Trouble in pink paradise
I'm completely surrounded by pink feathers. An astonishing display of agility, poise and elegance passes right in front of me. I’m particularly impressed by the one-legged acrobatics. But this isn’t the Rio carnival.
From an overlooking summit, the sight of thousands of lesser flamingos filling the bizarre, lunar-like landscape of Lake Natron in northern Tanzania is, quite frankly, a breathtaking sight. It’s surely one of the most amazing spectacles that nature has to offer. But it isn’t until you sit among them that you realise quite what a clever, unique and beguiling bird the flamingo is – one moment serenely elegant, the next hilariously gawky.
The flamingo is uniquely evolved to tolerate the extreme alkalinity of soda lakes such as Natron. It feeds on a blue-green alga known as spirulina. With its head inverted, it uses its tongue like a piston, drawing water into and out of its mouth 20 times a second. En masse, flamingos can consume 250,000 kilograms of algae per hectare per year.
It has taken me four hours sitting motionless up to my waist in water in an inferno of heat to get a front-row seat at flamingo rush hour, but it’s worth every second. I watch as adolescent males in groups gather momentum to take flight, change their minds at the last moment and then look for all the world as if they’re pretending they didn’t really mean it.
A group of females is bathing in a freshwater stream yards from me, raising and lowering serpentine necks with ballet-like delicacy until a squabble breaks out and any sense of dignified elegance is lost in a fury of water droplets and pink feathers.
A ten with a view
As the light dips below the mountains, I make my way back to camp. Lake Natron Camp, perched on a lava flow a short walk from Natron’s shores, is surely one of the most amazing campsites in the world. The little clutch of perfectly camouflaged tents (11, including a dining room) is surrounded by the awesome mountains of the lowest eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. The towering presence of Ol Doinyo Lengai (an active volcano that last erupted in 2008) looms to the south, and you can clearly see the pink striations of flamingos from the comfort of your private veranda.
A freshwater stream that erupts from a nearby rock outcrop meanders its leisurely way down to the lake, furnishing each tent with its own private bathing pool. I recline on a sandbank in my pool as plovers whir low overhead and an egret stalks a few yards away. The only sound comes from the wind bending the grasses. Not a bad end to a hard day’s ornithology.
Camp director Timothy Leach has managed to harness nature into luxury accommodation while leaving barely a footprint. Everything at the camp is made from recycled materials, even the agricultural netting that’s used as camouflage. Water from the stream is pumped by foot into cisterns above each tented bathroom. Toilets are composting; rubbish removed. It’s uncompromisingly ‘eco-thentic’.
Leach stumbled across the spot some time ago, but it took years of patient negotiation with the local Maasai communities to secure this modest but significant concession with a one-kilometre buffer zone, paying, in return, a yearly rent and a nightly camper fee to the local village. The first paying guest arrived in 2006.
At Leach’s request, the money is channelled into secondary education but, more significantly perhaps, it gives weight to his efforts to keep livestock away from the oasis.
‘If the spring is being used by local herders to water their animals, the wildlife won’t come,’ he explains. ‘There has always been this competition between wildlife and livestock. If we can persuade the herders that there’s money to be made from the wildlife, they tend to come around fairly quickly. Money talks! The difficult part is getting all of the parties on board.
‘It works best when you have land management with designated areas for wildlife but, of course, that requires enforcement, which requires money,’ he continues. ‘One of our concerns is big-predator poaching. By law, the villagers aren’t allowed to kill them, but how do you police that? We’ve come a long way in a short time, but it’s still a work in progress.’
Every year, Leach sees more wildlife coming to the spring. Zebras, wildebeest, Grant’s gazelles, oryx, ostriches, reedbuck, jackals, bat-eared foxes and hyenas all water here. One night, I’m jolted awake by the rather alarming sound of thundering hooves – zebra drinking at the stream.
