Global Warming Drives Flamingo to Nest at 12,000 feet

Over the course of approximately three months, thousands of [rare Andean flamingos] abandoned their nests on a salt lake in the Atacama Desert in the far
north of Chile. Their eggs failed to hatch, and all 2,000 chicks died
in their shells.

Of the six species of flamingo in the world, the Andean is the
rarest. There are just 40,000 of them, and about half live in Chile,
where they nest on the barren salt flats of the Atacama Desert. They
share this harsh desert habitat with Chile's big copper mining
companies. Some ecologists say the mining is destroying the area's
fragile ecosystem and threatening its wildlife.

But another, perhaps more likely, explanation for the death of the
chicks is that this was a hot, dry summer in the southern hemisphere,
even by the standards of the Atacama. That caused the lakes to shrink
and become more saline than usual. Eduardo Rodriguez, the regional head
of the government's environmental protection agency CONAF, says the
high temperatures might have killed the micro-algae on which the
flamingos feed, forcing the birds to abandon their eggs and migrate in
search of food.

The Atacama's hotter summer is seen by some as a symptom of global
warming, which may force the flamingos to flee to higher, cooler and
damper nesting grounds. That theory was supported by an unprecedented
discovery in the northern Chilean Andes this summer — a flamingo nest
at more than 4,000 meters above
sea level. Usually the birds nest at around 2,000 meters and seldom
settle in the very high mountains. "This is the first time we've seen
anything like that," says Rodriguez, who fears this could be the start
of a pattern in which flamingos try to adjust to unfamiliar nesting
grounds, with all the risks that entails. "In the next 10 years, we
were hoping for the birth of around 20,000 chicks to replenish the
population," he says. "But if the breeding season is a failure again
next year and if we don't have chicks in the third, fourth or fifth
years, then I think we'll have to sound the alarm bells."