Legendary Flamingo Flocks Of Africa's Rift Valley Flying Off, Dying Off - ENN

[hatrack]

LAKE NAKURU NATIONAL PARK, Kenya — The famous flamingos of Nakuru are fading away. The spindly, exquisite birds, clouds of pink rising on a million wings in generations of tourist photographs, are dying, flying off, fleeing a seemingly fatal brew of environmental threats in a shrinking Lake Nakuru, the home that has sheltered them for uncounted centuries.

Where just six years ago as many as 1 million flamingos fed in Nakuru's shallows, in vast rosy carpets of plumage, hooked beaks and curved necks, as few as 30,000 stay-behinds hug the equatorial lake's receding shoreline. The carcasses of many hundreds of dead flamingos litter newly dried and caked sections of lakebed.

Nakuru, whose recent maximum size was about 50 square kilometers (18 square miles), may have lost half its water in the past few years, residents say. "Something must be done," said Jackson Kilonzo, manager of the Lake Nakuru Lodge. "People have to come together and decide to do whatever it takes to bring the water level back up."

Precisely why the shallow lake and its flamingo population are shrinking remains a complex question. The water catchment area around Nakuru has been heavily deforested, and its rivers are running dry. Years of drought have further reduced the water supply. African temperatures, like global temperatures, are rising. Sewer and industrial runoff from nearby Nakuru town pollute the lake. And its blue-green algae, the flamingos' food, has diminished with the lake.

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[kestrel91316]

1. If we need flamingos we can just buy the lawn ornament ones.

These African flamingos just sound like more useless eaters. Bet their poop is messy, too.

:sarcasm:

[Boomer]

2. They went out of business

The company that makes flamingo lawn ornaments is another casualty of our booming economy... overseas.