Ash exploitation
However, there’s trouble in paradise. Soda ash – sodium carbonate, a chemical with a wide range of uses in everything from glassmaking to toothpaste production – is deposited in a rich crust under the shallow waters of Lake Natron by surface run off. It’s successfully and profitably extracted elsewhere in Africa, and several companies are now eager to exploit Natron’s unplundered resources.
Building a factory would involve extracting large amounts of water from the lake and pumping fresh water back in, seriously affecting its salinity. Natron is home to 70 per cent of the world’s lesser flamingos, an estimated 2.5 million birds, all of which could disappear if this were to happen.
In 2009, a proposal for a plant was rejected when the results of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) brought international condemnation. But the battle isn’t over. ‘The project is in limbo at the moment,’ says Leach. ‘But it is still a huge concern. It could still happen.
‘The flamingos are very flighty birds,’ he continues. ‘They scare easily. Even we have to be really careful that no pollution from the toilets or the showers gets into the stream. A very slight amount could make a fatal difference.’
This view is endorsed by Dr Hazell Shokellu Thompson, assistant director of Birdlife International’s Partnership, Capacity and Communities department. Thompson has been working for years to protect what he sees as a site of crucial ecological importance. ‘Natron is the preferred breeding ground for the vast majority of flamingos in East Africa,’ he explains. ‘It seems to be related to the natural quality of the lake and, specifically, the fact that human activity isn’t large-scale enough to affect the water’s chemistry, which is quite crucial.
‘Sometimes, they’ve stopped breeding at a site after only the slightest change,’ he continues. ‘We’ve seen this happen in other African countries. Natron, at present, seems to have all the conditions they require for breeding, which makes it a very special site indeed. Even a slight change here could be disastrous.’
Crucially, the consequences of any changes to Natron wouldn’t be confined to the lake. ‘If flamingo populations decline here, they decline all over East Africa,’ says Thompson. ‘Certainly at lakes Nakuru and Baringo in Kenya, north in Ethiopia and south through Zimbabwe and Zambia, maybe even into southern Africa.
‘You cannot say definitively,’ he adds ominously, ‘but we’re certain that if this site were damaged, it would mark the beginning of the end of the East African lesser flamingo.’
Transparency
And it appears that there are now moves to reactivate the scheme. ‘We think there are plans for a second EIA, implying that reactivation is starting,’ says Thompson. ‘Fortunately, under Tanzanian law, the results of this must be made public.’
Birdlife International hopes that this will be the undoing of the scheme. Following the initial EIA, and the subsequent criticism from conservationists, India’s Tata conglomerate relinquished its interest in the project. The project itself would have involved the extraction of an estimated 500,000 tonnes of soda ash per annum, employing 1,200 construction workers and 152 permanent employees.
‘They will require private investment for this development,’ Thompson says, ‘and it would not be a good PR exercise for any private company. That said, we do have to constantly point out the short-sightedness of this plan. It’s all about immediate gain rather than a long-term investment.’
Only this April, the Tanzanian president, Jakaya Kikwete, queried the delay and ordered that the project be speeded up for ‘the benefit of the country, the same way as neighbouring Kenya benefits from soda ash from Lake Magadi’.
‘The loss of the lesser flamingo would be a huge tragedy for the planet,’ says Thompson. ‘It’s one of the most spectacular things you could ever hope to see. It would be a tragedy not only for the loss of natural beauty and ecological systems but for the many thousands of livelihoods dependent, directly or indirectly, on the income that tourism brings in.’
Saringe, my 25-year-old Maasai bird guide, has much to say on this subject. ‘If the camp brings money to the village, then everyone can see that the wildlife has a monetary value,’ he says. ‘Before, the stream was just for livestock. The livestock is owned by only a few rich people in my community. So not many people benefit. I’m from a poor family, but now I can provide for them. The salary is good. Everyone is happy. We want wildlife to come so more tourists will come and there will be more money.’
Saringe leads hikes up Ol Doinyo Lengai – once, he proudly tells me, three times in one week. ‘But we only recommend it to very fit people,’ he adds, casting a wary eye at me. ‘Or those with mountaineering experience.’
