See also
An extremely rare black flamingo was spotted at Akrotiri salt lake on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.The flamingo mooved at Larnaka salt lake.
The flamingo have a genetic condition known as melanism, which causes it to generate more of the pigment melanin, turning it dark, rather than the usual pink colour.
Video and photos is taken by George Konstantinou at Larnaka salt lake on Thursday 16th of April 2015
Video and photos is taken by George Konstantinou at Meneou on 2/2/2020
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An article about the rare black flamingo from Vivien Johnson
http://akrotirienvironment.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BlackFlamingo_VivienJohnson.pdf
Akrotirians call her Melani1 , after the presumed cause of her aberrant dark plumage2 – and their belief from her slighter build that she must be the female of the species. Their salt lake, part of the largest aquatic system in Cyprus, has been the preferred destination of the world’s one and only black flamingo for three of the past four winters, so they are entitled to naming rights. Here Varnavas Michael of the Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre describes the first sighting of the black flamingo in Cyprus: The first time I saw it… It was 2015, the middle of April. I was looking at the lake. It was dark that day. It was after a big storm. The lake was starting to get more water in it. I saw a small flock – 10 birds, let’s say. I saw a black bird. I was thinking maybe it was a black stork. We had these visitors from Germany – it’s not easy to tell people you saw a black flamingo! I just got the camera and I ran. It was raining. I got those shots and I posted them on Facebook straight away. In 10 minutes the calls started coming in from everywhere. 16,000 people accessed the black flamingo photo that day. We had 100 visitors the next day. By Sunday the Centre was packed - people were bringing their kids – the media – it was front page of the Cyprus Times, on NBC, BBC… And so the story started.3 Melani’s arrival exemplifies the uncanny capacity of flamingos for detecting rainfall over vast distances. From locations sometimes hundreds of kilometres away they come, across mountain ranges and seas, just when recent storms have made water levels in the various lakes and saltpans they frequent rise to optimum levels4 . On this score at least, the Black Flamingo is no exception.
1. pronounced ‘Mel-ah-ni’ (which means ink in Greek – personal communication Katherine Toumbourou)
2. Melanins are “pigments, manufactured within cells, that generally produce in birds a range of earthy colours in various shades of black, brown, gray, reddish brown and pale yellow.” I.J.Lovette and J.W.Fitzpatrick (eds)The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology 3rd Edition 2017 John Wiley & Sons p135
3. Varnavas Michael, Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre, Akrotiri Cyprus interviewed by Vivien Johnson 23/04/2018 4. Anderson, M. Flamingos: Biology, Behaviour and Relationship to Humans Nova NY 2017 p99
Akrotiri salt lake, where Melani came in to land, is located within the Western Sovereign Base
Area (SBA) on the Akrotiri peninsula, site of one of the last full-scale RAF stations outside
the United Kingdom. For more than half a century, the restrictions imposed by the base have
sheltered an area with some of the highest levels of endemic wildlife in Cyprus from the crass
coastal development rife elsewhere. This advantage is not lost on its “internationally important
wintering population of Greater Flamingo Phoenicopterus ruber5
” – and another 250 million
migratory birds who over-winter there. “People follow the birds,” Varnavas Michael likes to say,
and all avian flyways in this corner of the world lead to Akrotiri, including the Black Flamingo’s.
Up to the 1600s, what is now Akrotiri Salt Lake figures on maps of Cyprus as a lagoon open to
the sea on its south-east side. It was a port probably used by successive empires who came to
exploit Cyprus’ abundant copper, from the Mycenaean Greeks who established Kourion in the
12th century BC, to the 15th century Venetians. The silting up of the lagoon entrance was partly
due to the Kouris River, which originally flowed through it to the sea and partly to a sea wall
constructed by the Venetians to create a safe harbour for their ships. Four hundred years later,
the British Governor Storrs “proposed a typically ambitious scheme to double the lake’s depth by
using an ‘ancient Venetian dyke’”8
to make it deep enough to land sea planes, but fortunately for
the birds, his grand scheme came to nothing. Eventually the port was moved to nearby Kolossi,
leaving Akrotiri to the birds and the villagers of Akrotiri, who still today practise the ancient
(recently UNESCO-listed) art of soft-weaving baskets with the indigenous reeds and grasses.
