Stretching nearly 4,000 square miles across the altiplano at an elevation of about 12,000 feet, Bolivia’s Salar de Uyuni usually looks, to a satellite, like a whole lot of nothing: flat, white, featureless. The world’s largest salt flat is, of course, much livelier from the ground. It hosts large numbers of breeding flamingoes each November and is home to other species adapted to the salty surroundings, including several other birds and the adorably plump, bunny-eared viscacha, a rodent related to chinchillas. During the wet austral summer, typically light seasonal rainfall…