Family business
I decide to forgo this opportunity and instead hike into the nearby Ngare Sero Gorge – a spectacular ravine cut into the towering Rift escarpment – with Leach. As he strides with confidence through the torrential stream and I inch tentatively behind, trying not to lose my footing, Leach explains that he initially trained as a marine biologist but ended up running the family business.
The camp is actually a satellite project of the Ngare Sero Mountain Lodge, a colonial guesthouse in the foothills of Mount Meru, near Arusha, 100 kilometres to the south, but the eco-camp is his passion. ‘I grew up in the jungle, really,’ Leach says. ‘I didn’t go to school until I was ten. Nature was my school.’ I can well believe this as I watch him scamper up an almost vertical cliff in search of aloe.
We swim among the beautiful waterfalls at the head of the gorge before descending to the top of a nearby 60-metre summit that overlooks the plain, where we watch the scarp’s shadow race across the plateau as the sun sets. Baboons socialise in the evening sunshine. The south coast of Kenya is transformed in the mirage into a series of magically floating islands. The shore is awash with pink; the camp is barely visible.
‘A lot of so-called “camps” are actually permanent structures,’ Leach says. ‘I wanted this to be an example of truly low-impact tourism. We could pack up in a week and leave nothing but a few bare patches that would be covered over in a month.
‘Tanzania can be a difficult country in which to live and work,’ he continues, ‘but the things that are special here tend to be very special indeed. Things that are truly worth protecting.’
Tanzania co-ordinates
When to go
Thanks to its location close to the equator, Tanzania enjoys relatively constant temperatures throughout the year, averaging about 25–30°C. The main rainy season takes place between March and May, and visitor numbers tend to peak during December and January.
Getting there
KLM and Kenya Airways offer flights from London to Kilimanjaro (via Amsterdam and Nairobi respectively) for about £600. Transfers from the airport to Ngare Sero Mountain Lodge take about 30 minutes. From there, it’s a further six-hour drive to the eco-camp.
Further information
Prices for the camp are US$300 full board per person per night based on two people sharing. For more information about the camp and the activities it offers, visit
www.ngare-sero-lodge.com.
November 2011
From an overlooking summit, the sight of thousands of lesser flamingos filling the bizarre, lunar-like landscape of Lake Natron in northern Tanzania is, quite frankly, a breathtaking sight. It’s surely one of the most amazing spectacles that nature has to offer. But it isn’t until you sit among them that you realise quite what a clever, unique and beguiling bird the flamingo is – one moment serenely elegant, the next hilariously gawky.
The flamingo is uniquely evolved to tolerate the extreme alkalinity of soda lakes such as Natron. It feeds on a blue-green alga known as spirulina. With its head inverted, it uses its tongue like a piston, drawing water into and out of its mouth 20 times a second. En masse, flamingos can consume 250,000 kilograms of algae per hectare per year.
It has taken me four hours sitting motionless up to my waist in water in an inferno of heat to get a front-row seat at flamingo rush hour, but it’s worth every second. I watch as adolescent males in groups gather momentum to take flight, change their minds at the last moment and then look for all the world as if they’re pretending they didn’t really mean it.
A group of females is bathing in a freshwater stream yards from me, raising and lowering serpentine necks with ballet-like delicacy until a squabble breaks out and any sense of dignified elegance is lost in a fury of water droplets and pink feathers.
A ten with a view
As the light dips below the mountains, I make my way back to camp. Lake Natron Camp, perched on a lava flow a short walk from Natron’s shores, is surely one of the most amazing campsites in the world. The little clutch of perfectly camouflaged tents (11, including a dining room) is surrounded by the awesome mountains of the lowest eastern escarpment of the Great Rift Valley. The towering presence of Ol Doinyo Lengai (an active volcano that last erupted in 2008) looms to the south, and you can clearly see the pink striations of flamingos from the comfort of your private veranda.
A freshwater stream that erupts from a nearby rock outcrop meanders its leisurely way down to the lake, furnishing each tent with its own private bathing pool. I recline on a sandbank in my pool as plovers whir low overhead and an egret stalks a few yards away. The only sound comes from the wind bending the grasses. Not a bad end to a hard day’s ornithology.
