Let’s hope his images are not a portent of what’s to become of this spectacular place. From the look of Brandt’s pictures, the place is already dead. The spectacle the Lesser Flamingo puts on at Lake Natron may soon disappear. The human activity may directly drive off the skittish birds, not to mention the ways both projects might alter the ecology of the water and mud the flamingos have come to rely upon. A dam and a soda ash extraction factory will dramatically alter the ecology of the lake. Lake Natron is such an attractive mating site for flamingos because the water stays low enough to prevent nest flooding but remains high enough that there’s a barrier between predators and the conical nests the birds build. That mating ground is now under threat from industry. It is very caustic and burns animals that get too close to it binds them and then fills their nasal cavities with poison, that turns them into a black, hardened rock. For the Lesser Flamingo, Lake Natron is a singular, prime breeding site. In some ways, Brandt’s photos mask the importance of Lake Natron to life in and around the body of water. Those that fall in and perish are exceptionally preserved by the salts that make the lake so unique, but the lake’s surface isn’t an aquatic equivalent of the Medusa’s gaze. And for those animals that do become interred here, animals don’t immediately die and turn to stone upon touching the lake. Lake Natron is a hotspot for beautiful life. BBC natural history unit programs and even a Disney documentary have featured the flamingos who congregate in this picturesque place. The importance of Lake Natron to the Lesser Flamingo isn’t a secret. Lake Natron is also an essential breeding ground for the Lesser Flamingo. Even though the lake is particularly warm and salty, Koerth-Baker notes, algae within the lake supports a species of tilapia adapted to the unusual conditions.
And, just like the Great Salt Lake, Lake Natron is hardly lifeless.īoingBoing’s Maggie Koerth-Baker has already covered the peculiar fish that live in the alkaline waters of the strange lake. Dead pelicans, seagulls, and other birds take on a similar appearance as salt covers their bodies along the margins of the Great Salt Lake near my home. The flamingos and bats didn’t really become petrified in place, as if calcified by ominous clouds of salt-filled smog. But as Brandt himself has noted, the images are more art than science, and these pictures obscure the resiliency of life in and around the lake.Īs Brandt told New Scientist and other news sources, he collected the dead animals and posed them on their dark perches. The gloomy images make the lake look like a living museum where animals fall into the water and immediately turn to stone. Other volcanoes usually spew silicates, but the Ol Doinyo Lengai is the only one on the planet that spills "natrocarbonatites" as cool, runny, dark washes.If you’re a natural history fan and have been online at all this week, chances are you’ve seen photographer Nick Brandt’s stunning photos of mummified birds and bats along the shores of Tanzania’s Lake Natron. It's a favorite among petrologists because it's the only one of its kind, Hannes Mattsson, a researcher at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, told NBC News. The culprit is Ol Doinyo Lengai, a million-year old volcano just south of Lake Natron. Nick Brandt / Courtesy of Hasted Kraeutler Gallery A calcified dove, from Nick Brandt's book Across The Ravaged Land, published by Abrams, New York.
How did the lake get this hostile? The "salt" in it isn't the regular table variety harvested from seawater, but magmatic limestone that's been forged deep in the Earth, poured out in runny lava flows and blasted into the air to become ash clouds 10 miles high. Water levels fluctuate easily because it's so hot - when the levels drop, the corpses are left behind on the shores, coated in salt, exactly how Brandt found them. Small birds or bats that try and fail to cross the 12- by 30-mile lake fall in, as do insects like beetles and locusts. Flamingos are some of the lucky birds that can make the trip across the lake which is 30-miles wide at its longest point. "If a body falls anywhere else it decomposes very quickly, but on the edge of the lake, it just gets encrusted in salt and stays forever," David Harper, an ecologist at the University of Leicester who has visited Lake Natron four times, told NBC News.
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