Lesser flamingos lose Kimberley breeding sites to sewage

TimesLIVE

3 days ago

Until the past half-decade, the majestic lesser flamingo had four African breeding sites: two salt pans in Botswana and Namibia, a soda lake in Tanzania and an artificial dam outside the historic Northern Cape diamond-mining town of Kimberley.
Now it only has three.
Years of raw sewage spilling into Kamfers Dam, the only South African water body where lesser flamingos congregated in large enough numbers to breed, have rendered the water so toxic that the distinctive pink birds have abandoned it, according to conservationists and a court judgment against the local council seen by Reuters.
Lesser flamingos are considered near-threatened, rather than endangered, by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN): there are 2- to 3-million left, four-fifths of them spread across Africa, the rest in a smaller area of South Asia.
But they are in steep decline and the poisoning of one of their last few breeding sites has worsened their plight dramatically.
Tania Anderson, a conservation biologist specialising in flamingos, told Reuters the IUCN was about to increase its threat level to 'vulnerable', meaning 'at high risk of extinction in the wild', owing largely to their shrinking habitats of salty estuaries or soda lakes shallow enough for them to wade through.