by Jolanda di Savoia, Italy (AP) – An unusual pest devastates the harvest and annoys the farmers in northeastern Italy: The Flamingo.
Herds of these relatively youngest immigrants have set their hungry sights in the flooded fields and produced the risotto in the province of Ferrara between Venice and Ravenna. The long -legged birds are not interested in the seedlings. Rather, Flamingos use their bed feet to stir the floor and grab mollusken, algae or insects from the flat water.
Rice is collateral damage.
The farmers started day and night to scare the birds. They honk the horns of their trucks, struck and even small gas cannons that make thundering booms. Most of the time, the noise only lets you fly to another nearby rice rice rice flying to be kicked with feet under your feet.
Enrico Fabbri, a local breeder, said that he was discouraged after seeing production losses of up to 90% in some of his planted areas.
“These are new things that have never happened before. They invest so much time and take care of preparing everything,” said Fabbri, 63, next to one of his paddies on the outskirts of Jolanda di Savoia. “Then when the harvest begins to grow, it is as if a newborn child is being taken away. It feels like that.”
The Flamingos seem to come from their earlier nesting in the nearby Comacchio valleys within a reserve on the coast, south of where the Po flow, Italy’s longest, flows into the Adriatic Sea.
According to Roberto Tinarelli, Ornithologist and President of the Emilia-Romagna Ornithologists Association, the birds have been there since 2000 after looking to the east in southern Spain.
Previously, they were limited to lakes in North Africa, parts of Spain and a bit of the France Camargue region, Tinarelli (61), said next to a pond in Bentivolgio, a city near Bologna.
There have yet been no studies that have found why these flamingos continued to search for food in the interior, where farmers flood their fields from late spring to early summer to germinate newly planted rice seeds. Until the paddies are drained after a few weeks, the flamingos are a threat.
“Obviously we are looking for answers from those who have to deal with the problem. All of this is nice from environmental notes, but we have to consider that rice cultivation to the most expensive, extensive harvest,” said Massimo Piva, a 57-year-old rice builder and vice president of the local peasant building.
“They are beautiful animals, it is their way of moving and behaving, but the problem is to limit their presence as far as possible,” said Piva.
Tinarelli, the orintologist, suggested several solutions that hand over flamingos that are more humane and more effective than the loud efforts currently used: surrounding paddies with high trees or hedges and, even better, the water levels of freshly planted paddies (5 and 10 centimeters) instead of 12 centimeters (30 centimeters).
“This is enough so that the rice grows, but definitely less attractive for flamingos that have to spray around in the water,” he said.
