Dry spell forces flamingoes to abandon thousands of eggs

VADODARA: Thousands of flamingo eggs have been found abandoned in one of the six breeding colonies in the Little Rann of Kutch (LRK). Every year lakhs of flamingos arrive in search of food and for breeding at LRK. Bird watchers and experts, who visited the site, attribute the drying up of water at the site as the reason for the unusual situation.

After the flamingos had laid their eggs, the water in this particular breeding site located between Wasraj bait and Dhrangadhra dried up sooner than anticipated resulting in a scarcity of food and water and forcing the flamingoes to abandon their eggs.

Wildlife photographers who visited the site claim that the number of abandoned eggs could be between 15,000 and 18,000. But officials claimed that only around 1,300 to 1,500 eggs were deserted.

"We visited the colony as part of our wildlife trips recently. The colony had turned into a mass grave. It was strewn with thousands of nests with unhatched eggs. We made an estimation of the number using the volunteers," said Nilam Patel, an avid wildlife photographer from Dahod.

"Flamingos will normally stay with their chicks till they mature and rear them with great care for a period of one-and-a-half month. They will abandon them only in extraordinary conditions," Patel told TOI.

"We have visited the area. There are about 1,200 to 1,300 nests with unhatched eggs. The birds are erratic breeders and breed in thousands. They have successfully bred in five other colonies in LRK. The wasted eggs are preyed upon by raptors frequenting the region," said Surendranagar's deputy conservator of forests, Pradeep Singh.

The flamingos need salt encrusted damp mud to build nests. Also the place where the nest is built has to isolated and inaccessible to human and predatory intervention.

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