Landfall was made over Lake Magadi, a soda lake in the southern reaches of Kenya's Rift Valley, where the water is so alkaline and the mineral crust so thick that the surface reads, at first glance, as something else entirely — a pale shore, a stretch of bleached sand, the edge of a sea that isn't there.

The flamingoes cut across that illusion. They fly in loose formation toward the salt pans, their forms narrow and deliberate against the expanse below. There is no coastline here, no tide, no water in the conventional sense. And yet the birds arrive as if making landfall — drawn to the brine, the algae, the harsh chemistry that sustains them where almost nothing else survives.

I was struck, in the moment, by how much the frame resembled a stretch of beach photographed from above. The mind insists on familiar shapes. It reaches for shore, for sand, for the logic of coastline. Magadi refuses all of that. What looks soft is caustic. What looks like water is salt. The landscape is beautiful and inhospitable in equal measure, and the flamingoes are among the few creatures that have learned to read it correctly.

The image is offered as a small record of that paradox — a place that pretends, at altitude, to be something gentler than it is, and the birds that know better. Soda lakes across East Africa are under quiet pressure from rising waters, shifting salinity, and a changing climate. Landfall, then, is also a question about how long this particular arrival will remain possible.