Many of the older houses are constructed from stone that is thousands of years old, recycled from
the ruins of earlier villages around the peninsula
The Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre was originally the villagers’ idea. Driven
by growing concern about the health impacts of huge antennae from the British radio
communications station encroaching closer and closer to their homes and the salt lake, they
were determined to teach the children of the community about the value and vulnerability
of their unique natural and cultural heritage. It was an unusual initiative for Cyprus and took
over a decade of agitation to get off the ground. The Centre initially opened in 2003 in rented
premises that now house the Akrotiri Tattoo Parlour. In 2007, it became part of the network
of environmental education centres of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Cyprus,
which funds two teachers to organise the Centre’s schools program, catering to 8,000 children
a year. The SBA funds the other Centre staff and also helped pay for its grand new premises
on higher ground overlooking the salt lake. The building was officially opened in November
2014 and boasts “some of the most innovative and environmentally friendly building concepts,
including a photovoltaic system on the roof which provides approximately 50% of its energy
requirements” and a “fully-interactive educational experience set against a backdrop of some
of the most spectacular wetlands areas on island”9
.
8. Morgan, T. Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus (I. B. Taurus London New York 2010) p116.
9. https://www.sbaadministration.org/index.php/new-eco-center accessed 6/6/18
What’s so special about the black flamingo?
The first known sighting of the black flamingo was in Eilat, the southernmost town of Israel, two
and a half years before she first appeared in Cyprus. On the morning of 23 October 2012, a storm
system severe enough to cause flash flooding across southern Israel had just passed. Itai Shanni
was setting up the ‘scopes at the Eilat Bird Centre, an old industrial site converted to a wetland
for birds deprived of their Red Sea shoreline by expansion of the tourist industry. For migratory
birds, this is the first stopover after the arduous Sahara crossing.
When Shanni checked on the regular over-wintering Greater Flamingo flock, he saw amongst
them one dark bird. Given the weather conditions, he did not at first rule out mud staining or
oiling as the cause of the bird’s odd colouration. But whatever the cause, he was in no doubt that
it was something he at least had never seen before.
His response was to contact the experts: Hein van Grouw, Senior Curator of Birds at the Tring
branch of the UK Natural History Museum10, in whose professional opinion “the dark plumage
of this bird was caused by melanism”11. Van Grouw also confirmed Shanni’s hunch that this was a
once in a lifetime sighting:
As far as we know, this is the first record of this plumage aberration for any flamingo
species. The bird remained at Eilat saltpans with the flock (60-100) during summer and up
to 1,500 during winter and was last seen in the first week of March 2014”12
From the great quantity of images of the bird gathered during its extended stay in Israel, we have
a detailed description of this black flamingo, whose size, shape and behaviour were all found to
be within the “normal range” for a Greater Flamingo. It has to be the same bird Varnavas saw
at Akrotiri three years later: Melani’s body markings when she first arrived at Akrotiri were
identical to those seen in the Eilat photos.
Van Grouw also concluded that the bird was a juvenile. The shift in her eye colour from brown
to “yellowish brown” (flamingos’ eyes are usually yellow) over the time she was at Eilat indicates
an immature bird in the process of maturing. Staying over at the Eilat wetlands all summer
and throughout 2013 into 2014 is also consistent with the behaviour of a juvenile flamingo, not
yet ready to accompany the flock to the breeding grounds. Significantly, there was no marked
difference in the bird’s plumage before and after the moult it underwent during its time at Eilat.
From this the researchers cautiously concluded that source of the bird’s dark plumage was “most
likely … a hereditary type of melanism”13. A scholarly article stating all this appeared in the
journal Dutch Birding after the bird had left Eilat, where she has not been seen since.
10. A purpose-built facility that houses one of the world’s largest and most scientifically important ornithological collections,
including Darwin’s finches and Wallace’s Birds of Paradise. It also incorporates an extraordinary collection of ‘aberrant
plumages’ amassed during the 19th century by Walter Rothschild, whose private museum built to house his vast
collection of stuffed avian colour deviations eventually became the basis of the NHM’s Herefordshire facility.
