Durrell Diaries: The devastating draining of Lake Sofia

Delivery and Impact Manager, Sarah-Louise Adams describes a recent visit to Lake Sofia in Madagascar, home to the world’s rarest duck, the Madagascar pochard. Sadly, this lake was impacted by heavy rain earlier this year, causing water levels to deplete by 90%. The team are working against the clock to find a solution that will ensure levels do not drop any further.

Three days of travel along incredibly dusty and bumpy roads brought us to our first sighting of Lake Sofia, which was extremely sobering for us all. This was the first time I had visited the lake, but the view was in stark contrast to the photos and videos I had seen of a large water-filled lake, with rare Madagascar pochards swimming happily alongside our release aviaries and floating feeding platforms. We were now looking upon a very sad looking puddle, surrounded by freshly growing vegetation in the thick mud where the deep water was present only several months earlier.

Landrover 1

We started our visit at the site where the lake had burst through a natural outlet during a period of heavy rain in February. What was once a two-metre-wide channel was now over 100 metres, and you could clearly see where the vast volume of water had eroded the now huge gap where the lake drained away. Extensive discussions were already underway, before our visit to Sofia, with the Madagascar Ministry of Agriculture and their technicians on the design of a dam to try and reverse this issue. We spent the morning speaking to local staff to try and gain a better understanding of what is needed to get construction underway and to ensure that what is proposed was going to be fit for purpose.

Sofia Puddle

In the afternoon we visited the edge of the puddle where the Madagascar pochards are still clinging on. We walked straight across where the centre of the lake used to be, which is now spongey green marsh, and were greeted by the team responsible for monitoring the reintroduced population of pochards. They told us numbers are still fluctuating between 40-60, as birds move on and off the lake. This is compared to 70 pochards, which were regularly seen before the water drained away. Despite the birds being grouped together in a smaller area, we were still amazed by the skill of our Malagasy colleagues who were able to determine which of the many little brown birds bobbing around on the water were our precious pochard friends. The team pointed out the last remaining floating feeding platform, which has already had to be moved four times as the lake depth decreased.

Proposed Dam Site

The Madagascar pochards are not the only ones that depend on the lake for survival. Local communities, both surrounding the lake and further downstream, rely on it for drinking, washing, cooking and irrigation of their rice fields and crops. The outpour of water destroyed many crops downstream and there is great concern from local people about the future of the lake and their livelihoods.

Our hope is that a dam constructed across the eroded site will allow the lake to start to refill once the rainy season begins. This gives us a hard deadline of the beginning of December to get something in place.

Working with our partners at the site, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, we are now in the process of securing an engineering company to begin construction as soon as possible. Our visit to the site has reinforced the importance of restoring the lake for the survival of both for the Madagascar pochard and the local communities of Sofia. 

Durrell has been working with the Madagascar pochard since 1989. You can find out more about Durrell’s work at Lake Sofia here.

This article was originally printed in the Jersey Evening Post on Friday 25 October.