minor respectively), with the lesser flamingo having a characteristic and spectacular pink-red colouration in their feathers. Two flamingo species gather in considerable numbers in Lake Nakuru and a few other East African rift lakes, namely, the greater and the lesser flamingo (Phoenicoptus ruber roseus and P. Flamingo-like ancestors, which would give rise to modern ducks, even left traces in the shallow saline mudflats of Eocene soda lake sediments that define the saline portions of the trona/nahcolite-bearing sediments of the Green River formation in Utah (Figure). (2009, 2012).Īncient avian counterparts can leave a particular set of trackways and trace fossils (including nest mounds) that can be used to refine mid-late Tertiary lacustrine depositional models (Melchor et al., 2012). Sedimentary textures and structures associated with flamingo lifestyles, where these birds dominate the macrofauna in some modern saline lakes, are described by Scott et al.
This creates the context between flamingos, mesohaline planktonic blooms, and saline lakes, well documented in Lake Nakuru by Vareschi (1982) and first noted in the geological literature in a benchmark paper authored by Kirkland and Evans (1981). Flamingos are filter feeders that thrive on halotolerant cyanobacterial blooms in mesohaline shallows of saline lakes worldwide. Although popularly misperceived as tropical species, flamingo distribution is more closely tied to the great deserts of the world and hypersaline lake sites than equatorial regions (Bildstein, 1993). The lake's flamingo population's fluctuating richness was dubbed the "flamingo connection" in a benchmark paper by Kirkland and Evans (1981) that considered mesohaline evaporitic carbonates as hydrocarbon source rocks.įlamingos (Aves, Phoenicopteridae) are an ancient lineage of long-legged, microphagous, colonial wading birds. Since 2006 there have been additional population crashes at Nakuru and Elmentia (Table).įlamingos numbers in Lake Nakuru are perhaps one of the most visually impressive responses to episodic but very high organic productivity levels, driven by a well-adapted species feeding in a layered saline water body subject to periodic salinity stress (Warren, 2011). At the same time, birds were gathering in places they have never been documented before. Previous mass die-offs occurred at Lake Nakuru and two other Kenyan lakes in 1993, 1995, and 1997, as well as at two lakes in Tanzania in 2002.
In 2006, more than 30,000 of the birds were found dead at Nakuru, leaving enough pink carcasses to spur an international newspaper to describe the lake as a "flamingo death camp." Two years prior, 43,800 of the birds had perished at Tanzania's Lake Manyara, the first significant die-off documented at that alkaline, soda-rich lake. Flamingo population levels in Lake Nakuru and any mass "die-offs" are popularly considered as indicators of the environmental health of Nakuru and other lakes in the African rift valley with significant flamingo populations. An aviator once described Lake Nakuru as "a crucible of pink and crimson fire," with a million flamingos painting an astonishing band of colour that burst into pieces as the birds took flight (Figures).
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