THE FIRST time I saw a flamingo was when I was five. My grandfather was reading me Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass with John Tenniel’s illustrations. Alice had a flamingo under her arm like a bagpipe. It was her mallet in a croquet game.
“The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing.”
There were a colony of about 40 flamingos at Larnaca last Friday. The lake shimmered and drifted in and out of focus in the salty heat. They formed a patch of pink question marks on the horizon. Questions I knew few answers to. My companion told me they had come from Kenya. But why? And when would they leave? And where were they going? Curiouser and curiouser, I pressed him for answers.
It seems flamingos existed four million years ago in Australia. There are none there now, but they have found fossils. In the Andes there is even older evidence, a fossilised flamingo footprint, dating back seven million years. The rare James’ flamingo, which lived high in the altiplano, was thought extinct until it was rediscovered in 1957, living at altitudes of around 14,000 ft. But these, very much at sea level, grounded under the Larnaca flight path, were Greater flamingos.
At first they were considered a type of duck, as they can both fly and swim. Now it is believed they are evolved from one of the earliest avian species, which existed 30 million years ago. The more questions I asked, the curiouser it became.
There is so much rubbish talked about male and female roles in our world. That we are but animals at heart, and our gender behaviour is determined by our sex and driven by instinct. Women as nest builders, men as hunters. Fine. We should look at flamingos.
Males and females build their volcano shaped nest together and both parents will take turns incubating the egg for 26 to 31 days. They both feed their nestling a liquid substance called ‘crop milk’, a secretion of the upper digestive tract stimulated by the hormone prolactin, dark red in colour, high in fat and protein. Raising their young is a task shared equally.
But their journey to reach this stage is long and mysterious. Up to 7,000 flamingos use Larnaca salt lakes as winter quarters, their own transit lounge under the path of the planes. They are now preparing to leave for breeding in the salt lakes of central Anatolia, some 600km further northeast.
I thought of all the human love stories that must unfold in the jet journeys above them: holiday romances, soldiers on leave, returning travellers from far flung continents, while unconcerned beneath loyal pairs of flamingos shuffle their bills for brine shrimps and wait for a day when something tells them it’s time to move on. They aren’t natural migratory birds, but like human refugees, survival and changing circumstances are making them move.
Not as straight forward as we might imagine. An ecologist studying flamingos at Lake Nakuru, Kenya has noticed an interesting phenomenon. Every year, when the time comes for migration, a few flamingos start the process by taking off from the lake. Since none of the others take any notice, they soon turn round and come back. The next day they try again, a few more tag along but the rest ignore them. Then finally at some point, a few days down the line, enough birds join the journey to set the migration in motion.
It reminds that it takes perseverance to move the masses, even for their own good.
One day soon we will pass that salt lake by the runway and the flamingos will have gone. Gone in the dead of night, for it is at night they fly at speeds of 30mph covering distances of hundreds of miles. Maybe we’ll think we spot one in the haze, a mirage of memory. We’ll strain with our eyes against the melting sun thinking we can still grasp a glimpse. But no, they are not there. Slowly they’ll fade from our thoughts, leaving just the pale impression of a pink question mark floating in our imagination.
As Carroll wrote in the final pages of his lost world of Alice and her croquet mallet, “Lingering in the golden gleam – Life what is it but a dream?”
