Flamingo Hunt

I suppose it all started just after I got home after my December 2014 trip to southern Florida. We took that trip primarily to drive to Key West at the end of U.S. Route 1 and to find some alligators and maybe some birdlife in the slowly moving river that is the Everglades National Park. When we got back home we discovered there were flamingos to be spotted in the Everglades and we completely missed it. Yes, I know there's a visitor center called the "Flamingo Visitor Center." Just didn't notice it. Darn! Would have liked to have seen some flamingos.

Now as luck would have it, this would not be my only shot at seeing a flamingo or two in this five year quest. We thought we might have a chance at seeing some in Africa but we went to the wrong part. I mean it's understandable, right? I mean Africa is a continent, not some National Park on the end of a state. Darn, again!

Then last summer, after missing albatrosses and penguins in the Galápagos Islands, we ran across two (yes, just two) flamingos the last evening before heading back to Quito and mainland Ecuador. Three trips less than two years apart all theoretically with an opportunity to check out some pink birds and just one hit. I thought that was it.

Then we decided to visit Mexico and in the process of our research discovered there were more than 50,000 non-migratory (note: non-migratory) Caribbean Flamingos living in two nature preserves on the north shore of the Yucatan Peninsula. We had to get to one, right? I mean, I know we didn't necessarily plan to make a portion of this five year quest about getting close to these birds but after a (unbeknownst) near miss in Florida, a total whiff in Africa and a little taste in the Galápagos, we just couldn't not go, right? Right!

So on our second day in country, we decided to head to Rio Lagartos which would serve as the central point of departure for the Rio Lagartos Biosphere. Flamingos, here we come!

Rio Lagartos is a long way from Chichén Itzá where we were staying. It took us about 35-40 minutes in a taxi cab (that's about 25 miles and 500 pesos or $25 complete with tip) to get over to the city of Valladolid where we hooked up with MexiGo Tours and our driver / guide for the day, Gilberto. From Valladolid, it took a little more than two hours before we arrived at the water to meet up with our boat, an eight person or so flat bottomed motor boat anchored right in front of the El Perico Marinero restaurant. A quick transfer to the boat and we were off, about three and a half hours after we left our hotel. This better be worth it.

Cormorants sunning themselves as we whizzed by searching for flamingos.

We started out heading west in an environment that is very much like the Everglades, meaning mangrove swamps with shallow to sometimes very shallow waters connecting each mangrove stand to the next. It's a perfect environment for wading birds like herons, egrets, storks and yes, you guessed it...flamingos. Rio Lagartos seemed far less dense than our Florida experience but that may have been just the areas we went to. Overall the trip seemed far more like open water and less swamp-y.

Considering the grand total of wild flamingos seen in my life before this trip was two, the first 20 minutes of this journey was like hitting the lottery. Literally five minutes after we pushed off, we spotted our first flamingo, filtering shrimp through his bill as he (or she, I suppose) slowly ambled from a sandbar towards a stand of trees. Minutes later, we found another seven (at least that's how many I count in the photograph below).

This first mass (yes, I'm calling eight a mass) sighting was awesome and an opportune time for some quick flamingo facts from Gilberto. Flamingos get their characteristic pink color from the tiny shrimp they eat while striding around with their beaks in the water (I knew this already). To get enough food for a day they need to filter 200 liters of water through their bills (OK, didn't know that or anything else he told us). They can live as long as 40 years or more in the wild, can start mating around six years of age and are monogamous for a year at a time. Sort of the serial daters of the bird world I guess, although we learned this past summer that blue-footed boobies do the exact same thing. Survival can be tenuous; flamingos lay just one egg per season which incubates for 28 days.

Now that we knew all that, let's keep going again. Let's find some more (like hundreds or thousands) and get way closer.

That's when we got stopped. The waters in the biosphere are tidal and the tides cause some parts of the park to be especially shallow. Too shallow, in fact, to use the motor on the boat. You can sort of see that in the photograph above, taken in probably ten inches of water. So after an attempt or two at pushing the boat forward with a big stick, we turned around and away from our flamboyance (look it up) and headed back east, hoping that wouldn't be the last we'd see that day.

Pushing the boat desperately towards the flamingos.

Despite the self-professed singular focus of our trip to Rio Lagartos, there was a whole lot more birdlife and wildlife to see. We motored past numerous great egrets, lesser egrets and snowy egrets in addition to at least two species of heron (great blue and green) and a few pelicans, common black hawks and cormorants. We also found four crocodiles along our west to east journey and got up close and personal with two, getting me to within about a foot or two of one's head and getting close enough to another to allow our captain to take a swipe at the croc's tail with his hand (he missed). And all that was well and good (and actually some really good looks at some incredible animals and birds), but we had come to see flamingos. And 90 minutes in, our tally still stood at eight.

Common black hawk...

crocodile (this was the closest and coolest of the four)...

and green heron. All really cool, especially the green heron, but we came for flamingos, darn it!

Our tour that day included a Mayan mud bath, which was basically a stop by the side of the river near a muddy patch where you could spread some exfoliating white mud all over your skin. We passed on this experience; I knew it would not be one of those regrets I'd have later in life, like chickening out on eating snails in Marrakech or driving into residential neighborhoods to get a closer look at the Hollywood Sign.

The Mayan mud bath location was in a part of the biosphere that is being used for salt farming, with a man-made canal cut into the white earth to separate out a pinkish-brown river of what looked like very unclean water with some salty foam floating on the surface. Not appetizing at all and not really relevant to this story. On the other side of the canal though is where we found our final sighting of flamingos for this trip. No, there weren't thousands or even hundreds, and no, they weren't close, but if nothing else, I can say there were more of these birds in the wild in any one spot than I have seen before. We counted about 34 or 35 all the way from the closest maybe 100 yards from us all the way into the distance a lot further away than that. Gilberto claimed he had a few more; whatever. It's not hundreds or thousands. The quality of our encounter is reflected in the photograph below.

If it seems like I'm griping about our flamingo quest last month, you'd be correct. Mostly. I mean yes, we were disappointed by the quality and quantity of the bird we sighted. I mean there are supposed to be upwards of 50,000 of these things in this area and we got less than 100. 

But also no. If there's one thing I've learned from seeking wildlife or other natural phenomena in Iceland, Florida, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana, Hawaii, Ecuador and a number of other locations in the world in the last three plus years, it's that with nature sometimes you win and sometimes you fail. If we wanted to guarantee sightings of these birds really close to us, we could just go visit a zoo. And after seeing elephants in the wild in 2015, there's no way I ever want to do that again. I feel lucky just to be able to continue to get in boats and go search for birds like these, and we were really fortunate in the quality and quantity of other wildlife we saw in Mexico last month.

I can't imagine I'll go flamingo hunting again before this blog hits five years when I said I would stop writing about my travels (spoiler alert: I may not stop), but if I do, I hope I'll see more than I did in the Yucatan. Below is the best flamingo picture I took that day. Looking into the sun while that first flamingo we saw goes looking for shrimp so he can remain pink. Below that is the best picture I took all day. Considering the close up crocodile photo I took that day, I feel extremely fortunate. For my part, I'll continue to explore nature whenever I can. Maybe I'll be luckier the next time.