11. Ottens, G. ‘Melanistic Greater Flamingo at Eilat, Israel, in October 2012-March 2014’ Dutch Birding 36: 242-243 2014
12. Ottens, Gert ‘Melanistic Greater Flamingo at Eilat, Israel, in October 2012-March 2014’ Dutch Birding 36: 242-243 2014
13. ibid
In February 2014, just before the black flamingo left Eilat for perhaps the last time, it had been
spotted and photographed by 70-year-old travel agent and amateur wildlife photographer Don
Presser of Carmel, California while on a bird-watching tour. The response of the bird guide to
Presser’s question about what he thought he was seeing was a classic: “That can’t be a flamingo.
There’s no such thing as a black flamingo.”14 Melani is literally “one of a kind”: never before in the
annals of bird watching (which date back at least to ancient Greece15) had anyone reported seeing
a black flamingo. This despite the fact that there were times, like the 19th century, when birds
with ‘aberrant plumage’ were an ornithological collector’s delight. For instance, the vast Walter
Rothschild collection of avian coloration oddities of the Tring Natural History Museum to which
the black flamingo’s Israeli discoverers reported their find, contained no such specimen. As far
as anyone knows, there has never before been a black flamingo – all other known flamingos have
been pink or pinkish. Their pinkness is a large part of what makes them special among birds in
the contemporary popular imagination. That’s why Melani stands out so much – there’s a kind
of perceptual double-take when we behold her amongst her flock: even when that’s what we’re
looking for and expecting or hoping to see. The mind resists the evidence of the senses, so that it’s
an almost hallucinatory sensation. This is certainly part of what makes seeing the black flamingo
with your own eyes such a special experience.
Slowly maturing birds like flamingos – they are one of the longest lived avian species and have
been known to live into their 80s in captivity – may take up to seven or eight years to reach their
definitive plumage, and over the years Melani’s appearance has changed. At first the changes were
subtle: some areas of the neck and adjoining sections of her body that in Eilat were chocolate
brown rather than black like of the rest of her appear in Varnavas’ photos from that first day in
Akrotiri to be a paler sooty grey. The changed colour could be due to ongoing maturation – or
even to Varnavas’ photoshopping of his shots to get a clear enough image of the bird to share
on the internet. However when she last re-appeared at Akrotiri after an absence of almost two
years her neck had dramatically whitened and now elegantly offsets her delicate white tuft of tail
feathers. Her legs on the other hand are now regulation Greater Flamingo pink.
14. www.montereyherald.com/article/zz/20140312/NEWS/140318486 accessed 5/6/2018
15. Curiously the great naturalist Aristotle (384-322BC) made no mention of flamingos of any shade in his encyclopedia
Historia Naturalis which purported to cover every avian species known to humanity at that time, but there are other
mentions of flamingos in the literature of Ancient Greece e.g. Aristophanes Birds translation by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/birds.htm accessed 24/01/16
From the first there was one intriguing difference between the Israeli and Cypriot sightings
of the black flamingo. Unlike the Israeli observers, those watching the bird closely at Akrotiri
did not consider its behaviour to be entirely “normal” for a flamingo. In the words of Thomas
Hadjikyriakou, Manager of Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre: “from our observations
it exhibited some restlessness and was not seem to be perfectly integrated with the rest of the
group”16. A video of the bird taken in April 2015 17 just after its arrival confirms this assessment. While the other flamingos feed, preen, look round, but stay in one place, the black flamingo promenades – right around the back of the flock and then around to the camera side, constantly in motion. On a broader scale, Melani’s movements also demonstrate her restless spirit after reaching maturity. Soon after arriving in Akrotiri in 2015, she flew 90km east to check out
Cyprus’ other large (though one third the size of Akrotiri) salt lake, alongside the airport at
Larnaca. She was there for only a few days before heading back to Akrotiri, where she stayed for
another two months before heading off possibly to Turkey with the other flamingos. She returned
in 2016 and stayed till June, but no one knows where she went after that until she turned up again
in Akrotiri in mid-February 2018.
