Lesser Flamingos are listed as “near threatened” in the Red Data books, due to declining population, various human induced threats and a limited number of breeding sites.

The birds previously bred only at Lake Natron in Tanzania,  Ethosha Pan in Namibia and Sua Pan in Botswana.

The breeding island at Kamfers Dam was constructed by Ekapa Mining and the Northern Cape Department of Tourism, Environment and Conservation in 2006 and is the only artificial breeding site for Lesser Flamingos in the world.

The flamingos ignored the 1000 constructed nesting turrets and built 8517 of their own from clay.  The birds began breeding a little more than a year later after the initial construction and last summer an estimated 9000 chicks were hatched. As the South African Lesser Flamingo population only numbers about 100 000 this was a significant increase to their numbers.

History was made when the first chicks hatched as it is the only time in recorded history that Lesser Flamingos have bred in South Africa.

Mark Anderson, the executive director of Birdlife South Africa said. the first chicks this year were sited on 18^th November and there are now more than 100 baby chicks with the numbers growing daily.  Anderson said that the first eggs were laid on 23^rd October, with hundreds maybe thousand laid on the S shaped man-made island, indicating the flamingos acceptance of this new breeding site.

The world’s attention has recently been drawn to this breeding colony by conservationists concern about the effects of the town’s malfunctioning sewerage system which supplies the dam with most of its water and the proposed Northgate development.