Half a dozen Dalmatian pelicans fly off as we approach the Narta lagoon, a marshland near Vlora in south-west Albania. It is a majestic sight – six elegantly soaring birds, with necks tilted back and wingspans almost matching that of an albatross. “They’re juveniles,” says Taulant Bino, head of the Albanian Ornithological Society (AOS). “They might start their own family in the next years.”
Although Dalmatian pelicans (Pelecanus crispus) do not breed here, the lagoon serves as an important feeding site for the birds and many more species, including flamingos, gull-billed terns and Kentish plovers. Migratory birds use the lagoon as a stopover during their long journey between Africa and central and northern Europe. They are key Mediterranean wetlands, the type of habitat that covered much of the whole Albanian coast until Enver Hoxha’s dictatorial regime drained large swaths of it in the 1950s and 60s, in an attempt to eradicate malaria and develop the lowlands for agriculture.
The Dalmatian pelican’s range spans much of Eurasia – from the Mediterranean in the west to the Taiwan Strait in the east – but it has experienced a decline in the 20th century. A combination of land development, drainage of marshlands, human disturbance and poaching means the bird is considered “near threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This year, avian flu has killed an estimated 2,000 adult birds in Greece and Romania.
In Albania, the Dalmatian pelican’s survival counts as one of the country’s biggest conservation successes. Once inhabiting its entire coastal strip, the bird came close to disappearing from the area in the 1990s. When Hoxha’s totalitarian regime ended in 1991, a state of anarchy ensued. “In those days, everyone had guns, which means everyone was a potential hunter,” says Aleksandër Trajçe, head of Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment in Albania (PPNEA). “Even just a few trigger-happy individuals with crazy ideas could cause a lot of damage.”
By 2000, when Bino began working to save the birds, only 19 nests remained in Divjaka-Karavasta national park – the country’s only breeding colony, 25 miles north of Narta – down from 81 pairs in 1984.
According to Trajçe, legal protection proved crucial in reversing the downward trend. “Initially, only the pine forest of Divjaka was a protected area,” he says. “In 1996, the lagoon got protected status. And in 2007, the entire area, from the Shkumbin River in the north to the Seman River in the south, was declared a national park.” Vjosa-Narta became a protected landscape in 2004. A hunting moratorium in 2014, although poorly implemented, added another layer of protection; international conservation efforts also helped.
Now, from January to June each year, when pelicans breed and raise their chicks, wardens guard the nests day and night, preventing tourists, poachers and fishers from disturbing the birds. “At night, local fishermen use flashlights to catch fish, which make the pelicans sometimes abandon their nest,” says Bino. “And when we realised eggs got lost in floods, we created heightened breeding beds from sticks, branches and vegetation. The colony started bouncing back.”
In 2020, 85 pelican pairs nested in Albania, the highest number since records began.
