June 16, 2017
Some 10,000 flamingos have stayed in Lake Urumiyeh this year as the improved ecology is satisfying their needs.
This year the birds didn’t fly to other areas such as South Africa and the Persian Gulf, Omid Yousefi, an official with West Azerbaijan province’s department of environment, told the state news agency.
Flamingos are now living in Lake Urumiyeh National Park’s southern areas such as Hasanlou and the Kaniborazan wetlands mostly because of enough food supplies, he explained.
Lake Urumiyeh was once the largest lake in the Middle East and the sixth-largest saltwater lake on earth, but has faced a dramatic decline until recently.
Old and inefficient irrigation methods, depleting ground water resources within the lake watershed, long periods of drought, damming rivers which were supposed to flow into the lake are among the strains on the lake.
The lake, which was a major tourist attraction and a home to hundreds of thousands of migratory birds, shrank substantially for years, but is now regaining some of its old luster. In 1997 the volume of water in the lake was measured at 30 billion cubic meters, which dramatically decreased to 0.5 billion cubic meters in 2013. The lake had a surface area of 5,000 square kilometers in 1997, but shrank to 500 square kilometers in 2013.
However, the volume of water has risen again to 2.5 billion cubic meters now and the surface area has been restored to almost half of the original area.
The return of the flamingoes could also be a sign of restoration.