Desire for loot poisons the earth

Story by BETTY CAPLAN
Publication Date: 11/20/2006 - Daily Nation

Another game drive? Many are mystified to see others racing round the country looking for animals and birds, straining their eyes through binoculars.

"What?" said a former colleague of mine. "Go and stare at a giraffe? If it is there, I might glance in its direction but go specially to find it? You must be mad!"

Well, perhaps I’m mad but there’s nothing I love more. I have just returned from a visit to Crater Lake in Naivasha, a place I have never been to before. Jade-coloured, small and at the bottom of an extinct volcano, it is surrounded by trees and quite set apart from all the activity at nearby Lake Naivasha.

Colobus and vervet monkeys scamper in the trees. It is populated by thousands of flamingos, but what I saw broke my heart. It was just like a cemetery.

At one of the few places where you can walk without the danger of wild animals present, the dead bodies of these exquisite birds are everywhere: floating in the water, caught in the bushes, lying by the lakeside, some of their bodies already torn apart by eager packs of hyenas for whom Christmas has come early this year.

The intestine of one has been dragged out and is covered in flies. Another has fallen by the wayside in the past 24 hours and its eyes are still bright and clear, gazing into nothing.

It does, at least, give you a chance to look at them closely and to marvel at the pattern of pink, red and white that marks their feathers.

The smell of these soda lakes isn’t the most enticing at the best of times, but when you add to that the stench of decomposing birds, it is very unpleasant.

The irony is that all of this is happening while a the UN World Conference on Climate Change is taking place only an hour and a half away, and while tourist officials are busily trying to target rich tourists who, they pray, will come in larger numbers and spend more than the current ones.

Do any of these people go around the countryside to see what is happening?

There is a famous Norse myth on which German composer Richard Wagner based his great opera cycle The Ring of the Niebelungen. Gold is taken out of the River Rhine where it has lain undisturbed for ages and fashioned into a ring by a greedy dwarf, which eventually destroys the world – gods and all.

It is an apocryphal story about the way that the desire for loot literally poisons the earth. At the end, in The Twilight of the Gods, the river bursts its banks and the ring is thrown back into the primeval water where it came from.

I can’t help connecting that with what is going on all around us: unprecedented droughts, flooding, bushfires, odd and unnatural events. It is eerie and unsettling.

In London just a few weeks ago, although it was late autumn, it was warm enough for people to sit outside and wear short sleeves. It just didn’t feel right.

The further we go from nature, the more disturbed we become as societies. Concrete, asphalt, packaged food, and the absence of trees all cause deep incurable depression.

Those who were born here and have never lived anywhere else don’t realise what death to the spirit is caused by being cut off from wilderness, from the roar of a lion or the trumpeting of an elephant, from all the squeaks you hear in the bush at night.

I have seen the grandeur of Yosemite National Park and the Grand Canyon in the USA, the rain forests and Great Barrier Reef in Australia, the lush jungles of Malaysia. Yet nothing can compare with the plains of East Africa with its sheer abundance of animals and its distinctive umbrella-shaped Acacia trees nibbled into shape over the centuries by the indigenous giraffe.

Don’t take it for granted. I look at the grunting flocks of flamingos and wonder what they are thinking. Those that are dying are apparently refugees from the toxic Lake Nakuru, set in a park which brings in millions of dollars each year. Aren’t they affected by the devastation going on around them?

Surely, they are the most extraordinary creatures, like giraffes, the figment of a weird and comical imagination. The Collins Field Guide to African Wildlife tells us: "Flamingos have the longest necks and legs, relative to body size of any family of birds. They can wade into very deep water and still feed on the bottom. In shallows, they sweep their bills from side to side –.sifting tiny organisms out of water and mud, using filters at the edge of the beak and tongue."

Watch them move: they skim the water with long legs trailing and necks fully extended. They have a unique way of walking, stirring up bottom mud with their feet, then filtering it with the bristles in their bills for aquatic insects, crustaceans and molluscs.

The Greater and Lesser flamingos, though somewhat different in appearance and habits, often mix happily because there is no competition between them. The pink colour comes from food high in alpha and beta carotenoid pigments, the richest sources of which are the algae and various insects that make up the flamingos' diet. They even have pink milk!

They are highly sociable, living in enormous colonies. They give the impression of being rather vain because they spend 15-30 per cent of their time during the day preening, far more than waterfowl, for instance.

But their vanity, unlike ours, has a purpose: a gland near the base of the tail secretes oil that the bird distributes throughout its feathers which ensures waterproofing.

They act together, synchronising breeding by ritualised postures and movements. A series of displays is usually performed which includes the head flag, the wing salute and the twist preen.

Watching them at Lake Nakuru has always been a particular pleasure – seeing thousands of birds act quickly and elegantly according to some inborn instinct. Is there any man-made entertainment that can compare with that?

It would be tragic if greed and mismanagement of forest and water resources were allowed to ruin this priceless treasure. And, incidentally, tourists are immediately put off if they are made to feel they are being fleeced at every turn. They are far more likely to want to spend money in a country which shows that it cares for its natural inheritance as well as its human population.

At such a critical time, it would be far wiser to plough money into local rehabilitation rather than into luring the rich from distant lands. After all, there is a lot of competition out there.