LARNACA, Cyprus (AP) – Conservationists in Cyprus are asking authorities to expand the ban on hunting across the coastal network of salty lakes, amid concerns that migrant flamingos could potentially swallow lethal amounts of lead shotgun pellets.
Martin Hellicar, director of Birdlife Cyprus, said that flamingos are at risk of ingesting the tiny balls that lie on the lake bed while feeding. Like other birds, flamingos swallow small stones to aid digestion, but cannot distinguish between stones and lead pellets.
“Last year, we had dozens of flamingos lost,” said Hellicar.
Cyprus is an important stop on the migration path for many types of birds that fly from Africa to Europe. Larnaca’s Salt Lake, a network of four-lake swamps, typically hosts about 15,000 cold-weather flamingos off the southern coast of the island nation in the eastern Mediterranean. They stay during the winter and leave in March. Other water birds that frequent the lake include ducks, waders and seagulls.
Hunting is prohibited on almost the entire salt lake, but hunters can still shoot ducks at the southern end of the net.
The government’s Game and Wildlife Service says that in the first two months of last year, 96 flamingos were found dead in the salt marshes of Larnaca’s Salt Lake as a result of lead poisoning. Cyprus Veterinary Services official Panayiotis Constantinou, who performed autopsies on flamingos, said the pellets’ lead poisoned the birds.
The high number of deaths is attributed mainly to the heavy winter rain two years ago, which stirred the lake sediments and displaced the embedded lead.
A sports shooting range near the northern tip of the lake was closed almost 18 years ago and the authorities organized a lead cleaning on the lake bed.
But Hellicar says the cleanup was apparently incomplete. A European Union-funded study is underway to identify where significant amounts of lead pellets remain so they can be removed. Preliminary results from the study showed “very high” levels of lead at the southern tip of the wetland and continued duck hunting could exacerbate the problem, said Hellicar.
“The problem is pronounced,” he said. “The danger is real for flamingos and other birds that use the area.”
The Cyprus Hunting Federation official, Alexandros Loizides, disagrees, saying that hunting in a strip north of 200 meters is not a problem due to the limited number of hunters. He said he did not know of any flamingo deaths in the area and failures in the flow of pesticides and fertilizers from nearby farms because of creating pollution problems that harm wildlife.
“I think the effect of hunting there is very small in a specific part of the lake,” said Loizides. “It would be a shame for hunters to lose the only area where hunting is allowed near swamps.”
The ban on the use of lead pellets near wetlands has been in force in Cyprus for several years. A similar ban across the EU came into force last month, but conservationists believe the laws are not being enforced enough.
Pantelis Hadjiyeros, head of the Hunting and Wildlife Service, said it is less important to ban hunting in the area than to convince hunters to stop using leaded shells.
“People should be emphasized that the use of lead pellets is prohibited near swamps and that only steel pellets are allowed,” Hadjiyeros told the Associated Press.