Flamingorama!

Strandfontein is a water treatment facility in the Cape region of South Africa. It's a series of manmade impoundments that serve as settling and purifying ponds for, oh, OK, sewage. 

Other than some low brick buildings, fencing and pumps, you'd never know it. The waters are teeming with food.

Flamingos don't care. Neither do the hadedas. 

These funny, stocky ibises wail like babies. They're found all over South Africa, their loud cries just part of the everyday scene from Cape Town to Kruger Park. It's neat to have an ibis be so common, a bit like the white ibises in Florida, grazing in everyone's lawn. 

We were here for the birds, and they did not disappoint. What a delight to have a still, sunny day for flamingo indulgence! I have soo many nice photos of them, and I'm torn. Do I show you all the good ones, or keep it to a dull pink roar?

I was so taken by the axillars--the long, filmy feathers in their wingpits, brilliant carmine, fading to blush--imagine how that would look in a hat! After it's been molted, of course. Part of me understands the millinery feather craze of the late 1800's when I look at these feathers. But they would soon fade to white; the color in flamingo feathers is pigment-based, and fleeting. Let's leave them on the birds.

Strandfontein is a sort of unusual setting for flamingos, because the water is so much deeper than what I imagine them choosing for feeding. They swim around like odd, bent-billed swans. You almost forget they have stilts under them when you watch them swim by.

They paddle like antic sternwheelers, their long pink legs making odd angles behind them. They even tip up like ducks and geese, feeding on the bottom, filtering sludge for tasty crustaceans. They must get some pretty good stuff here, because there are a lot of happy looking flamingos frequenting the settling ponds.

I could watch them swim, take off, and land all day long. And we pretty much did.

Like most larger waterbirds, flamingos must run across the water's surface, flapping like mad, for a distance before becoming airborne. 

It's harder to get started when the water's so deep.

Taking off into the wind gives them lift. They throw little rooster tail tracks out behind them.

When the water's glassy, the reflections are incredible. Glassy conditions are rare on the Cape, which is known for its near-constant winds. We were very, very lucky with the weather on our trip--only one day of occasional drizzle and clouds in twelve! There's a severe drought going on, so it was a mixed blessing--more on that later.

 I particularly like this shot of grace going airborne. Don't forget to take in its reflection!

I found myself holding my breath until that magic moment when the feet lifted off the runway.

These are all greater flamingos, which are larger and paler than lessers, also present in the Cape Region. That jet-black melanin in their flight feathers strengthens the feather for the inevitable wear of flight. Many otherwise white birds have black or black-tipped flight feathers, because these are the hardest-working feathers, and subject to the most wear, scraping against the air.

I was so focused on the birds that I kept forgetting to get a longer shot of the mountain background around Strandfontein. Behind that mountain is a large bay of the Indian Ocean.

With these flying umbrellas against a filmy blue backdrop.

Every once in awhile, the water would be still enough for mirrored reflections. I tried to stay conscious of them while composing.

I couldn't resist putting some words on this shot of one bird taking to the air. Might as well add to the inspirational memevalanche.

You were. Me too. Try not to waste a minute.

Flamingos. Pinch Me Please.

One never quite gets used to the sight of a flotilla of flamingos planing into a waste water lagoon.
But for the backdrop of towering mountains, and a glimpse of the nearby Atlantic Ocean, it's quite an ordinary place

with extraordinary birds feeding and prospering there.

I quickly realized that shooting flamingos at Strandfontein Wetlands was a matter of judicious framing.

When they are coming in against the mountain, they create a vision of singular beauty.



You can see the city of Strandfontein in the haze beneath the birds. They're all busy making wastewater for the flamingos.



Not every shot is so poetic. I had to shoot this guy, nonchalantly preening in flight as he dropped into a lagoon. The backdrop, not ideal...



But that's what's such fun about bird photography. You can frame and crop and tell any story you want.


We were able to get out and walk at the wetlands, but we made a point of staying in the van around the flamingo flocks. It's only polite.

I shot this from the vehicle. There's a kind of tunnel vision that overtakes an avid photographer in pursuit of that perfect shot. This person is trying to get as close as possible to a resting flock. You can see that, while some are preening, one head has shot up, and a wing is out. That's like a neon sign flashing, "Back off!!"



Which, of course, he doesn't. Perhaps because he wants some flight shots. It's pretty arrogant, we thought, to put sixty heretofore relaxed flamingos to flight just to score yourself some photos.



