Bye bye flamingos!
They move on at the end of April and don't show up again until August. Flamingos are the masters of the Mediterranean. They fly back and forth, criss-crossing as they please. Their route network also includes Mallorca, more precisely the wetlands behind the natural beach Es Trenc, near Campos on the flat south coast. There are currently several hundred of the pink migratory birds there. They arrive in August and leave in April to breed somewhere else, in the Ebro Delta in Catalonia, in the Fuente de Piedra lagoon near Málaga or in the French Camargue.
Flamingos are a so-called flagship species:
They are so beautiful that they attract people's attention, making it easier to protect their habitats. This is why Mallorca wants to persuade the birds to stay. They should also spend the summer on Mallorca and breed here. This is because the regional government wants to place the entire hinterland of Es Trenc, including the beach, under protection and thus protect it from development once and for all. Flamingos would be the perfect birds of prey. But they are still taking their time.
Environmentalists have cleared an island in the Es Trenc salt flats of undergrowth in the hope that the flamingos will build their unusual nests there: Small volcanoes made of mud, into the opening of which they lay their eggs. They did build the clay cones, but they remained empty. No one knows why, but it is assumed that it was too restless for the animals. The access road to the natural beach of Es Trenc leads directly past the salt pans.
THE FLAMINGOS COME FROM EVERYWHERE
THE RED, SMALL BRINE SHRIMPS ALSO GIVE THE BIRDS THEIR PINK COLOR
Jordi Muntaner from the environmental authority has been observing and identifying the flamingos at the salt works for many years. With his binoculars, he can read the rings on the animals' legs. The biologist knows that they come from "everywhere": from Corsica and Sardinia, from Turkey, Algeria and Italy. The animals fascinate him. They are unique, literally, because they are the only family of Phoenicopteriformes. The term refers to the highly specialized beak, their most important distinguishing feature apart from their color.
It is equipped with hairy lamellae on the inner edges and helps them filter plankton and small crustaceans from the shallow, salty water. The red, small brine shrimps also give the birds their pink color: they are full of carotenoids, a fat-soluble pigment that migrates into the quills of the regrowing feathers in the flamingos' bodies. Young birds are still white because they are fed a special food mash that contains no carotenoids. Incidentally, the pigment is also present in the microorganisms that live in the shallow salt pools and give the water its unreal pink hue.
Text: Brigitte Kramer
THE SHY MALLORCA AMBASSADORS
Mallorca is worth a trip all year round
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