More than 500 people have participated this Saturday in the ringing of flamenco chickens that took place this year in the Laguna de Fuente la Piedra Nature Reserve, in Malaga. Among scientists, banders, conservationists and environmental volunteers, there was the delegate of the Andalusian Government, José Luis Ruiz Espejo, the general director of Management of the Natural Environment and Protected Spaces, Javier Madrid, the territorial delegate of the Environment, Adolfo Moreno, and members of the corporation of the Town Hall of Fuente de Piedra.
In total there have been more than 600 flamingo chickens ringed, an activity with which the Junta de Andalucía enables individual monitoring of these birds and studies different aspects of the biology of this species.
Volunteers place flamingo chicks inside a corral before fitting them with identity rings at a lagoon in the Fuente de Piedra natural reserve, near Malaga
/ JON NAZCA
(REUTERS)
The plastic rings, which allow the remote identification of the birds without the need to capture them, make it easier for ornithologists to analyze the dispersion of the population, the use they give to the different humid areas, their reproductive behavior or their survival, among others. factors. The information obtained from this monitoring is essential for the correct management of this colony and to evaluate the use that this species makes of the Andalusian Wetlands Network.
The bell in the Nature Reserve, which leaves with the objective of ringing the chickens, takes the witness of the work carried out on July 21 at the Marismas de Odiel, Huelva, which were settled with the capture and ringing of 383 specimens.
According to data from the Ministry of the Environment and Territorial Planning, there will be more than a thousand hatchlings that will be ringed this year, with a total forecast of participation spanning the 900 volunteers.
–The ringing process took place at dawn in Fuente de Piedra (Málaga) / JON NAZCA (REUTERS)
The ringing tasks in the Laguna de Fuente Piedra, with the José Antonio Valverde Visitor Center as a meeting point for volunteers and media, have a team made up of 500 people, all of them working under the direction of the Ministry technicians.
The activities begin with the capture of the chickens and their subsequent transfer to the corral, where the young are marked with two rings, one made of plastic and one made of metal. Identification work also includes the weighing of the animals and the wing, tarsus and beak measurement, as well as the evaluation of the crop content and the extraction of a blood sample for discrimination by sex and its subsequent use in research projects.
The objective of ringing is to guarantee knowledge of flamingo populations, in addition to identifying their movements, breeding areas and possible exchanges with other Mediterranean colonies and North Africa. On the other hand, the activity, with more than 30 years of history, has been revealed as a useful tool to raise awareness about the values of this Natural Reserve and promote its protection.
The Unicaja Foundation has highlighted that this activity is carried out in support of education and environmental conservation, being one of the oldest, with a collaboration dating back to 1986, date of the first ringings in Laguna de Fuente de Piedra.
In the first thirty years of the program, the Fuente de Piedra reserve has registered the arrival of more than 350,000 breeding pairs of flamingos, exceeding 200,000 births. Citizen collaboration is one of the keys to the success of this environmental education initiative, since volunteers represent around 85 percent of the personnel involved.
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