Four out of five of Turkey's lakes have vanished. Scientists are racing to save what's left

One of the world's most important routes for birds runs through eastern Turkey's wetlands. Without painstaking effort by a team of birders, they're at risk of turning into dustbowls.

In the middle of an icy drizzle on a cold day in October, Çağan Hakkı Şekercioğlu stands at the edge of Lake Aktaş with his binoculars, watching the birds. The lake sprawls across the Turkish-Georgian border. On this grey and quiet morning, it is thickly dotted with birds just visible through the mist. Şekercioğlu spots coots, pelicans, and even a sociable plover, which is a critically endangered species.

"This is the last lake in Turkey remaining where both Dalmatian pelicans and great white pelicans still come," says Şekercioğlu. 

Within sight of Lake Aktaş is the village of Kenarbel, little more than a few stone houses with tin roofs and nearby fields of mud and cows. Within sight is also a military base, watching this hinterland that used to be one of the borders between Nato and the Soviet Union. It now serves as one of multiple entry points for locals hoping to pop over the Georgian border for cheaper wine and cigarettes. The military base is what keeps the villagers from boating on the lake, picnicking on its islands, and disturbing its lush collection of migratory birds.

The part of northeastern Turkey that holds Lake Aktaş is one of the most important migratory bird sanctuaries not just in Turkey, but the entire world. The birds of this region represent 68% of all the bird species in Turkey. 

These crucial wetlands are drying, fast. With four in five of Turkey's lakes already dried up, Şekercioğlu and a small team of ecologists is racing to save this last bastion for the world's birds.

When a nearby road leading all the way to the Georgian border was being planned, Şekercioğlu and his team worried the noise would disturb the birds, and proposed building it a mile away from the lake. They also suggested that if the road was closer, barriers would reduce the visual and noise pollution, while also directing the birds to fly high enough to avoid hitting cars. The government agreed, and the barriers were built. 

"This is one of the few happy stories about bird conservation," says Şekercioğlu.

Çağan Hakkı Şekercioğlu is a conservation ecologist, ornithologist, tropical biologist, and wildlife photographer, and a force of nature himself. He is the founder of KuzeyDoğa Derneği, an organisation dedicated to monitoring and saving the birds, lakes, and wetlands of the wild frontier in eastern Turkey. 

Şekercioğlu's work juggles local politics, complicated international borders, DIY dams, and global climate change to protect one region's wetlands and migratory birds. Şekercioğlu and KuzeyDoğa opened the Aras Research Station in 2006 along the Caucasus-Eurasian bird migration route; it's the first bird migration research station in Eastern Turkey. 

Many of the world's lakes and wetlands are under threat of drying up, and the birds that Şekercioğlu spots in eastern Turkey are migratory, winged travellers who transcend borders. The lakes of eastern Turkey are just one stop on a global journey that connects the land to the vast ecosystem throughout Europe and Africa.

Nearly two-thirds of the world's bird species are in decline. In Turkey, many species depend on wetlands – and the country is at risk of entering severe drought by 2030. Some 88% of Turkey is at risk of desertification, including the bird-rich wetlands in the east.

The evidence is already stark. 186 out of 240 of Turkey's lakes have already dried up, and more are poised to follow. Nearly 80% of Turkey's water resources are being extracted. It's a local problem within the tapestry of a larger global problem.

Şekercioğlu is attempting to mitigate it as well as one small organisation can, in one of the region's most bird-rich areas, and an important breeding stop for birds flying between African and Eurasia.

While Lake Aktaş is protected by the border that bisects it, nearby Lake Kuyucuk hasn't been so fortunate. Once upon a time, this lake, located 77km (48 miles) south of Lake Aktaş and not far from the Armenian border, was a paradise for birds. Şekercioğlu first came to Lake Kuyucuk in 2004 on a butterfly expedition and was bowled over by the wealth of migratory birds alighting on the lake. 

"We counted over 40,000 birds on 2.2 sq km (0.8 sq miles), half of which were ruddy shelduck," says Şekercioğlu. "And at the time, the estimated population of ruddy shelduck was 170,000 globally. So 12% of the world's population [was] on this one little lake."

But trouble was brewing at Lake Kuyucuk. Every year, Şekercioğlu and his team would measure the lake's water depth and shoreline, and in 2010 they noticed that the water levels were rapidly decreasing. In 1997, the lake was 13m (43ft) deep, and when Şekercioğlu began his work, it measured 4.5m (14.8ft) deep. But by 2010, the lake was 1m (3.3ft) deep at its deepest point.

"That's when I realised the lake is really going down," says Şekercioğlu. "I never thought it would disappear, but I thought, 'Okay, this is serious.'"

