Nata Bird Sanctuary

The flamingo chicks that walk 50 km to Nata's water

In 2001 thousands of grey flamingo chicks set off on foot across Sua Pan. They were too young to fly. The water around their colony had gone, and the nearest left was more than 50 km to the north, at the end of the pan where the Nata River comes in. That season 19,340 pairs of lesser flamingo had nested. About 3,000 chicks lived.

The figures are Graham McCulloch’s. He worked out of Francistown under the name Makgadikgadi Flamingo Research and counted the colonies from the air for three summers running, work that became a thesis at Trinity College Dublin and a paper with Kenneth Irvine in the journal Ostrich.

The nests are not where you are standing

Most of what gets written about the sanctuary says the flamingos breed here. They don’t, quite. The colonies McCulloch flew over were in the south of Sua Pan, out in the middle, where a good flood puts a moat between the nests and anything that eats eggs. The sanctuary holds the other half of the arrangement. The Nata, which Zimbabweans call the Manzamnyama, runs 330 km from the watershed near Bulawayo, and its delta is the part of Sua that rarely dries out completely. In a bad year this is where the walking chicks are headed.

How bad or good is down to rain. In 1998 to 1999 the pan got 442 mm and 16,430 pairs of lesser flamingo tried. The water went in March, and 8,000 to 10,000 chicks were left stranded in the far south. The next summer brought 851 mm, in the wettest season Botswana had recorded. Rising water washed the lesser flamingos off their usual colony and they moved onto a small sandy island next to the greaters: 64,287 pairs of one and 23,869 of the other, the most ever counted on Sua. Close to 50,000 chicks fledged, and because the north of the pan stayed under water all through 2000, they did not have to walk anywhere. Then came 348 mm and the march.

Two days to the Atlantic

In July 2001 McCulloch and his colleagues fitted satellite tags to five lesser and three greater flamingos, the first time anyone had tracked the birds in southern Africa. They sat tight on the flooded pan until February 2002. Then one greater left and was picked up two days later on the Namibian coast, 1,230 km west. Two of the lessers were logged on the Makgadikgadi on 20 February and at Kamfers Dam outside Kimberley three days after that, 930 km away. Kamfers is filled by Kimberley’s storm water and treated sewage. So the pink line you may see from the platform is on a circuit that takes in the Namibian coast and a municipal dam in the Northern Cape.

It also explains the empty years. Drought in 2002 to 2003 meant nobody was sure a single chick survived, and the following summer late rain washed one colony away.

1988, the big water

The Nata’s flow has been measured since 1967 and the 1987 to 1988 season is the standout. That April somebody counted 25,000 to 26,000 greater flamingo chicks on Sua. It was the same year the Nata Conservation Committee started setting aside the delta end, with help from the Kalahari Conservation Society and the people at Nata Lodge. When the gate opened in 1993 the project won the Tourism for Tomorrow award for the southern hemisphere.

The decades since have been harder. In 2010 a London fund called Hedgerow agreed to pay for two lodges, a gatehouse and a training centre. Farmers at Semowane said the sanctuary’s boundary took in their grazing, the argument went to the High Court and on to an appeal that only ended in 2014, and the fund walked away. Kerileng Garebolelwe, who chaired the trust, told a Botswana paper in 2020 that no lease had ever been signed for a second concession the trust was given around 2009, so nothing was built there either. Nata Lodge had its own bad year: a bushfire in September 2008 left two tents standing. It was trading again by early 2010.

What turns up at the delta end

Pelicans are the dependable ones. A couple who came in a dry September found them roosting on a sandbank in the afternoon sun with openbill storks working the shallows, and campers in June 2018 had great white pelicans, yellow-billed storks, Cape teal and an osprey. One long-standing poster on the 4x4 Community forum puts the best months at the river mouth as July to October, depending on what the previous rains left behind. That is one overlander’s view, and it is later in the year than the November to March most write-ups give.

Flamingos are a gamble in any month. A February 2023 visitor on a lodge drive saw them only as a smear in the distance, though the same drive produced wattled cranes, grey crowned cranes and double-banded coursers with chicks. The wattled cranes are worth a second look. More than 1,000 used the Makgadikgadi in the 1960s and 70s, and later counts put it nearer 100. One blogger who arrived to a dry pan missed the birds altogether and photographed their feathers lying on the crust.

Two smaller things, each from a single traveller. The September couple were more struck by the termite mounds along the road than by the pan: tall and white, like skyscrapers. And the June campers ate lunch at the platform with pied crows gurgling at them from close range.

The zebra herds and lions of the Makgadikgadi are a different trip, further west in Makgadikgadi Pans National Park. From here the nearest beds are around Nata.