Kerkini

Lake Kerkini is not a lake. It is a reservoir: on 20 October 1928 the Greek government signed a contract with an American joint venture — John Monks & Sons and Ulen & Company, the Monks-Ulen combine — to drain the malarial marshes of the Strymon valley, and in 1932 their dam at Lithotopos closed the river and filled the basin. The same works emptied a real lake, Achinos, downstream, and turned the Serres plain into farmland for some tens of thousands of refugees from Asia Minor. Nobody involved was thinking about birds. The wetland was listed under the Ramsar Convention in August 1975, decades before Greece got round to the national park, and the park that followed in 2006 — Εθνικό Πάρκο Λίμνης Κερκίνης, some eight hundred and thirty square kilometres, taking in Mount Belles along the Bulgarian frontier to the north and the Krousia and Mavrovouni hills to the west — protects one of the most crowded waterbird sites in Europe, which exists entirely by accident.

The accident has a second act. By the 1970s the Strymon's silt had taken so much of the reservoir's capacity that a higher dam was built, working from 1982, and the raised water drowned the shoreline the birds had been using. Reedbeds vanished within a few years and have not returned. The white willow forest at the northern end, where the river comes in, was flooded to the trunks: half the riparian woodland was gone between 1982 and 1991, and what stands is dying standing, the old trees hanging on while seedlings fail to establish, because the water is deepest in late spring — exactly when a floodplain willow needs its roots drying. That inversion governs everything here. Kerkini is at its lowest from September, refills through late winter and spring, peaks in May or early June and is then drawn down across the summer to irrigate the plain, so its surface swings between roughly fifty-four and seventy-two square kilometres over the year. A natural marsh does the reverse.

What tolerates the regime does very well on it. Around three hundred bird species have been recorded. Dalmatian pelicans, the largest of the pelicans, began nesting here in 2004 on rafts anchored for them and colonised by birds that came over from Prespa; the colony passed two hundred and fifty pairs in 2018 and 2019. Great white pelicans arrive in hundreds to feed without breeding, pygmy cormorants winter in numbers, common pochard peak above twenty thousand in January and February, and eleven species of heron, egret and their relatives nest in mixed colonies in the drowned willows. The dying forest, in other words, is the reason much of this is here — an awkward problem, given that it is dying because of the dam that made the lake.

Two older things persist around the shore. Water buffalo have been grazed on these marshes for generations; Greece held something like seventy thousand of them in the 1950s and about six hundred by 1992, and the recovery since — to a few thousand nationally, under farm-subsidy schemes — has concentrated at Kerkini, which now carries the largest herds in the country. They stand chest-deep through the summer and keep the wet meadows open, which is why the grazing is treated as habitat management rather than agriculture. And the fishermen still work from plaves — flat-bottomed wooden punts, the only sensible hull for water a metre deep and full of willow stumps. The pelicans have learned to follow them.

What's worth knowing before you go

Serres is the nearest city, about forty-five kilometres east; Thessaloniki is roughly a hundred kilometres by road, an hour and a half on the A25, which runs from the A2 north of Thessaloniki up past Serres to the Bulgarian crossing at Promachonas. Kerkini village on the north-western shore is the place to base yourself — the visitor information centre is there, and the jetty the plaves work from — with Chrysochorafa on the eastern side and Lithotopos, by the dam, as alternatives. Coming without a car is awkward: buses reach Serres easily enough, but the shore villages and the viewpoints between them are strung out along the embankment road, and the lake is seventeen kilometres end to end. Winter is the serious season for pelicans and wildfowl, May for the mixed colonies in the drowned willows, September and October for waders on the mud the summer drawdown leaves behind. July and August are the worst of it — the birds are scattered, and the Serres plain runs to thirty-five degrees and above, humid, hazy and comprehensively mosquitoed.

The hour is first light in late January or February. The Dalmatian pelican's throat pouch flushes deep orange-red for only a few weeks of courtship, and the Kerkini birds — unusually, for a species that is wary almost everywhere else in its range — will let a plava come close enough that you do not need the long lens.