Kenya's heart stops pumping
By James Morgan, BBC News, Kenya At the edges of Kenya’s Lake Nakuru, Paul Opiyo picks up a dead flamingo and warns some eager tourists not to touch it, just in case. He points down to his feet – the brown earth is speckled with brittle white feather shafts. “We should be underwater, standing here,” says the deputy warden of Lake Nakuru national park. “This isn’t the lake shore. This is the lake floor.” To reach the water’s edge, we have driven hundreds of metres out across the former lake bed – now a barren moonscape of tyre tracks and bones. “Twenty years ago, this lake was 2.6 metres deep,” says Mr Opiyo, of the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS). “Last month, it was 1.4 metres. “One point four metres,” he says again. “It is a lake you can literally walk across.” Lake Nakuru is disappearing. And with it, around 1.5 million flamingoes – the icon of the Rift Valley – are under threat. … All three of the rivers that feed Nakuru are bone dry. The rivers flow from Mau forest. We climb down into a dusty brown ditch – the remains of the Njoro, the main river flowing into Lake Nakuru. This is the rainy season – the water should be over our heads. But the measuring gauges are redundant. “This used to be a permanent river – even in the dry season there was always some water flowing,” says Bernard Kuloba, a KWS ecologist. … With the rivers empty, the marabou storks are now drinking instead from a stagnant pool of greasy grey gloop. “This is sewage from the nearby town,” says Mr Opiyo. “The smell is a sign that it was not completely treated. “The pelicans, the flamingoes… this is what they have to survive on – treated sewage.” …