This isn't a zoo, and these regal birds haven't been put there just for your amusement. It's easy to forget that the flamingos are busy trying to lead their lives,  even when they seem to you to be doing nothing at all. When they radically change what they're doing because of something you're doing, you're doing it wrong, sir. Seeing that he was going to press the birds until he got what he was after, I thrust my Canon into Leon Marais' expert hands and he got this beautiful shot as the birds fled right past us.

And this one. Just look at the splashes! Thanks, Arrogant Photographer. I guess.

photo by Leon Marais. He was sitting on the right side of the van. But he is that much better than I am.

I much prefer shooting flamingos that are ignoring us. Or mostly ignoring us. In any flock, someone's always got his eye on you.

Artist Mary Richmond, whose wonderful blog, Cape Cod Art and Nature, has been going as long as this one (making us both blogosaurs), has a great Instagram feed. She found this greater flamingo mount in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I thought you'd like to see what a flamingo does with the standard-issue 14 neck vertebrae all birds have. It uses them all, just stretches each one into a 2" tube. Look at the center bird. You can actually see the individual bones on the bottom curve of its neck. Looove it. You know what else I loved? Mary was on the South Africa trip! She'll be painting, writing and thinking about the million wonderful things she experienced for years to come.

Like the not so small miracle of flamingos at a wastewater treatment plant. 

Looking at this photo, I imagine that this bird is little more than the weight of its feathers, its bill and its long hollow bones. A supermodel among birds, living thin on her shrimp and spirulina protein shakes. 

Such a world we live in, that pink birds stiltwalk on water

fold into sines and graceful elipses

and steam off like a flotilla of sternwheelers on a September day

But this isn't the Ohio River, and it's not the Sternwheel Festival, and I am really seeing this, right over my head. Pinch me moments are what this trip is all about.

I'm going back to South Africa in September 2016. Wanna come along? Click here for details.

A Mighty Fancy Turd Tumbler

Any birder will tell you that the best birding is often in the weirdest places: dumps and the like. When I was 12, I spent a summer in the northeast corner of Montana, just south of the Saskatchewan border, where I observed at length my first blue-winged teal, shovelers, American avocets, marbled godwits, and long-billed curlews at the sewage lagoon for an Air Force base in Opheim. I had to be told it was a sewage lagoon, and not to wade in. To me, it was a wonderland. 

I feel the same about Viera Wetlands near Titusville, Florida. Magic. I'd happily spend a whole week there birding and photographing and sketching with zeal. 

Strandfontein "Wetlands" is no different. The birds are so magical you quickly forget that these lagoons have a not-so-beautiful function. 

There are black-winged stilts... (as above)

great white pelicans (different from our American whites)

black-headed herons

blacksmith plovers

Egyptian geese...well, those are everywhere, but still lovely to look at, delightful to hold

and lots of WHAT ARE THOSE?

PINK THINGS

In a SEWAGE LAGOON FOR PETE'S SAKE

Honking like geese and gangling all over the place??

OK. I'm not in Ohio any more. There are GREATER FLAMINGOS in the sewage lagoons here. 

Lots of them.

And one cool thing that happens here happens because the water is so deep. 

Flamingos normally feed in shallow water, not much above their ankles. Shallower than this. Their bills have that distinctive down-bend. That's because when they feed they turn their heads upside down (imagine if these birds simply dropped their heads until their heads were upside down). 

Then they sweep their bills back and forth, rapidly clapping their mandibles and taking up globs of mud. They use their strong tongues to squeeze the mud back out through comblike projections along the bill sides called lamellae, and by so doing strain out small crustaceans, shrimp, amphipods, insect larvae, bivalves--that kind of thing. The carotene in the blue-green algae and crustaceans they take in give them their rich color. And all those little wrigglers I listed, they keep and swallow. I would imagine they have to raise their heads to swallow...

Here, the water's so deep that the flamingos take off like so many swans or mini-sternwheel paddleboats and swim!

It is quite amazing. I like to imagine those long coral legs thrashing under the water.

And this time I got to see them! The flamingos were tipping up like so many mallards, probably to reach the muddy bottom of the lagoon, and all the delicious things living there. What a sight to see.  File all this under: Things I hadn't known flamingos do.

More flamingos anon. I know you love 'em. 

I'm headed back to South Africa, leading a trip for Holbrook Travel, in September 2016. Wanna come along?

Details HERE