It was a combination of causes, not just one. Small, makeshift dams villagers had set up on the streams that feed the lake siphoned off water for their livestock. Illegal wells drained the groundwater. By watering their animals, they were slowly drawing away the water for the birds. (The name Kuyucuk, ironically, means "little well", and there are centuries-old wells around the lake that also take the underground water.)

Şekercioğlu set about trying to save the lake himself. He convinced the governor to drill a well to pump water back into the lake – "like chemotherapy", Şekercioğlu says; an emergency measure, not a sustainable one, and one that was only feasible at all because the lake is only 2 sq km (0.77 sq mile).

Simultaneously, Şekercioğlu said he and his team worked with the local villagers to convince them to take down illegal dams that were blocking the lake's feeding streams, which now remain unimpeded.

"It's not a lake anymore, but it's a wetland, and it hasn't just turned into dust," says Şekercioğlu. "That's how it is with conservation. I just have to keep hoping and keep trying." 

Now, Şekercioğlu and his team keep an eye on the hinterlands. While the Georgian-Turkish border protects Lake Aktaş, the currently closed Armenian-Turkish land border has kept the area around Lake Kuyucuk quiet. But there is talk of opening that land border, and the shortest route between Armenia and Turkey would cut right through the wetlands of Lake Kuyucuk.

Şekercioğlu had originally planned to establish a bird monitoring outpost at Lake Kuyucuk, but as the lake diminished, a new location needed to be found. So farther along the edge of the border, deep in nearby Iğdır Province, Şekercioğlu established the Aras Bird Monitoring Station by the Aras River in 2006, the first of its kind in Turkey. For six months of the year, a crew of shaggy volunteers catch and tag birds daily.

The monitoring station is positioned just on the Aras wetland, and the crew heading out to check special collection nets every hour, suited up with knee-high rubber waders that get caked with a thin layer of dried dun-coloured mud. They return with bags twittering and wiggling with live birds, who are then efficiently tagged, measured, identified and released. 

Aras Monitoring Station is the only place doing this kind of work in eastern Turkey. All the data is neatly entered before the birds are released out the window, back to their wild life. The walls of the tiny station are covered with Şekercioğlu's macro bird photography and handwritten signs declaring "JUST FOR THE BIRDS!", referring to the hooks for the bird's bags.

The whole team of bird-banding volunteers have found their way to the flank of eastern Turkey for different reasons, and from different locations, and all bring their radiant individuality to the repetitive task. Maxim Kostin chases rare dragonflies, Hasan Can Bağ writes short stories, Guşef Tunçer studies architecture, Ayşenur Akgün makes rosehip jam. Ayşenur is also the station's bird ringer responsible for slipping the small band tags on each bird’s leg, one of the few certified bird ringers in Turkey. (The first was, of course, Çağan Hakkı Şekercioğlu.) 

The birds all have their individualities too, and that is what the Ayşenur and the team aims to record: wing length, weight, sex, species. On one brisk autumn day, they bag European stone chats, mountain chiffchaffs, meadow pipits, and many more twittering specimens. They sit quietly restrained in Ayşenur's hand as she efficiently gathers her data and bands the birds.

The work at Aras is important and necessary, but fieldwork has already begun on the nearby Tuzluca Storage Dam project, which would decimate the delicate ecosystem that draws these migratory birds. The construction camp for the project has been built, though construction of the dam itself hasn't yet begun. "

KuzeyDoğa Derneği has been trying to negotiate, receiving an agreement that two villages would be spared, though the current plans still would inundate three villages and the bird banding station. "The construction process will take five years so we are continuing to talk, negotiate and hope it won't happen but legally, we cannot do anything," says Şekercioğlu.

The local government's branch manager of nature conservation and national parks told the BBC: "We did do the necessary [environmental] work. We looked at similar project and what they did. There were specific people working to make sure birds don’t get harmed. We then decided to make artificial islands. There would be these and also the dam would then create its own new system where all animals are living." 

This is the story of eastern Turkey's water and birds: a constant back-and-forth between bureaucracy and conservation, between climate change and human infrastructure, between the protection of international borders and the threat of the same.

More like this:

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• The sinkholes caused by Turkey's thirst for water

• The noxious plague troubling Istanbul's coast

"The lakes naturally disappear over time, because people always want more water, and when nature competes with people for water, nature will lose," says Şekercioğlu.

"Telling people, 'I'm saving this water for the ducks' is not going to get you the most votes, you're going to lose," says Şekercioğlu.

In the quiet of morning, a heron perches on the edge of the bank, a magpie flits across the sky, a cormorant swoops. Eastern Turkey's paradise of birds continues on, unbothered by the small problems of the people below, unaware that down here, the choices we make might drain them dry.

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