean Basin as a climate-change hotspot because it has warmed faster than the global average since the pre-industrial period.
Turkey’s general directorate responsible for protecting natural assets launched a water-supply project in 2022. The system pumps water into wetland areas used by newly hatched flamingos, aiming to keep nesting zones viable during vulnerable stages of the birds’ development. No mass chick deaths were reported in 2024, and the latest count suggests the intervention has continued to support breeding conditions.
The new hatch does not erase the lake’s longer-term water risks. Lake Tuz remains dependent on a sensitive combination of seasonal rain, inflows and groundwater, and its recent history includes repeated periods of extreme drying. Still, the observed increase gives conservationists a measurable sign of improvement after the 2021 losses. Monitoring through the rest of the season will be needed to determine how many chicks mature and whether the recovery can persist across future dry years.
The supplied account does not quantify the water delivered by the project or separate its effect from improved rainfall. It therefore supports an association between the intervention and better nesting conditions, not proof that pumping alone produced the larger hatch. The comparison remains encouraging but bounded by the available observations.
