Flocks of seagulls swarm small fishing boats in the first decade of January 2024 like a scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. Colonies of Heuglin’s gulls can be seen almost every morning on the Yamuna River in Delhi, India. (Photo by Raghav Rai Ralhan/Solent News)

A Hindu devotee takes sand bath at Sangam, the confluence of the rivers Ganges and Yamuna, in Prayagraj, in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Monday, June 5, 2023. Prayagraj in the northern Uttar Pradesh state is an important Hindu pilgrimage center. (Photo by Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP Photo)

An Indian boy sells flowers to Hindu devotees of Lord Shiva as they perform rituals after collecting water from the river Ganges during the holy month of Shravan, In Allahabad on July 22, 2019. Shravan is considered the holiest month in the Hindu calendar with many religious festivals and ceremonies. (Photo by Sanjay Kanojia/AFP Photo)

A devotee offers prayers to Sun God while standing inside an artificial pond near the banks of river Yamuna on the occasion of the Hindu festival of “Chhath Puja” in New Delhi on October 30, 2022. (Photo by Sajjad Hussain/AFP Photo)

Photo taken at the top of the Canton Tower, a landmark in Guangzhou, on August 7, 2022 shows the Pearl River running through downtown of Guangzhou, capital of south China's Guangdong Province. (Photo by Liu Dawei/Xinhua News Agency)

A young Iraqi shepherdess cools down buffaloes in wastewater filling the dried-up Diyala river which was a tributary of the Tigris, in the Al-Fadiliyah district east of Baghdad, on June 26, 2022. (Photo by Ahmad Al-Rubaye/AFP Photo)

A general view of dried-up rivers in the Pilbara region of Western Australia December 2, 2013. Western Australia's Pilbara region, which is the size of Spain, has the world's largest known deposits of iron ore and supplies nearly 45 percent of global trade in the mineral. (Photo by David Gray/Reuters)

National Geographic photographer Steve Winter has spent most of his adult life shooting wild cats. Photo: A 14-month-old cub, cooling off in a pond, is riveted by a deer that appeared near the shore. Tigers are powerful swimmers; they can easily cross rivers four to five miles wide and have been known to swim distances of up to 18 miles. (Photo by Steve Winter/National Geographic)