Such boldness is to be expected of a melanistic individual according to van Grouw: “In general,
more strongly melanistic individuals are more resistant to stress, more aggressive and differ in
metabolism.”18 The flamingos of Akrotiri are not – yet – in an urban environment, but Akrotiri
is already a more challenging environment than what they might have experienced here over the
previous few hundred years, and before the establishment of the military base. As the favoured
16. personal communication 12/02/18, 4:14 PM
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8Gu2sODgo uploaded to UTube by George Konstantinou of Cyprus WildLife Tours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8Gu2sODgo)
18. Hein van Grouw cites for this observation Roulin & Ducrest 2011, Poelstra 2013, Corbel et al. 2016 in his The dark side
of birds: melanism—facts and fiction © 2017 The Authors; Journal compilation © 2017 British Ornithologists’ Club Bird
Group, Dept. of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, Akeman Street, Tring, Herts. HP23 6AP, UK
habitats of flamingos – inhospitable and inaccessible – become rarer and flamingos are obliged to
accept feeding grounds vulnerable to human observation, could melanistic individuals and their
resilience in the face of environmental stress become relevant to the survival of the species? Van
Grouw again:
Morphism in a species probably is initiated as an occasional colour aberration. If a selective
balance operates between the aberrant and normal colour morphs, based on selective
advantage vs. disadvantage, the aberration may become an established morph. Pigment
aberrations often combine with different behaviour and physiology, and these differences
may prove advantageous in certain habitats, ultimately leading to speciation.
In mediaeval times the ultra-rare appearance of a black flamingo would surely have been
seen as a divine symbol – perhaps a harbinger of doom. Melani’s first appearance at Akrotiri
did come just three months after the governments of the UK and Cyprus had signed a new
agreement allowing “non-military” i.e. commercial development in the non-restricted parts of
the Sovereign Base Area. Despite assurances from the SBA’s Information Office that “there will
still be a planning regime in the SBA to prevent inappropriate development that is inconsistent
with the SBA Policy Statement, military and environmental obligations”19, it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that Akrotiri stands on the edge of a developmental precipice. Just a few hundred
meters from the salt lake, construction is underway on the City of Dreams casino, which its
promoters claim will be the largest in Europe. This may be just the beginning of Akrotiri’s
commercialisation. There are also natural gas fields off the peninsula where major global resource
companies including Total and Exxon Mobil have already staked their claims.
Ironically the most remarkable about Melani may in the end turn out to be her very uniqueness:
how can she be the only one? Surely, if there can be one melanistic flamingo, there can be more?
If Melani was a juvenile back in 2012, she must by now be at least six years old, which may be old
enough for a flamingo to breed. Could she have gone this time to the breeding grounds with the
rest of her flock? If she does breed – and there is no reason to think that she won’t, since the other
flamingos behave towards her in every other respect as a conspecific – will her baby grow up to
be black? That’s a trickier question than you might think. Melanism may be usually a dominant
characteristic, but females are the heterogametic (sex-determining) sex in birds, so it depends
on the location of the melanistic mutation whether it will be passed on to her offspring or only
to the males or the females amongst them. But if her chick does turn out to be black, a surreal
scenario could one day unfold on the serene waters of Lake Akrotiri…
And if Melani’s fondness for it continues, the fame her recurrent presence will inevitably bring
in a flamingo-obsessed world will be some guarantee that the rare and precious ecosystems of
Akrotiri will be protected, or at the very least that their fate will not go unnoticed.
© Vivien Johnson 2018
19. www.sbaadministration.org accessed 5/6/18
http://akrotirienvironment.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/BlackFlamingo_VivienJohnson.pdf
Akrotirians call her Melani1 , after the presumed cause of her aberrant dark plumage2 – and their belief from her slighter build that she must be the female of the species. Their salt lake, part of the largest aquatic system in Cyprus, has been the preferred destination of the world’s one and only black flamingo for three of the past four winters, so they are entitled to naming rights. Here Varnavas Michael of the Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre describes the first sighting of the black flamingo in Cyprus: The first time I saw it… It was 2015, the middle of April. I was looking at the lake. It was dark that day. It was after a big storm. The lake was starting to get more water in it. I saw a small flock – 10 birds, let’s say. I saw a black bird. I was thinking maybe it was a black stork. We had these visitors from Germany – it’s not easy to tell people you saw a black flamingo! I just got the camera and I ran. It was raining. I got those shots and I posted them on Facebook straight away. In 10 minutes the calls started coming in from everywhere. 16,000 people accessed the black flamingo photo that day. We had 100 visitors the next day. By Sunday the Centre was packed - people were bringing their kids – the media – it was front page of the Cyprus Times, on NBC, BBC… And so the story started.3 Melani’s arrival exemplifies the uncanny capacity of flamingos for detecting rainfall over vast distances. From locations sometimes hundreds of kilometres away they come, across mountain ranges and seas, just when recent storms have made water levels in the various lakes and saltpans they frequent rise to optimum levels4 . On this score at least, the Black Flamingo is no exception.
