If Camargue is the main nesting site of the greater flamingo (Phoenicopterus roseus) in Europe, the reproduction success of the species has varied a lot over time, especially due to the essential presence of nesting islets. Until the construction of protective dikes in the middle of the 20th century, small islets were created naturally through sedimentation and erosion processes thanks to the variations of the Rhône's course in the deltaic plain. From the 1970s, islets had to be artificially built to allow flamingos to keep reproducing and the numbers of the species, which had become rare in France at the beginning of the 1960s, to recover.