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ESSENTIAL DESTINATIONS
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MONTH: June 2006
What’s become of Persian Gulf bird habitat?
SAN FRANCISCO––Iraq was known for attracting some of the world’s largest and most varied congregations of migratory birds, before becoming a war zone, and especially before former dictator Saddamn Hussein drained the northern swamps to crush political foes.
Sergeant First Class Jonathan Trouern-Trend of the Connecticut National Guard, 38, wondered what might be left when he started a year-long deployment to Iraq in March 2004. He found many species still thriving amid the destruction.
A birder since age 12, Trouern-Trend began a web log devoted to his sightings in Iraq, continued with frequent postings until his rotation home to Marlborough, Connecticut, in February 2005.
Excerpts from the web log were compiled as a book at the suggestion of Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope, and published by Sierra Club Books in May 2006 as Birding Babylon: A Soldier’s Journal from Iraq.
While swamp restoration is underway in Iraq, and old landmines and other disincentives to human use often cause former no-man’s-land to become wildlife habitat by default, birders are now anxious about the fate of the Khor al-Beidah lagoon in the United Arab Emirates. The threat there is not war, but peace, prosperity, and development.
“The Khor al-Beidah lagoon is a pristine tidal flat teeming with wildlife, including endangered birds, sea turtles, and dugongs who swim among its tangles of mangroves,” wrote Associated Press correspondent Jim Krane from Um Al-Quwain in August 2005, then a city of 35,000, but soon to be surrounded by a planned metropolis of 500,000.
“The once empty Emirates coast is awash in construction that has buried coral reefs, mangrove, and other wildlife zones,” Krane lamented. “The tidal lagoon here is one of the last such areas in the country.”
“We’ve seen it happen everywhere else. When you start to dredge and build marinas, that’s the end of it,” said Emirates Bird Report author Colin Richardson, a 30-year resident of Dubai.