1. pronounced ‘Mel-ah-ni’ (which means ink in Greek – personal communication Katherine Toumbourou)
2. Melanins are “pigments, manufactured within cells, that generally produce in birds a range of earthy colours in various shades of black, brown, gray, reddish brown and pale yellow.” I.J.Lovette and J.W.Fitzpatrick (eds)The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology Handbook of Bird Biology 3rd Edition 2017 John Wiley & Sons p135
3. Varnavas Michael, Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre, Akrotiri Cyprus interviewed by Vivien Johnson 23/04/2018 4. Anderson, M. Flamingos: Biology, Behaviour and Relationship to Humans Nova NY 2017 p99
Akrotiri salt lake, where Melani came in to land, is located within the Western Sovereign Base
Area (SBA) on the Akrotiri peninsula, site of one of the last full-scale RAF stations outside
the United Kingdom. For more than half a century, the restrictions imposed by the base have
sheltered an area with some of the highest levels of endemic wildlife in Cyprus from the crass
coastal development rife elsewhere. This advantage is not lost on its “internationally important
wintering population of Greater Flamingo Phoenicopterus ruber5
” – and another 250 million
migratory birds who over-winter there. “People follow the birds,” Varnavas Michael likes to say,
and all avian flyways in this corner of the world lead to Akrotiri, including the Black Flamingo’s.
Greater Flamingos have not always overwintered at Akrotiri salt lake – if only because the lake as a lake is of relatively recent origin. When about 12,000 years ago humans first made landfall at a rock shelter known as Aetokremnos (“place of the eagles”) set into the cliff face, Akrotiri was a small island that only later merged with the mainland of Cyprus. It is partly because of its long isolation as an island that the peninsula now has so many unique plant and animal species either not found or critically endangered elsewhere in Cyprus6
Little is known of the history of the Akrotiri peninsula following this first brief human visitation. There are over 100 ancient ruin sites dating back over 2,500 years, but as yet few have been excavated7
We do know that over the next few thousand years Akrotiri became a tombolo or tied island – an elevated rocky outcrop attached to the mainland of Cyprus by a flat sandy isthmus
5. https://www.ramsar.org/news/ramsar-mission-to-cyprus-akrotiri-salt-lake accessed 5/6/2018 The Ramsar Convention
on Wetlands of International Importance 1971 is an international treaty for the conservation and sustainable use of the
world’s wetlands. As of March 20, 2003, Akrotiri was added to the Ramsar List. It is site No. 1375.
6. Akrotiri has 20 Cypriot endemic plant species, 77 arthropods (insects and crustaceans) and 9 endemic snails, 30
species of orchids, 2/3 of those known in Cyprus. The peninsula was declared an Important Bird Area by Birdlife
International with more than 300 different species of birds. The coastline of the peninsula hosts some of the few
breeding beaches on the island for Green and Loggerhead turtles, both endangered species in the Mediterranean.
Important mammal species have also been recorded in the area, such as monk seals, dolphins and bats.
