Bonn, 25 April 2012 - In 2011, the Convention on Migratory Species (CMS) and Centro de Estudios en Biología Teórica y Aplicada (BIOTA -Center for Studies in Theoretical and Applied Biology), agreed to cooperate on a large project within the framework of the CMS Memorandum of Understanding on High Andean Flamingos, as part of its implementation. The initiative is being funded by the CMS through its Small Grants Programme (SGP).

This project to monitor populations of High Andean Flamingos and their breeding colonies provides data that are essential in order to know the current conservation status of these populations and establish the trends of the breeding colonies. The data obtained will be the basis for developing a programme, in collaboration with institutions from Argentina and Bolivia, to monitor and protect the species in the future. The objective of the project is to study, during the 2011-2012 breeding season, reproduction and active nesting sites, count the flamingos’ breeding colonies in priority sites, and identify the principal threats to their conservation.

This project also includes a key element of capacity building to involve park rangers and training them on monitoring techniques.

The monitoring activities began on August 1, 2011 and will end on May 31, 2012. The important information obtained through the study is presented at regular intervals, once half way through the project and again at the end. After it is completed, a final evaluation of the breeding success of High Andean Flamingos will be presented.

A summary of the mid-term report, including the outcomes of the work conducted to date, is presented below.

In January 2012, investigators from two institutions, BIOTA in Bolivia and YUCHAN in Argentina, simultaneously carried out a census of High Andean Flamingos (Phoenicoparrus jamesi and P. andinus) in the Jujuy and Catamarca wetlands in Argentina and the wetlands of southwest Potosí in Bolivia.

This broad census covered a total of 81 wetlands, and as a result of this study, it is estimated that in January 2012, these ecosystems were home to 93% of the entire global population of P. jamesi flamingos and 48.7% of the entire P. andinus population.

During the November 2011 to April 2012 breeding period, High Andean flamingos were monitored in 28 wetlands of Southwest Potosí, Bolivia. These 28 wetlands are located in the “Los Lípez,” which has been designated as a Ramsar site and has an area of 1.4 million hectares. “Los Lípez,” located between 4,200 and 6,000 m above sea level on the Bolivian plateau is a complex of permanent saline, hypersaline and alkaline endorheic lakes, as well as bofedal wetlands systems and geothermal wetlands.

As of February 2012, a total of 16,106 chicks of the two flamingo species were hatched at five lakes (Table 2), which included 10,489 P. jamesi and 4,208 P. andinus chicks hatched on Lake Colorada. In Argentina this year, only P. jamesi showed signs of nesting with 259 nests at Lake Honda and 200 nests at Lake Grande.

Data on nesting and chicks hatched up to the end of February 2012 in southwest Bolivia support the assumption that this flamingo breeding period will be quite successful compared with last year when only 600 juveniles were recorded at Lake Colorada in April 2011.

However, the accuracy of this assumption depends on local inhabitants not interfering with nesting colonies to collect eggs and other factors such as depredation of the colonies by the Andean fox or rain, which can flood nesting colonies. In April 2012, monitoring of flamingo nesting colonies will be stepped up to determine how many of the juveniles survived. .