Counting flamingos

Anyone seen my lake?

Yesterday's big adventure (for me at least), was an expedition to help count the flamingos on Lake Manyara, one of the large (32 km long, 6km wide...) soda lakes in the Rift Valley. The area is perhaps best known for the lions that live (apparently) up the trees in the National Park on the western shore, but happily our assignment was less hazardous, doing the north and eastern portion as much as we could. In the end I filled the landrover with eight folk of varying experience and we set off down the road. After a little faffing around trying to find the track to the lake, we got there and drove as far over the shore as we dared. Soda lakes are notorious for having a beautiful dry surface crust hiding imposibly deep mud below... It's an incredibly shallow lake, shelving very, very gently from our side towards the rift escarpment, so the shore can move quite long distances depending on local rainfall, and even the wind direction. When I came out two years ago we saw the lake sloshing about and around 200m 'tides' depending on the prevailing wind. Didn't make it easy when trying to site mistnets along the shore...

Still, looking out from the starting point we could see the lake, so dropped team one off, then drove around the shore a couple of kilometers before parking and setting off ourselves. The plan was that team A would count a couple of kilometers of shore, get to where we's started, head back to the car, drive on past us and so we'd leapfrog our way around the lake. Unfortunately, someone had pulled the plug. Instead of the few hundred metres to the shore that was what we thought we could see, if took over an hour of walking, first across crazy-paved solid mud, then soft, sticky sticky stuff that clung to our shoes (until we decided to take them off...) and then through liquid mud up to our ankles (happily there was a fairly solid base to walk on) until we got to the bird zone. As you can see, there were plenty of bird tracks to see (and the top picture actually has about 4500 little stints in it if you look really hard...). But it was a fantastically muddy experience!

People pay good money sor this sort of soda mud though, so my feet must be fantastically healthy now...

Consequently, we the first "leapfrog" took several hours and we only stopped for a late lunch. Where it was absolutely roasting - a hot wind blowing over everything. You only had to take the bread from the bag and it was developing a toasty crust. Amazing! And think what it was doing to us all day in the sun - I drank 2 litres of water in one go at lunch, plus lots more through the day and still didn't need the toilet until we got home in the evening...

We did find a couple of nests while eating lunch (this one's Fischer's Sparrowlark - not much nest insulation needed here - just a parent to shade the eggs from the sun), and it was great to be eating among herds of wildebeeste, zebra and Thompson's gazelles.

Foolishly, most of us plunged back in after lunch and did another few kilometres, but we scarcely scratched the eastern side. We still need to total the the two groups bird lists not to mention the TANAPA team counding in the national park who I'm sure didn't get out of the ca...), but even the little bit we did was truly awesome: 130,000 Lesser flamingos (no, I don't count them one by one...), 5000 Avocet, 5000 Black-winged Stilt, 5500, Little Stint, 3000 Ruff, etc., etc. The biggest surprise was a flock of 1500 Northern Shoveler, supposedly a rare visitor to these parts... And we counted a pretty significant proportion of the world population of Chestnut-banded Plovers too, which was one of the main targets, so that's good. Very cute they are too.  The last surprise was the bizare choice of this Ostrich to nest right where the water fairly regularly floods:

 

This particular bit of mud (there's an amazing variety of muds when you start looking) was a real killer - very dry and sharp corners of the cracks, but soft, oozy and sticky just an inch under. Wear shoes and you'll covered in heavy mud unless you can balance on the larger crusts, bare feet and you're soles are shredded. A nasty way to hobble back to the car! And to add insult to injury, the water had receeded another 500m during the time it took us to eat lunch, so we had even further to trudge! Consequently, instead of the civilised return to base by about 7.30, we only made it back to the car as the sun was setting and then had to negotiate getting off the mud-flats, find and then follow a barely visible track back to the road, and then the 2hr drive back... We made it at about 9.50 I think... Still, as on of the others commented, I'm glad I did it. But if we were doing it again next weekend I might have to find an excuse...