Dhe red arrow in the Red List of Threatened Species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) shows a clear trend: Marmot ducks are declining, waterfowl are considered endangered. At the end of 2020, there were at most 2,200 animals of this species in Europe. There may even have been only 760. And this despite the fact that these ducks, with their cream-colored plumage and lots of bright spots, have been bred in zoos and released into the wild for years.
The waterfowl mostly live in warmer climes, such as in the Mediterranean region, in shallow lakes with dense vegetation. However, such bodies of water are often drained or intensively managed by humans. As a result, the marmots lost their homes in many places, and there was little good news about them. Until a small private expedition led by Jens Hering, a member of the Advisory Board of the German Ornithological Society, from Limbach-Oberfrohna in Saxony, found 100 chicks of these waterfowl swimming in the bay of a salt lake in the middle of one of the most remote regions of the Sahara in northern Chad.
The residents rejected strangers
However, the path to this sensation for ornithologists was anything but easy. Jens Hering had already visited the Ounianga lakes in 2021, which are located in one of the driest regions of the world. At Lake Boukkou in the far east of this chain of waters, Hering was then abruptly turned away by a local, saying they were not wanted here. But that is exactly where the small expedition led by Jens Hering, his wife Heidi and the bird and entomologist Martin Winter wanted to go in May 2023.
When they arrived in N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, two off-road vehicles, each with a driver, a cook and a translator, were already waiting for them. And the message from the travel agency that the lakes of Ounianga Serir and thus the large bodies of water in the east of the lake district are closed to tourists. The residents there rejected strangers, even destroying their vehicles. A central point of the expedition would almost have been doomed to failure – if the travel agency had not chosen Ahmed as one of the drivers. He belongs to the Unia ethnic group, which has lived around the Ounianga Lakes since living memory.
The road to his old homeland is long and rocky. On the map, the expedition only had to travel 1,000 kilometers. In Chad, however, there are not too many asphalt roads. The journey through a desolate scree and sand landscape can take five days. “The region around the Ounianga Lakes seems to have been forgotten by the world,” says Hering. At least that applies to the waters to the east, the Ounianga Serir Lakes. On the other hand, the four lakes of Ounianga Kebir, 40 kilometers to the west, pass by a road, known as a “through road”, on which trucks bring groceries from neighboring Libya to Chad.
In 2021, Hering and his team had already observed marmots at these not-so-world-forgotten lakes – in a landscape of superlatives. After all, every year a six meter high layer of water evaporates from the large Lake Yoa. For this gargantuan loss, the two millimeters of rain that falls in the area annually isn’t even a drop in the bucket. Actually, Lake Yoa, which is at most 25 meters deep, should have dried up long ago and become a crust of salt.
Ancient groundwater feeds the salty Ounianga Lakes
However, climate history shows that even in the dust-dry Sahara there were always wetter times. The desert turned into a savannah landscape resembling today’s Serengeti with its huge herds of animals. In this green Sahara, huge areas of lakes were created, the largest of which, at perhaps one million square kilometers, was about a quarter the size of the European Union. When the last wet climate period ended around 3500 years ago, the lakes quickly disappeared again. Only smaller bodies of water remained, such as the Ounianga lakes and a groundwater layer, in which the rainwater from these times can still be found today.
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