Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin (ISSN 0178 – 6288) . Number 147, March 2017, pp. 1-16. | Page 4

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The sighting in Cyprus happened during a flamingo count at a sprawling salt
lake at the Akrotiri environmental center on the southern coast of Cyprus (Daily
News, April 2015).
“A melanistic individual is a very, very rare sighting ... basically it’s the opposite
of an albino, when the individual produces more melanin than normal,”
Charilaou told Reuters Television (Daily News, April 2015).
Up to 20,000 greater flamingos descend on Akrotiri salt lake each year (Daily
News, April 2015).

A Melanistic Greater Flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus Pallas, 1811) at a salt pond in Umm AlRashrash (Eilat), southern Palestine in March 2013. Photo by David.
http://strangesounds.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/black-flamingo-israel-march-2014.jpg
Gazelle : The Palestinian Biological Bulletin – Number 147 – March 2017