Djoudj

The Djoudj National Bird Park was established in 1971 in northern Senegal, in the delta of the Senegal River and some sixty kilometres from Saint-Louis, and protects some 160 km². UNESCO inscribed it on the World Heritage List in 1981.

Its importance is best understood from its geographical position: it is the first freshwater wetland that Palaearctic migratory birds meet after crossing the Sahara. Around three million birds pass through it each year, and the park holds one of the largest great white pelican colonies in the world, alongside flamingos, spoonbills, herons, cormorants and wildfowl in enormous concentrations.

The landscape is a mosaic of lagoons, river arms, marshes and floodplains, whose functioning depends entirely on the water regime of the Senegal. That regime was precisely what changed with the building of the Diama and Manantali dams in the 1980s, and the park has twice been on the List of World Heritage in Danger: between 1984 and 1988 and again between 2000 and 2006, the latter because of the invasion of the aquatic plant Salvinia molesta, which came to cover the water surface and whose biological control by means of a specific weevil allowed the wetland to recover.