01 What they are doing there
The key is not the air temperature but the water chemistry. These lakes are saline and very shallow, with a sheet of water that warms quickly in summer and in which crustaceans and microscopic algae proliferate. That is, literally, a flamingo's feeding ground: it filters the water with its bill and feeds on what is suspended in it.
The second condition is seasonality. They do not live here all year: they arrive in spring, around April, and stay into late autumn; when the lakes freeze, they leave. That is, they exploit a window of seven or eight months in a place where the rest of the year is uninhabitable for them.
02 Fifteen million birds passing through
The flamingos are the postcard, but they are not the most important part. The reserve was created in 1968, covers 543,171 hectares and in 2008 became part of a UNESCO World Heritage site together with another protected area in the north of the country. What was protected was not a species: it was a staging post.
It is estimated that between fifteen and sixteen million birds use these wetlands as a feeding ground on migration.
That is the figure that orders everything else. These wetlands lie on the route of birds moving between Africa, Europe and southern Asia, and work as a resting and feeding area in the middle of a continent. Around 350 bird species have been recorded, many of them threatened.
03 What else lives on the steppe
The reserve is not only water. Around the lakes there is steppe, and on it lives the saiga antelope, an improbable-looking animal — with a bulbous, flexible snout that filters dust and tempers the air it breathes — which drops its calves on these plains in late spring.
The whole adds up to notable figures: more than 500 plant species and more than 1,400 aquatic and terrestrial animal species, among them 43 mammals. On a plain that from the road looks empty and monotonous, that density is exactly what you do not see unless you stop and look.
04 How to see it without spoiling it
Three practical things. First: this is a strict reserve, not an open park. Access is regulated, there are closed areas and it is worth sorting the permit and the transport in advance, because there is no scheduled service from the capital.
Second: bring binoculars. The flamingos keep their distance, out on open shallow water, and to the naked eye they are a pink line on the horizon. And third, the one that matters most: in spring there are calves on the ground, camouflaged and motionless. Leaving the marked tracks in those weeks is not a minor lapse.