7. There are currently two excavations under way – one by the University of Leicester Portsmouth and the other at
Aetokremnos by the Department of Antiquities Cyprus Government
the sea on its south-east side. It was a port probably used by successive empires who came to
exploit Cyprus’ abundant copper, from the Mycenaean Greeks who established Kourion in the
12th century BC, to the 15th century Venetians. The silting up of the lagoon entrance was partly
due to the Kouris River, which originally flowed through it to the sea and partly to a sea wall
constructed by the Venetians to create a safe harbour for their ships. Four hundred years later,
the British Governor Storrs “proposed a typically ambitious scheme to double the lake’s depth by
using an ‘ancient Venetian dyke’”8
to make it deep enough to land sea planes, but fortunately for
the birds, his grand scheme came to nothing. Eventually the port was moved to nearby Kolossi,
leaving Akrotiri to the birds and the villagers of Akrotiri, who still today practise the ancient
(recently UNESCO-listed) art of soft-weaving baskets with the indigenous reeds and grasses.
Many of the older houses are constructed from stone that is thousands of years old, recycled from
the ruins of earlier villages around the peninsula
The Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre was originally the villagers’ idea. Driven
by growing concern about the health impacts of huge antennae from the British radio
communications station encroaching closer and closer to their homes and the salt lake, they
were determined to teach the children of the community about the value and vulnerability
of their unique natural and cultural heritage. It was an unusual initiative for Cyprus and took
over a decade of agitation to get off the ground. The Centre initially opened in 2003 in rented
premises that now house the Akrotiri Tattoo Parlour. In 2007, it became part of the network
of environmental education centres of the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Cyprus,
which funds two teachers to organise the Centre’s schools program, catering to 8,000 children
a year. The SBA funds the other Centre staff and also helped pay for its grand new premises
on higher ground overlooking the salt lake. The building was officially opened in November
2014 and boasts “some of the most innovative and environmentally friendly building concepts,
including a photovoltaic system on the roof which provides approximately 50% of its energy
requirements” and a “fully-interactive educational experience set against a backdrop of some
of the most spectacular wetlands areas on island”9
.
8. Morgan, T. Sweet and Bitter Island: A History of the British in Cyprus (I. B. Taurus London New York 2010) p116.
9. https://www.sbaadministration.org/index.php/new-eco-center accessed 6/6/18
What’s so special about the black flamingo?
The first known sighting of the black flamingo was in Eilat, the southernmost town of Israel, two
and a half years before she first appeared in Cyprus. On the morning of 23 October 2012, a storm
system severe enough to cause flash flooding across southern Israel had just passed. Itai Shanni
was setting up the ‘scopes at the Eilat Bird Centre, an old industrial site converted to a wetland
for birds deprived of their Red Sea shoreline by expansion of the tourist industry. For migratory
birds, this is the first stopover after the arduous Sahara crossing.
When Shanni checked on the regular over-wintering Greater Flamingo flock, he saw amongst
them one dark bird. Given the weather conditions, he did not at first rule out mud staining or
oiling as the cause of the bird’s odd colouration. But whatever the cause, he was in no doubt that
it was something he at least had never seen before.
His response was to contact the experts: Hein van Grouw, Senior Curator of Birds at the Tring
branch of the UK Natural History Museum10, in whose professional opinion “the dark plumage
of this bird was caused by melanism”11. Van Grouw also confirmed Shanni’s hunch that this was a
once in a lifetime sighting:
As far as we know, this is the first record of this plumage aberration for any flamingo
species. The bird remained at Eilat saltpans with the flock (60-100) during summer and up
to 1,500 during winter and was last seen in the first week of March 2014”12
From the great quantity of images of the bird gathered during its extended stay in Israel, we have
a detailed description of this black flamingo, whose size, shape and behaviour were all found to
be within the “normal range” for a Greater Flamingo. It has to be the same bird Varnavas saw
at Akrotiri three years later: Melani’s body markings when she first arrived at Akrotiri were
identical to those seen in the Eilat photos.
Van Grouw also concluded that the bird was a juvenile. The shift in her eye colour from brown
to “yellowish brown” (flamingos’ eyes are usually yellow) over the time she was at Eilat indicates
an immature bird in the process of maturing. Staying over at the Eilat wetlands all summer
and throughout 2013 into 2014 is also consistent with the behaviour of a juvenile flamingo, not
yet ready to accompany the flock to the breeding grounds. Significantly, there was no marked
difference in the bird’s plumage before and after the moult it underwent during its time at Eilat.
