Uzungeren

Worth a detour

When the Mandra dam closed in 1963 it cut off a piece of the original lagoon, and Uzungeren is what survived: two hundred hectares of shallow salt water between the Kraymorie quarter and the village of Tvarditsa. Two hundred waterbird species have been recorded on it, five of them globally threatened. There is nothing built here at all, which is both the problem and the point.

Story

Background

The name is Turkish and means the long marsh, which is what it was — part of a lagoon system that ran unbroken from the sea into the plain before the engineering of the twentieth century. It became a protected site in 2005, covering a little over two hundred and eleven hectares, and is part of the Mandra–Poda complex.

Its value is as a feeding and roosting water within a few hundred metres of both Poda and the sea, which means birds move between all three through the day. In winter it holds ducks, geese and waders; in the migration months it takes overspill from Poda when that is disturbed. Five globally threatened species are on its list.

There is no infrastructure. No hide, no board, no path, no car park. The honest advice is to treat Uzungeren as something you look at in passing from the Kraymorie road with binoculars, or from the hill at Lale Bair along with the rest of the Mandra basin, and to spend your actual birding time at Poda where the equipment and the expertise are. If you have a scope and an hour at dawn in January, it will repay you; otherwise it is a name on a map.