Too much rain could kill plants that cannot tolerate excessive water at their bases.

Animals that have no climbing power or are sessile would drown if the rain persists.

Subterranean animals like ants, beetles, grasshoppers and worms try to seek higher ground to survive.

Until the beginning of this millennium it was believed that the Greater Flamingos at the Ras Al Khor Wildlife Sanctuary (RAKWS) in Dubai and Al Wathba Wetland Reserve in Abu Dhabi came from Lake Razya in Iran.

In 2005 and 2006, the Environmental Agency - Abu Dhabi (EAD) and the Dubai Municipality placed satellite transmitter tags on some flamingos to track their flight patterns.

A flamingo named Sindbad, tagged at Al Wathba on November 2005, made an epic journey to the Caspian states.

Birds have ingenious ways to beat the cold. Last week when temperatures dropped, I went out to watch how the birds in Dubai were coping.

We have between 10,000 and 20,000 gulls in Dubai. Over 5,000 were resting inside the Awir Sewage Treatment Plant which is protected by tall vegetation. A few thousands took shelter in the Al Warsan Lake area where Nakheel is creating huge sand dunes with steep slopes. The gulls were using the side of the dune that was not facing the winds.

Smaller birds like the sparrows, mynas, bulbuls and doves took refuge in trees under the canopy of leaves.

The Khor Kalba mangrove forest in Sharjah is the largest and the oldest mangrove forest in the country. It lies on the south-eastern boundary of the UAE, with the Sultanate of Oman along the coastline of the Gulf of Oman.

Here, a visitor may sight a kingfisher (white-collared kingfisher, Todiramphus chloris, earlier named as Halcyon chloris), perched over a branch on a mangrove tree or on a boulder, partly submerged in water.

The Kalba kingfisher is totally isolated from other kingfisher populations in South and East Asia and even the one in Oman. Also, this species is not a migratory one. So, considering its total isolation, Simon Aspinall – a UAE-based British Birdwatcher – founded a new subspecies in 1996 for these over 100 kingfishers, naming them as Todiramphus chloris kalbaensis or Kalba Collared Kingfisher. So, we can consider this Kalba kingfisher as our own bird.

Recently I took a tour of the hilly areas of the UAE looking for seasonal plants and birds. I noticed that date palm gardens that were raised during the late 1980s and 1990s were dying.

Upon enquiring, I learnt that the farms had failed due to shortage of water from underground sources, a problem which was later compounded by the presence of more salt in the water.

In the past, hill farms were irrigated through a natural system by taming the flow of rain water through a canal system developed along the sides and furrows of the rocks and crevices. The farmers could drain the rain water to the fields and sometimes store it in wells. But their crop fields and fruit orchards were of limited expanse.