Camp director Timothy Leach has managed to harness nature into luxury accommodation while leaving barely a footprint. Everything at the camp is made from recycled materials, even the agricultural netting that’s used as camouflage. Water from the stream is pumped by foot into cisterns above each tented bathroom. Toilets are composting; rubbish removed. It’s uncompromisingly ‘eco-thentic’.
Leach stumbled across the spot some time ago, but it took years of patient negotiation with the local Maasai communities to secure this modest but significant concession with a one-kilometre buffer zone, paying, in return, a yearly rent and a nightly camper fee to the local village. The first paying guest arrived in 2006.
At Leach’s request, the money is channelled into secondary education but, more significantly perhaps, it gives weight to his efforts to keep livestock away from the oasis.
‘If the spring is being used by local herders to water their animals, the wildlife won’t come,’ he explains. ‘There has always been this competition between wildlife and livestock. If we can persuade the herders that there’s money to be made from the wildlife, they tend to come around fairly quickly. Money talks! The difficult part is getting all of the parties on board.
‘It works best when you have land management with designated areas for wildlife but, of course, that requires enforcement, which requires money,’ he continues. ‘One of our concerns is big-predator poaching. By law, the villagers aren’t allowed to kill them, but how do you police that? We’ve come a long way in a short time, but it’s still a work in progress.’
Every year, Leach sees more wildlife coming to the spring. Zebras, wildebeest, Grant’s gazelles, oryx, ostriches, reedbuck, jackals, bat-eared foxes and hyenas all water here. One night, I’m jolted awake by the rather alarming sound of thundering hooves – zebra drinking at the stream.
Ash exploitation
However, there’s trouble in paradise. Soda ash – sodium carbonate, a chemical with a wide range of uses in everything from glassmaking to toothpaste production – is deposited in a rich crust under the shallow waters of Lake Natron by surface run off. It’s successfully and profitably extracted elsewhere in Africa, and several companies are now eager to exploit Natron’s unplundered resources.
Building a factory would involve extracting large amounts of water from the lake and pumping fresh water back in, seriously affecting its salinity. Natron is home to 70 per cent of the world’s lesser flamingos, an estimated 2.5 million birds, all of which could disappear if this were to happen.
In 2009, a proposal for a plant was rejected when the results of an environmental impact assessment (EIA) brought international condemnation. But the battle isn’t over. ‘The project is in limbo at the moment,’ says Leach. ‘But it is still a huge concern. It could still happen.
‘The flamingos are very flighty birds,’ he continues. ‘They scare easily. Even we have to be really careful that no pollution from the toilets or the showers gets into the stream. A very slight amount could make a fatal difference.’
This view is endorsed by Dr Hazell Shokellu Thompson, assistant director of Birdlife International’s Partnership, Capacity and Communities department. Thompson has been working for years to protect what he sees as a site of crucial ecological importance. ‘Natron is the preferred breeding ground for the vast majority of flamingos in East Africa,’ he explains. ‘It seems to be related to the natural quality of the lake and, specifically, the fact that human activity isn’t large-scale enough to affect the water’s chemistry, which is quite crucial.
‘Sometimes, they’ve stopped breeding at a site after only the slightest change,’ he continues. ‘We’ve seen this happen in other African countries. Natron, at present, seems to have all the conditions they require for breeding, which makes it a very special site indeed. Even a slight change here could be disastrous.’
Crucially, the consequences of any changes to Natron wouldn’t be confined to the lake. ‘If flamingo populations decline here, they decline all over East Africa,’ says Thompson. ‘Certainly at lakes Nakuru and Baringo in Kenya, north in Ethiopia and south through Zimbabwe and Zambia, maybe even into southern Africa.
‘You cannot say definitively,’ he adds ominously, ‘but we’re certain that if this site were damaged, it would mark the beginning of the end of the East African lesser flamingo.’
