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Write a User ReviewA Pretty Little Safari Park
There used to be over a million flamingos, but changing water levels have made the place far less attractive to these enigmatic birds. You will likely see some (maybe even a lot), but the giant flocks the park was previously so famous for have largely gone elsewhere.
That’s not to say Nakuru is a letdown. Far from it in fact. It’s actually very pretty, thanks to the lake itself and the presence of attractive acacia woodlands where antelopes, monkeys, and buffalo can all be encountered.
If you haven’t seen rhinos, well, there are plenty of both species here, and you have a very high chance of spotting them ambling along the grassy lake shores.
There are lions, who famously climb trees from time to time, and there are quite a few leopards too. No elephants though.
Due to its diminutive size and
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proximity to a busy town, Nakuru can sometimes feel a bit crowded with visitors, especially so around predator sightings.
Challenging Game Viewing
Once upon a time, people flocked to Nakuru to spot the flamingos that flocked here. Sadly, thanks to repeated floods in the Rift Valley, the flamingos are not as common as they used to be. The park is home to four of the Big Five (elephants are absent) as well as hippos, a wealth of antelope and the usual zebra and giraffe. Spotting the animals can be challenging and my personal wildlife-watching experience here was largely underwhelming. Scenically though, this park sitting in the Rift Valley is arresting, particularly the vistas from Baboon Cliff Viewpoint, which conjure up scenes from ‘The Lion King’.
A Feel-Good Park With Spectacular Scenery
I was lucky enough to see the famed tree-climbing lions though, one with its head poking out the top of a squat acacia and the other crouched on a lower branch. Who says lions don’t climb trees? Here they do!
The flamingos used to be a big drawcard of this park. Most departed for richer feeding grounds a few years ago due to rising water levels, but small
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flocks are still quite often seen here. Apart from flamingos, the lakeshore is a rich repository of other birdlife, and birders have hundreds of different species to discover.This is a park I would definitely spend more time in and I recommend a couple of days here at least.
One of Kenya’s Flagship Parks, Famous for Its Flamingos
It’s now many years since the gigantic flocks of flamingos that used to grace Lake Nakuru began to diminish in number, thanks to a change in the chemical makeup of the water. Even so, the image of that shimmering vision in pink remains a Kenyan icon, and it’s rare for the flocks to be absent altogether. In fact, some flamingos have returned. When I visited, there was a healthy number of lesser flamingos gracing the water, along with crowds of pelicans.
There’s more to the park than the lake – acacia woodland surrounds the water, and it’s easy to drive around looking for rhinos, giraffes and baboons. I saw a good number of waterbuck at unusually close range – the park is an excellent place to watch them as vehicles don’t seem to disturb them unduly. Just as well, as there are always plenty of vehicles here – the park is right next to the busy town of Nakuru, and very accessible.
Kenya’s Flamingo and Rhino Capital
It’s less than an hour’s drive from Nakuru city centre to Lake Nakuru National Park and less than three hours from Nairobi.
The park’s main attraction used to be the thousands and sometimes millions of lesser flamingos that foraged along its shores, but these birds are no longer a reliable presence due to changes in the water level. Nakuru also has strong populations of both white and black rhino, which have both been introduced. This has necessitated constructing a fence around the entire park to help prevent poaching, and this undoubtedly takes something away from the natural feel of the place.
Rothschild’s giraffes were also relocated here from the west of the country back in the late 1970s and lion and leopard are here too, though my experience tells me that sightings are infrequent.
As with all of the Rift Valley’s soda lakes, though the flamingos tend to steal the show, there are myriad other interesting bird species to be found.
