The Crèche in the Salt: Inside Türkiye's Flamingo Summer
Lake Tuz is the second-largest lake in Türkiye: an endorheic salt pan spread across the provinces of Ankara, Konya and Aksaray, and the source of a large share of the country's salt. For a few months each summer it is also one of the most important flamingo nurseries on earth — and this year it produced the best season in five.
A record hatch, and the rain behind it
Türkiye's Minister of Environment, Urbanisation and Climate Change, Murat Kurum, announced that 12,800 flamingo chicks had hatched at the lake this season, the highest figure recorded in the last five years.
Prof. Dr. Ahmet Karataş, coordinator of the Tuz Gölü Special Environmental Protection Area species and habitat project, run by the ministry, told Anadolu Ajansı what changed: the winter and spring rains of 2026 were far better than in recent years, and the water reached not only Lake Tuz but the wetlands around it. Tersakan, Bolluk and Kulu lakes, which had dried out in previous years, are holding water again.
His warning came with the good news. The basin is now fed essentially by rainfall, and "more agricultural irrigation in the region could create a new danger". Water, he said, "is the right not only of human beings and farmers, but of every living thing".
The crèche system
Flamingos do something that very few birds do. Karataş's arithmetic from the count is simple: with 12,800 chicks on the lake and two chicks per pair, there are more than 6,000 breeding pairs present. Each day more than 5,500 of those adults fly out to feed, while a few hundred stay behind with the young. Those few hundred gather the chicks together, walk them, and lead them to the right food.
It is the same solution a city arrives at when parents go to work, and the Turkish term for it is exactly that: kreş sistemi, the crèche system. Of roughly 11,000 bird species in the world, Karataş notes, only about fifty use it — flamingos and penguins among them.
The years it went wrong
Flamingos have been counted here by air almost every year, and the record shows how fast a salt lake can turn. Breeding was first recorded at Tuz in 1969; the recent run of counts includes years above ten thousand chicks, a peak of more than 20,000 in 2019, and a collapse. In 2021 the drought left the basin so dry that chicks died in large numbers — only about 3,000 hatched. The ministry's answer was practical: a 4-kilometre pipeline carrying water into the lake, after which the 2022 count reached 9,371 chicks, confirmed one by one from aerial photographs.
The same monitoring recorded what kills chicks besides thirst: free-roaming dogs, illegal hunters and other predators, all taking young birds that cannot yet fly. And the chicks do not stay in one place — once they fledge they move to the mouth of the Konya Canal where it enters the lake, and feed there.
Where to look, and when
Breeding concentrates in the lake's southern section, inside Aksaray province near Eskil. Chicks begin to fly in September and October, which is when the colony becomes a spectacle rather than a crowd of grey shapes on white crust.
Fahri Tunç, president of the Bird's Eye View of Nature and Ecology Association, who has monitored the lake's flamingos for years, describes it in terms a photographer would recognise: "When it rains, the basin fills with water, creating an ideal environment where wildlife can feed and rest. Lake Tuz has now become a natural studio."
What to listen for
Flamingo country is loud in a specific way, and the noise is not what most people expect — not a song but a constant, nasal, goose-like conversation between birds that feed with their heads underwater. Here is the voice of the lake's summer, plus three species you will meet on the same flats.
If you go
Breeding flamingos are sensitive, and a colony that is walked into is a colony that produces fewer chicks next year — the same rule that makes the drone counts of seabirds matter elsewhere. View from the roads and the shore, keep drones down, and remember what the salt pan itself is: a working salt basin and a wetland in one. Türkiye's bird list, and the species pages for every bird recorded here, are collected on our Türkiye page.