Lake Nakuru National Park
Is among Kenya’s finest national parks. Flanked by rocky escarpments, pockets of acacia forest, the park is gorgeous year-round and is home to both black and white rhinos, lions, leopards, hippos, and endangered Rothschild’s giraffes. As one of the saline lakes of the lake system lying in the Great Rift Valley, Nakuru is world-famous for clouds of pink coloured flamingos.

There are also waterbucks, gazelles, warthogs, elands, baboons, jackals, dik dik, impalas, buffaloes and leopards. There is no shortage of carnivores such as hyenas and some prides of lions, usually lying in the sun along the grassland surrounding the lake. A large family of hippos dominates the northeastern part of the lake. The rare bat Hipposideros megalotis also lives here, a tiny straw-colored species with long ears. Absent the elephants.

The habitats surrounding the lake are very diverse: one encounters swamps, wooded areas, grasslands, arboreal savannahs of yellow fever acacias, steep cliffs and rocky hills covered with forests of gigantic Euphorbia candelabrum, (the largest existing euphorbia forest in Africa).

It should also be said that those who have recently visited Lake Nakuru have seen, with great regret, a lake without its emblem, the flamingos.
What happened, where did more than a million flamingos go? They simply moved 100 km north to Lake Bogoria, leaving behind only a few hundred specimens. The cause? An unusual phenomenon, the increase in the water level of the lake by over 2 meters, heavily influenced the salinity, reducing algae, the main food of flamingos, forcing them to migrate in mass. As the flamingos flee the lake, the remaining population of over 450 bird species including pelicans, storks etc as well as numerous species of migratory birds has increased enormously. Rising water has submerged parts of the acacia forest making it easier to spot the park's mammal population. Hippos, once very elusive, are now easier to see.