Pretty in Pink
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I enjoyed an excellent leopard encounter – something for which the park is well known – and was also impressed by the high numbers of waterbuck, reedbuck and other antelope. You may also spot one of the park’s many large pythons.Lake Nakuru: Flamingos and the Big Four
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of people chopping wood can often be heard here and it always takes the edge off what is otherwise a wonderful park experience.The Pink-Tinged Lake
Lake Nakuru National Park is a short drive from Nakuru town, making it one of the most visited parks in Kenya. Whilst it doesn’t rate highly as a true wilderness experience, that’s not to say that a visit here isn’t worthwhile. White rhinos are common here, and there are also large numbers of waterbuck, buffalo, impala, warthog and the odd lion.
This is also one of the best places in the country to see leopards and they can attract quite a crowd. On my last visit here my guide pointed out a leopard in the trees; within minutes it was surrounded by a gaggle of jeeps and tourists’ cameras flashing brightly against the dusk.
The park is most famous for its flamingos, however. There were once over two million but numbers have dwindled due to fluctuating water levels, pollution and drought, although there are still sometimes enough to create quite a spectacle. My overriding memory of the park is of a late afternoon at the southern end, the lake tinged pink with thousands of flamingos, and rhinos quietly grazing in the foreground.
The Family Friendly Park
But, what the park gains in user-friendliness it loses in wilderness appeal. Fenced in its entirety, Lake Nakuru National Park is home to so many rhinos (which have largely been brought in from less well-protected parks)
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simply because it’s not a remote and wild park and therefore they can be easily protected here. And, despite the density of wildlife here, this can make some people a little snooty about Nakuru. Before I first visited the park, I probably fell into that category myself but when, eventually, I did get around to visiting and I first saw the lake tinged with the pink of flamingos, my opinion quickly changed. Sure, I’d seen flamingos before but never quite in the numbers that were present here and what made it better is that as I peered at them through binoculars my view was constantly being obscured by other animals: Rothschild’s giraffes, rhinos and others, ambling through the foreground.However, flamingos, being fussy birds, are reliant on exactly the right depth of water in order to flourish. In recent years (from 2019) heavy rains through much of Kenya’s Rift Valley region have raised lake waters considerably and this means that right now there are far fewer flamingos present than there were a few years ago. If flamingos are your big reason to visit Nakuru, then it would be wise to seek local advice before heading into the park.
To summarise, I would say that if you want a real back-of-beyond safari then Nakuru probably won’t do it for you, but if you were travelling here with children, or people with only a limited interest in wildlife, then Nakuru, which can be enjoyed over the course of just a couple of hours before heading back into town, should be high on your list of parks to visit.
Lake of Birds and Land of Rhinos
Fortunately, Nakuru still supports exceptionally high densities of both species of rhino, which have been introduced here because it is relatively easy to monitor for poachers. The larger and more peaceable white rhino is probably seen here more easily than it is in any other East African national park; good places to look for it include the southeastern lake floodplain
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around Rhino Point and areas of open savannah in the park’s far south. The smaller, crankier and more secretive black rhino tends to stick to thick acacia woodland, where it is quite common, but often challenging to locate.Other wildlife likely to be seen in Lake Nakuru National Park includes the localised Rothschild’s giraffe, and plentiful buffalo, zebra and waterbuck. On our most recent visit, in 2024, we had several excellent sightings of leopards and tree-climbing lions around Rhino Point. And even without flamingos, this small national park – listed as a Ramsar wetland and Important Bird Area – supports a remarkably diverse and exciting avifauna, with impressive flocks of great white pelican the stars of a bird checklist that includes more than 450 species.
Flamingos, Rhinos and Big Cats
Flamingos aside, the wildlife viewing tends to be very good. On our last visit, we had seen four of the Big Five within 24 hours (there are no elephants) and much more. We saw the same beautiful male leopard on every drive (trying to catch rats on the road), an exciting but heartbreaking scene of lions hunting a new-born buffalo calf, and a three-way standoff between black rhinos, a white rhino and a few buffalo bulls all fancying the same shady spot under an acacia tree. Last but not least we can confirm that lions still love climbing trees here. We stayed in the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) Naishi self-catering