site.btaStrong Breeding Season for Birds in Atanassovsko Lake

Strong Breeding Season for Birds in Atanassovsko Lake

Bourgas, on the Black Sea, July 6 (BTA) - This year has seen a
very good breeding season for birds in the protected
Atanassovsko Lake near Bourgas on the southern Bulgarian Black
Sea coast. This was established in the traditional bird
monitoring carried out in July by the Bulgarian Society for Bird
 Protection (BSBP). The heavy rainfalls in the spring have not
caused any serious damage to the bird colonies in the lake and
the nesting success is pretty high, ornithologist Vladimir
Mladenov told BTA.

Two artificial islands in the southern edge of the lake, one of
which was built during a youth camp last summer, have proven
particularly successful.
        
After a most unfavourable nesting season in 2014, when
torrential rain inflicted considerable damage to the colony,
environmentalists counted 200 bird couples of the common tern,
pied avocet and black-winged stilton on the two islands. The
nests there currently hold hundreds of fledglings which should
be expected to fly off within a week.

The main colony in the northern part of the lake has nearly 600
pairs of pied avocets and some of them have young ones.

Loss of birds due to predation has been minimal compared to
previous years, largely thanks to a protection system built by
volunteers earlier this year, Mladenov said.

The BSBP monitoring of birds in the Atanassovsko Lake is carried
 out as part of the Salt of Life Project funded by the LIFE+
programme of the European Commission.