Less than a mile from our house is Lake Elmenteita, one of the Rift Valley's alkaline lakes. The water has a high soda content and will burn the skin in tender places as I know from painful experience when I lived here as a boy. This 5 mile long lake is shallow - no more than 4 feet deep. At one end it is fed by hot springs, at the other, a now-seasonal river which used to flow year round when I was a boy.

Thousands of years ago, this area was rent by violent volcanic activity. Huge volcanoes to the south sent massive lava flows towards the lake which, in those times, was much higher than today. Around the western shore, molten lava burst through the earth's crust creating a jumble of black lava ridges and plateaus interspersed with hidden glades and hollows. Near the lake itself, these are filled with 10 foot high bamboo grass but further inland, they contain beautiful yellow acacias and rich green warburgia trees.

In the shallow water on this side of the lake are a number of low, rugged, lava-rock islands. Here is one of the few nesting sites in Africa of the Great White Pelican. The islands are packed sometimes with shoulder-to-shoulder nesting birds or at others, a tightly packed host of dark colored fledglings. Elmenteita does not have an adequate food supply for all these huge birds so they fly the 10 miles westwards to Lake Nakuru to fish and bring the catch back in their large beak-pouches to their young. The sky is therefore often filled with great flocks of pelicans circling in formation, seeking the thermals to lift them over the ridge to Nakuru.

This small, secret wilderness on the west side of the lake is home to some 250 Cape buffaloes, 20 Rothschild giraffes, numerous herds of impalas, Thomsons gazelles, hundreds of the diminutive dikdik, warthogs, baboons, hyenas, hyrax, porcupines, jackals, bat-eared foxes, many different species of birds including thousands of greater and lesser flamingoes and last but not least, the elusive leopard. This unspoiled haven is where we go to escape the cares of the world and the frustrations of a stalled chimpanzee painting.

Special moment. Beautiful birds come and go. Life around us returns to the natural rhythms which were so rudely disturbed by our noisy approach.

At dusk, relaxed and happy, we decide to head for home. Just before shattering the peace by starting the car, the buffalo herd suddenly gallops away. Strange. Why? Did they anticipate our leaving?

We drive down a faintly-visible trail and follow a pair of dikdiks as they run ahead of the car. Suddenly, a large form bursts from the tall grass and chases the dikdiks. In a flurry of dust we see it is a leopard which grabs a dikdik and stands with the unfortunate animal in its' mouth only twenty yards from where we sit in stunned silence.