Bird paradise?

At the end of a track on the outskirts of Çaliş, just behind the beach and its line of hotels and bars, is a tall metal gate, padlocked to deter revellers from the nature reserve.  Ali has a key, and he leads you alongside the straightened mouth of the river, through the long dewy grass, past towering clumps of reeds where reed warblers chatter frantically, past flowers encrusted with gatherings of beige snails, and the grinning fisherman who shows you the blue crab he has caught, but says he doesn’t want his picture on Facebook because he looks ugly this morning.  He smiles and tells you his name, but you do not catch it, and you keep walking. 

Ali is in front, the waistcoated wise man of the marshes, long white beard tied with colourful elastic bands, a snug green cap with a peregrine badge on it.  He pushes quietly through the sopping grass and the knee-high daisies, clutching his camera.  A single peeping lost duckling seems symbolic, somehow.  The 8 am sun glares down, already well above the watery glaze of the mountains.  The sea is perfectly calm, like blue milk in a bowl.  Fishermen wade with nets for shrimp.  You have reached the mouth of the mismanaged river, where it disperses its snowmelt into the sheltered bay. 

To one side of the river is what remains of a vast wetland that once spread from one side of the wide valley to the other.  Ali has been instrumental in saving this pocket of ground, so it is without irony that he calls it ‘Bird Paradise’, though when you look at it from across the bay it seems pitiful, a tawny scrap encroached upon by breaking waves of white, rufous-roofed development.  When he said that you would be visiting a place with such a name, you were reluctant, suspecting a sad suburban aviary.

At the mouth of the inlet, next to shreds of litter, a scum of oil and floating detritus, crouches a group of tiny sandpipers: little stints.  Nine purple herons are ranged across the saltmarsh like the remains of rusty wheelbarrows; they creakily sprout wings and tilt over the town towards the mountains, resuming their spring migration.  A dark row of glossy ibises wonkily follows them.  Swallows, terns, plovers, stilts and sandpipers are revealed to be using Bird Paradise as a crucial stopping-off point on their northward journeys, too.

By the beach stands the illicitly built restaurant, allowed to stand nonetheless, where loud late-night music often disturbs the birds.  For seven years Ali fought to have this place protected, and now it is, he is doubtful that it can last.  Monitoring is revealing what survives here; Ali accumulates evidence, carries out surveys, takes photographs to persuade the local government to retain what is, if not paradise, then at least a fragment of what was.  Standing with him, overlooking the diminished marsh, you reflect that a remnant is far better than nothing at all.