Our next stop meant going into Campillos and working our way through the town to the A-468 road which leads to all of the lakes. Lakes are not given in order of visit but in order along the road southeastwards.
Laguna Redonda: About a km. further along the road, the last time I stopped here, about a decade since, it was a rubbish tip where a pair or so of Stilts rummaged amongst a dead refrigerator and sundry garbage in ghastly stagnant water. It has been cleaned out and enlarged and there is ample off-road parking and hide! Birds seen there included a Black-headed Gull, over-flying Gull-billed Terns, a pair of Little Ringed Plovers, a pair of Pochards with 6 ducklings and more White-headed Ducks. So, next stop ....
Laguna del Toro: This lake is right by the road and one scarcely needs to get out of the car. We saw at least 25 Gull-billed Terns feeding over the lake and 2 Black-headed Gulls. Here too we found a pair of Black-necked Grebes with 3 chicks and a single Lapwing, Little Ringed Plover and hordes of Coots.
From there, having time in hand, we hied ourselves off to Fuente de Piedra under clouding skies, stopping to look down on the colony from the west end and also from Cantarranas in the forlorn hope of picking out a Lesser Flamingo, there being a pair nesting there in amongst some 3.000 Greaters. The colony is split into some 6 or 7 units this year because of the high water levels. We were joined by a single, raucous Raven but it didn't help us at all. Thbis has been a record breeding year for the Flamingos with some 20.000 pairs (yes, 20.000) and 15.000 chicks (give or take a few hundred either way), the only possible problem for the chicks being that there is too much water when they come to form the nursery (crêche, guardería) groups.
And to finish, a story about a Lesser Flamingo from Kenya. reported this week in a mail from Colin Jackson :
The Ringing Scheme of East Africa has just received news of a Lesser Flamingo that was found freshly dead at Lake Baringo on 13th February this year with a ring. The incredible thing about it is that the ring was a BTO ring (British Trust for Ornithology) that was one of those rings used on a batch of several thousand Lesser Flamingo chicks that bred at at Lake Magadi in....1962!! This bird was in fact ringed by none other than the very well-known Leslie Brown on 1st November 1962 making it 50 years, 3 months and 25 days old!
It must surely be the oldest recorded Lesser Flamingo and quite stunning that it lived for so long. A few years ago there was one recovered also at Magadi that was about 45 years old - there may be one or two more out there with rings from that time! If anyone receives this who knows more about that ringing event of Lesser Flamingo chicks in 1962 - or was perhaps even there and took part, it would be really interesting to know the full story. I believe many of the chicks had got 'anklets' of encrusted soda formed around their legs which were acting as a 'ball and chain' and were killing the birds. Rescuers were breaking the balls of encrusted soda off and putting rings on thus saving the lives of many flamingos - some to live to over 50 years later! The person who found the flamingo is Nick Armour of Swavesey, England, to whom we are indebted for reporting the ring. The distance from ringing site to recovery site is 242kms.
I actually remember the event and seeing film (what a memory!), presumably on the news or in some wildlife programme on the BBC, of what is said about the chicks being caught with soda anklets and thus prevented from moving, as is reported, plus the fact that many hundreds, if not thousands, were saved by volunteers carefully cracking off the sodium and thus releasing the chicks from a slow death.
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