Deadly Lake Water Turns Bird into Stone

1. Tanzania's Lake Natron actually a mix of chemicals and it contains mainly sodium bicarbonate (baking soda) and sodium carbonate de-cahydrate (soda ash). The lake Natron is fed by mineral hot springs and a river, but no water flows out except through evaporation. The results are totally havoc and the caustic waters create deadly outcomes.

Deadly Lake Waters Turn Birds to Stone

2. Calcified Fish Eagle

It may look like this bird was gripped by the icy hand of death, but actually it was calcified in the caustic waters of Tanzania's Lake Natron.  The unexpectedly found the creatures all manner of birds and bats washed up along the shoreline of Lake Natron in Northern Tanzania.No one knows exactly how they die, but it appears that the extreme reflective nature of the lake’s surface confuses them, and like birds crashing into plate glass windows, they crash into the lake.The water has a tremendously high soda and salt content, the soda and salt causes the creatures to calcify, perfectly preserved, as they dry. Across The ravaged land is to give these clearly lifeless creatures an air of reanimation. 

Calcified Fish Eagl

3. Calcified Bat

The Lake Natron waters can reach high temperatures up to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. And during dry spells the PH can go up to 10.5, just shy of the alkalinity of ammonia. Sometimes the mineral to water ratio is so high that the water becomes almost thick to the touch.

Calcified Bat

4. Calcified Songbird

Some living things can survive the super salty waters, with the exception of certain red-colored cyanobacteria a type of blue green algae which give the lake a rust colored appearance from space. A single species of endemic fish can thrive in the corrosive environment. 

Calcified Songbird

5. Calcified Flamingo

Lesser flamingos take advantage of the inhospitable environment as a breeding ground. They feed off the blue-green algae in the lake and nest on islands of evaporated salt, or even along the dry, salty shorelines. It's such a good spot for nesting, indeed, that this lake area where these 2.5 million birds will breed. There are no needs to fear predators because there are none. However; saline waters themselves can prove toxic if the birds aren't careful. The lesser flamingo is now categorized as "near threatened" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

Calcified Songbird

6.Calcified Swallow

The Gelai Volcano sits on the southeastern shore of the 35-mile lake, towering 9,652 feet above the caustic waters. Due to its exclusive ecosystem, the Lake basin is on the Ramsar List of Wetlands of International Importance. The significance of birdlife and other species to big threats from nearby development, which include a proposed hydropower plant on the Ewaso Ngiro River, just over the border into Kenya, and a mill to process the soda ash from the lake itself.

Calcified Songbird

7. Calcified Dove

Today nomadic peoples occasionally herd cattle through the region, but public do not live in the Lake Natron basin. The existing lake is a highly poisonously concentrated remnant of what used to be a massive, freshwater lake 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. Even go to more in past, people did occupy this area. Just west of the lake is the resting place of Australopithecus boisei  and the early East African hominin whose 1.75-million-year-old jaw and full set of teeth were uncovered in 1959. His dried bones are not unlike the calcified remains of Brandt's birds.

Calcified Dove