The Israeli Flamingos
Last weekend I went to Eilat. I spent some time diving (see the pictures at the gallery), and visited a few sites nearby - like the Netafim spring, the Ammonite wall at Ramon Crater (which is not so near, but on the way), and the flamingo pools, to which this post is dedicated.
The story of the Israeli Flamingos is tightly connected to the local salt industry. It started a few decades ago, when a salt company decided to produce salt from the red sea. They built these pools near Eilat, where they vaporize the water to obtain the salt crystals. So you have these series of pools, which are pretty salty, and where the water level is low and the temperature is high. Unintentionally, it turned out to be the exact conditions that the brine-shrimps need, so large colonies of these microscopic shrimps evolved in the pools.
From here the line was short. Israel, and specifically the Arava and gulf of Eilat, are under a major migration root for millions of birds, flamingos included. Brine shrimps are the Flamingo’s favorite food (they are actually responsible for their typical pink color). The wether in the southern Arava is African. Very soon, a group of migrating flamingos decided there’s no point travelling all the way to Africa, and they stayed for the winter in Eilat.
Now, Flamingos have this neat feature. They are born in black and white, gain the pink color from their food, and only migrate after they have grown up. Soon the Eilat pools filled up with young black-and-white flamingos, which stayed there for the summer when their parents left, because they were not old enough. The rest is history: Eilat now hosts a growing population of flamingos, hiding in the salt pools just out of town, and easily visible almost all year round - at winter you have both the big and the small ones (again, I refer you to (my pictures from last weekend), and on summer time - only last year newborns stay, so you have the black-and-white version.
I think this example demonstrates a good connection between industry and environment. I was very pleased to see it - it is actually working.
Other things in this weekend included the fossil wall at Ramon crater, where a huge group of Ammonite fossils is easily visible and accessible; however the signs nearby are misleading - you should not use the road signs if you want the easy way to get there, but stop about one k”m south of where the sign is; it was good I had a map. About this, as the dives themselves (some cool eels, octopuses, lionfish, and of course - heaps of corals and other fish), I may write on a different occasion. Here I just wanted to publish the good story of the flamingo pools.
