The Bahamas’ isle of the flamingos

The four-wheel drive Ford pickup lurched around a curve in the rock-and-rubble road and pitched to a stop on top of the dike. Below us, about 200 feet away, a dozen flamingos stood frozen in place like lawn ornaments in the shallows of a windblown saltwater lagoon.

Every bird was facing into the breeze, poised to take flight. Overhead, a line of flamingos stretching more than 100 feet from first bird to last was flying toward the far shore, the trailing edges of each magnificent bird’s hot-pink wings etched in black.

A half-mile away, on the other side of the lagoon, a thin pink smear extended across the full arc of the horizon.

“There are thousands there. Maybe 5,000. Maybe more,” said Henry Nixon, senior warden of Inagua National Park and protector of the 60,000 flamingos and more than 130 other bird species that live on remote Great Inagua island in the Bahamas.

But even this flamingo-filled panorama pales in comparison with the scene just before the females lay their eggs in early spring, when scattered groups of flamingos gather to form a single mega-flock.

Responding to some inner cue, the world’s largest breeding colony of West Indian flamingos rises as one to fill the sky. If conditions are exactly right, Nixon said, sunlight reflected off the backs of tens of thousands of flamingos turns the underside of low-hanging clouds pink.

I’ve come to Great Inagua for a week with my friend to bird-watch, fish and explore this salt-encrusted island 400 miles southeast of Nassau and 55 miles north of the eastern tip of Cuba.

For the birds

Only about 800 people live on Great Inagua, the third-largest island in the Bahamas. There are no luxury hotels, no casinos, no place to rent jet skis or get a Shiatsu massage. One morning, I breakfasted on warmed tuna fish and hot buttery grits – the only food on offer in the dining room of the Main House in Matthew Town, one of a half-dozen places on the island that offer rooms to tourists. (Quite tasty, actually.)

Despite the barriers, hundreds of hardy travelers come here every year in late winter and early spring to see the quirky head-bobbing, strutting and wing-flicking courtship rituals of the flamingo. Most visitors fly into the island’s only airport, outside Matthew Town, or come by sailboat.

Outside the park, Great Inagua is a virtual domain of Morton Salt, the island’s largest employer. Morton harvests a million tons of salt annually from huge evaporative saltwater reservoirs called “pans” that border the park.

The saltworks and the flamingos enjoy a mutually beneficial relationship. Brine shrimp thrive in the salt pans. These tiny crustaceans are a favored food of the flamingo and the source of the bird’s distinctive reddish-pink coloration. The birds are filter feeders, so they help keep the brine shrimp and other microorganisms in check.

At the beginning of the last century, the West Indian flamingo was virtually extinct throughout its range, hunted nearly to the vanishing point for food or for its feathers.

In the early 1950s, Nixon’s father and uncle, both professional hunters, took Audubon Society Director of Research Robert Porter Allen deep into the island’s harsh interior. Chasing a rumor, Allen had come to Great Inagua to find one of the world’s last breeding colonies of West Indian flamingos.

The party found “a few hundred scraggly birds,” Nixon told us. Allen hired the brothers to watch over the flock. “The hunters had become the protectors.”

Building a park

Through the efforts of the Audubon Society and other conservationists, the Bahamian government created Inagua National Park in 1965. The Nixons were retained as wardens.

Today this 183,740-acre wildlife sanctuary covers more than half the island. Birds dominate the park, and flamingos are the stars. But as I learned on a tour of the park with Nixon that flamingos aren’t the only feathery attractions on Great Inagua.

“Sanderlings, sandpipers, snowy plovers. ...” Nixon quietly ticked off the names of a profusion of shorebirds that stand in the shallows or hunt at water’s edge on a 50-foot stretch of shoreline below a rocky road that runs along the top of a dike.

We kept driving, and birds kept appearing: elegant terns with their black crests and orange beaks, reddish egrets – both red and white-faced species are found here – and tri-color herons.

A few hundred yards farther, however, we encountered the first of several scenes of unnerving desolation. Years ago, this pond had been a scrub forest of oak and silver buttonwood trees. Then an adjacent salt pan overflowed and covered the land with toxic brine. Black, limbless tree trunks jut from the toxic water, the skeletal remains of trees that once grew here.

There were no birds there, so we drove on.

A solitary flamingo flushed from the shallows beside the road flew off to join a large flock in the distance.

Of boars and donkeys

On any given day, you’ll see hundreds, probably thousands of flamingos. But don’t expect to walk among them, particularly during the spring breeding season.

Blame the wild boars, the descendants of the pigs that came with French soldiers who built a garrison on the island in 1749. The French stay was brief – the troops fled when the British dispatched warships to claim the island as their own. The boars, however, remained and flourished.

When Nixon, who’s now 56, was growing up, flamingos nested along the roadways. But the boars developed a taste for flamingo eggs and newly hatched chicks. “They can wipe out a rookery in a single night,” Nixon said. “But wild boars avoid water. So the flamingos now nest in the middle of the lakes,” far from marauding boars and inquisitive tourists.

On our way to see the flamingo’s primary rookery, we pass a fat, barren expanse of dried mud, weathered limestone rock and an occasional scraggly bush.

“Wild donkey,” Nixon said, pointing to the cream-colored creature with a gray-brown face and enormous ears that stands oddly alone on the bone-dry pond. Like the boars, the first donkeys came with the French.

We came to the end of the road, as close as most tourists can get to the rookery on Flamingo Key during the breeding season. It’s nearly a mile from the nursery site in the middle of a now-dry seasonal lake.

Too dry for nesting

There were no newly hatched birds to observe this day, even with high-powered binoculars. “The flamingos didn’t nest this year,” Nixon said. “It was too dry.”

It was early afternoon, and our park tour ended. Nixon turned the truck toward Matthew Town. But I wanted a final look at Inagua’s famous flamingos. Nixon reluctantly turned back into the park.

The wind had picked up. Fast-moving rain clouds rolled in. We drove to a narrow dike road inches above the water. In low spots, saltwater and sea foam flowed across the road.

A hundred yards ahead, several dozen flamingos stood in the shallows. Nixon stopped the truck. The birds spotted us and started ostrich-stepping into the wind, wings flapping, legs bicycling as they struggled to gain lift. (“A flamingo is like an airplane,” Nixon had explained earlier. “They have to take off into the wind. If they don’t, they flip over.”)

As awkward as they can be on land, a flamingo in the air is pure pink poetry, its impossibly long neck arched forward and its impossibly long legs extending back, like a javelin in flight, perfectly balanced in the air.

The flamingos bank steeply to the left and catch the wind that carries them far down the flooding roadway.

“We can go back now,” I said.

This story was originally published November 7, 2014 at 12:00 AM.