From this the researchers cautiously concluded that source of the bird’s dark plumage was “most
likely … a hereditary type of melanism”13. A scholarly article stating all this appeared in the
journal Dutch Birding after the bird had left Eilat, where she has not been seen since.
10. A purpose-built facility that houses one of the world’s largest and most scientifically important ornithological collections,
including Darwin’s finches and Wallace’s Birds of Paradise. It also incorporates an extraordinary collection of ‘aberrant
plumages’ amassed during the 19th century by Walter Rothschild, whose private museum built to house his vast
collection of stuffed avian colour deviations eventually became the basis of the NHM’s Herefordshire facility.
11. Ottens, G. ‘Melanistic Greater Flamingo at Eilat, Israel, in October 2012-March 2014’ Dutch Birding 36: 242-243 2014
12. Ottens, Gert ‘Melanistic Greater Flamingo at Eilat, Israel, in October 2012-March 2014’ Dutch Birding 36: 242-243 2014
13. ibid
In February 2014, just before the black flamingo left Eilat for perhaps the last time, it had been
spotted and photographed by 70-year-old travel agent and amateur wildlife photographer Don
Presser of Carmel, California while on a bird-watching tour. The response of the bird guide to
Presser’s question about what he thought he was seeing was a classic: “That can’t be a flamingo.
There’s no such thing as a black flamingo.”14 Melani is literally “one of a kind”: never before in the
annals of bird watching (which date back at least to ancient Greece15) had anyone reported seeing
a black flamingo. This despite the fact that there were times, like the 19th century, when birds
with ‘aberrant plumage’ were an ornithological collector’s delight. For instance, the vast Walter
Rothschild collection of avian coloration oddities of the Tring Natural History Museum to which
the black flamingo’s Israeli discoverers reported their find, contained no such specimen. As far
as anyone knows, there has never before been a black flamingo – all other known flamingos have
been pink or pinkish. Their pinkness is a large part of what makes them special among birds in
the contemporary popular imagination. That’s why Melani stands out so much – there’s a kind
of perceptual double-take when we behold her amongst her flock: even when that’s what we’re
looking for and expecting or hoping to see. The mind resists the evidence of the senses, so that it’s
an almost hallucinatory sensation. This is certainly part of what makes seeing the black flamingo
with your own eyes such a special experience.
Slowly maturing birds like flamingos – they are one of the longest lived avian species and have
been known to live into their 80s in captivity – may take up to seven or eight years to reach their
definitive plumage, and over the years Melani’s appearance has changed. At first the changes were
subtle: some areas of the neck and adjoining sections of her body that in Eilat were chocolate
brown rather than black like of the rest of her appear in Varnavas’ photos from that first day in
Akrotiri to be a paler sooty grey. The changed colour could be due to ongoing maturation – or
even to Varnavas’ photoshopping of his shots to get a clear enough image of the bird to share
on the internet. However when she last re-appeared at Akrotiri after an absence of almost two
years her neck had dramatically whitened and now elegantly offsets her delicate white tuft of tail
feathers. Her legs on the other hand are now regulation Greater Flamingo pink.
14. www.montereyherald.com/article/zz/20140312/NEWS/140318486 accessed 5/6/2018
15. Curiously the great naturalist Aristotle (384-322BC) made no mention of flamingos of any shade in his encyclopedia
Historia Naturalis which purported to cover every avian species known to humanity at that time, but there are other
mentions of flamingos in the literature of Ancient Greece e.g. Aristophanes Birds translation by Ian Johnston of
Vancouver Island University, Nanaimo, BC https://records.viu.ca/~johnstoi/aristophanes/birds.htm accessed 24/01/16
From the first there was one intriguing difference between the Israeli and Cypriot sightings
of the black flamingo. Unlike the Israeli observers, those watching the bird closely at Akrotiri
did not consider its behaviour to be entirely “normal” for a flamingo. In the words of Thomas
Hadjikyriakou, Manager of Akrotiri Environmental Education Centre: “from our observations
it exhibited some restlessness and was not seem to be perfectly integrated with the rest of the
group”16. A video of the bird taken in April 2015 17 just after its arrival confirms this assessment. While the other flamingos feed, preen, look round, but stay in one place, the black flamingo promenades – right around the back of the flock and then around to the camera side, constantly in motion. On a broader scale, Melani’s movements also demonstrate her restless spirit after reaching maturity. Soon after arriving in Akrotiri in 2015, she flew 90km east to check out
Cyprus’ other large (though one third the size of Akrotiri) salt lake, alongside the airport at
Larnaca. She was there for only a few days before heading back to Akrotiri, where she stayed for
another two months before heading off possibly to Turkey with the other flamingos. She returned
in 2016 and stayed till June, but no one knows where she went after that until she turned up again
in Akrotiri in mid-February 2018.
