Yesterday evening I walked out over the salt lake, its vast edges now a smooth surface dusted with salt crystals, in places it cracked under my feet like a freshly baked cake. A few rubbery plants still poked through here and there in remarkable defiance of the conditions. A few weeks ago the water would have been past my ankles here but the unrelenting heat and wind has drawn the lake backwards to a remarkable degree, a hundred metres or more, so far that birds disappear easily into an oily haze and counting them would be impossible any other way.
Under a glaring sun a few Black-winged stilts headed my way shrieking in alarm and way beyond them a rippling off-white smear over the lake marked the massed ranks of greater flamingos - one thousand three hundred and forty two of them I recorded a little while later.
That the water retreats so much is not surprising given the heat now, but I have also found that Akrotiri is one of the windiest places I have ever been. The peninsula, a thumb of land welded from sand, mud, shingle and sun-scorched rocks, seems barely an inconvenience to the Mediterranean and its prevailing winds pass across as if it were not there.
Other little changes have slowly revealed themselves. I first noticed it last week when those same winds materialised a common tern on the salt lake from somewhere, a bird far scarcer here than in North Western Europe. The same evening, a large roost of adult yellow-legged gulls appeared and set about causing consternation in the kentish plover colony. But yesterday a check on the kentish plovers in the gravel pits also sent a pair of green sandpipers noisily airbound. Unlike the plovers, their breeding range lies much further north so it seems these birds were already headed south – an indicator that migration has started again and the avian calendar has already turned a new leaf in its seasonal spread.
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