Transparency
And it appears that there are now moves to reactivate the scheme. ‘We think there are plans for a second EIA, implying that reactivation is starting,’ says Thompson. ‘Fortunately, under Tanzanian law, the results of this must be made public.’
Birdlife International hopes that this will be the undoing of the scheme. Following the initial EIA, and the subsequent criticism from conservationists, India’s Tata conglomerate relinquished its interest in the project. The project itself would have involved the extraction of an estimated 500,000 tonnes of soda ash per annum, employing 1,200 construction workers and 152 permanent employees.
‘They will require private investment for this development,’ Thompson says, ‘and it would not be a good PR exercise for any private company. That said, we do have to constantly point out the short-sightedness of this plan. It’s all about immediate gain rather than a long-term investment.’
Only this April, the Tanzanian president, Jakaya Kikwete, queried the delay and ordered that the project be speeded up for ‘the benefit of the country, the same way as neighbouring Kenya benefits from soda ash from Lake Magadi’.
‘The loss of the lesser flamingo would be a huge tragedy for the planet,’ says Thompson. ‘It’s one of the most spectacular things you could ever hope to see. It would be a tragedy not only for the loss of natural beauty and ecological systems but for the many thousands of livelihoods dependent, directly or indirectly, on the income that tourism brings in.’
Saringe, my 25-year-old Maasai bird guide, has much to say on this subject. ‘If the camp brings money to the village, then everyone can see that the wildlife has a monetary value,’ he says. ‘Before, the stream was just for livestock. The livestock is owned by only a few rich people in my community. So not many people benefit. I’m from a poor family, but now I can provide for them. The salary is good. Everyone is happy. We want wildlife to come so more tourists will come and there will be more money.’
Saringe leads hikes up Ol Doinyo Lengai – once, he proudly tells me, three times in one week. ‘But we only recommend it to very fit people,’ he adds, casting a wary eye at me. ‘Or those with mountaineering experience.’
Family business
I decide to forgo this opportunity and instead hike into the nearby Ngare Sero Gorge – a spectacular ravine cut into the towering Rift escarpment – with Leach. As he strides with confidence through the torrential stream and I inch tentatively behind, trying not to lose my footing, Leach explains that he initially trained as a marine biologist but ended up running the family business.
The camp is actually a satellite project of the Ngare Sero Mountain Lodge, a colonial guesthouse in the foothills of Mount Meru, near Arusha, 100 kilometres to the south, but the eco-camp is his passion. ‘I grew up in the jungle, really,’ Leach says. ‘I didn’t go to school until I was ten. Nature was my school.’ I can well believe this as I watch him scamper up an almost vertical cliff in search of aloe.
We swim among the beautiful waterfalls at the head of the gorge before descending to the top of a nearby 60-metre summit that overlooks the plain, where we watch the scarp’s shadow race across the plateau as the sun sets. Baboons socialise in the evening sunshine. The south coast of Kenya is transformed in the mirage into a series of magically floating islands. The shore is awash with pink; the camp is barely visible.
‘A lot of so-called “camps” are actually permanent structures,’ Leach says. ‘I wanted this to be an example of truly low-impact tourism. We could pack up in a week and leave nothing but a few bare patches that would be covered over in a month.
‘Tanzania can be a difficult country in which to live and work,’ he continues, ‘but the things that are special here tend to be very special indeed. Things that are truly worth protecting.’
Tanzania co-ordinates
When to go
Thanks to its location close to the equator, Tanzania enjoys relatively constant temperatures throughout the year, averaging about 25–30°C. The main rainy season takes place between March and May, and visitor numbers tend to peak during December and January.
Getting there
KLM and Kenya Airways offer flights from London to Kilimanjaro (via Amsterdam and Nairobi respectively) for about £600. Transfers from the airport to Ngare Sero Mountain Lodge take about 30 minutes. From there, it’s a further six-hour drive to the eco-camp.
Further information
Prices for the camp are US$300 full board per person per night based on two people sharing. For more information about the camp and the activities it offers, visit
www.ngare-sero-lodge.com.
November 2011
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