Such boldness is to be expected of a melanistic individual according to van Grouw: “In general,
more strongly melanistic individuals are more resistant to stress, more aggressive and differ in
metabolism.”18 The flamingos of Akrotiri are not – yet – in an urban environment, but Akrotiri
is already a more challenging environment than what they might have experienced here over the
previous few hundred years, and before the establishment of the military base. As the favoured
16. personal communication 12/02/18, 4:14 PM
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8Gu2sODgo uploaded to UTube by George Konstantinou of Cyprus WildLife Tours (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LW8Gu2sODgo)
18. Hein van Grouw cites for this observation Roulin & Ducrest 2011, Poelstra 2013, Corbel et al. 2016 in his The dark side
of birds: melanism—facts and fiction © 2017 The Authors; Journal compilation © 2017 British Ornithologists’ Club Bird
Group, Dept. of Life Sciences, Natural History Museum, Akeman Street, Tring, Herts. HP23 6AP, UK
habitats of flamingos – inhospitable and inaccessible – become rarer and flamingos are obliged to
accept feeding grounds vulnerable to human observation, could melanistic individuals and their
resilience in the face of environmental stress become relevant to the survival of the species? Van
Grouw again:
Morphism in a species probably is initiated as an occasional colour aberration. If a selective
balance operates between the aberrant and normal colour morphs, based on selective
advantage vs. disadvantage, the aberration may become an established morph. Pigment
aberrations often combine with different behaviour and physiology, and these differences
may prove advantageous in certain habitats, ultimately leading to speciation.
In mediaeval times the ultra-rare appearance of a black flamingo would surely have been
seen as a divine symbol – perhaps a harbinger of doom. Melani’s first appearance at Akrotiri
did come just three months after the governments of the UK and Cyprus had signed a new
agreement allowing “non-military” i.e. commercial development in the non-restricted parts of
the Sovereign Base Area. Despite assurances from the SBA’s Information Office that “there will
still be a planning regime in the SBA to prevent inappropriate development that is inconsistent
with the SBA Policy Statement, military and environmental obligations”19, it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that Akrotiri stands on the edge of a developmental precipice. Just a few hundred
meters from the salt lake, construction is underway on the City of Dreams casino, which its
promoters claim will be the largest in Europe. This may be just the beginning of Akrotiri’s
commercialisation. There are also natural gas fields off the peninsula where major global resource
companies including Total and Exxon Mobil have already staked their claims.
Ironically the most remarkable about Melani may in the end turn out to be her very uniqueness:
how can she be the only one? Surely, if there can be one melanistic flamingo, there can be more?
If Melani was a juvenile back in 2012, she must by now be at least six years old, which may be old
enough for a flamingo to breed. Could she have gone this time to the breeding grounds with the
rest of her flock? If she does breed – and there is no reason to think that she won’t, since the other
flamingos behave towards her in every other respect as a conspecific – will her baby grow up to
be black? That’s a trickier question than you might think. Melanism may be usually a dominant
characteristic, but females are the heterogametic (sex-determining) sex in birds, so it depends
on the location of the melanistic mutation whether it will be passed on to her offspring or only
to the males or the females amongst them. But if her chick does turn out to be black, a surreal
scenario could one day unfold on the serene waters of Lake Akrotiri…
And if Melani’s fondness for it continues, the fame her recurrent presence will inevitably bring
in a flamingo-obsessed world will be some guarantee that the rare and precious ecosystems of
Akrotiri will be protected, or at the very least that their fate will not go unnoticed.
© Vivien Johnson 2018
19. www.sbaadministration.org accessed 5/6/18
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