Flangamingo

My friend told me she was reading her 3-year-old niece a bedtime story involving a flamingo, and the niece – and I quote – "assumed the flangamingo was a girl. I told her that there are boy flamingos too. She didn't believe me because they are pink."

Cute but also a bit sad; stereotypes catch us early and catch us hard.

Flangamingo was a typo in my friend's text message. Flamingo is already a great word, but flangamingo is even better.

In March my friend (different friend) and I went to the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary in Mumbai. These migratory birds breed in Great Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh in Gujarat, but their feeding grounds are the wetlands of Mumbai. This year the Thane Sanctuary is playing host to a record number of flamingos – apparently some 54,000 greater flamingos and 65,000 lesser flamingos. A river of pink amidst the blue waters of the creek.

This was an impromptu trip; had I known, I would have brought my DSLR which I generally use for bird photography. In the event, I only had a little underwater digicam whose zoom lens tops out at 120mm (35mm equivalent). All this to say: I don't have a good photo of these magnificent birds in flight; this is the best I could do:

But oh my, it was just glorious to see them in real life. The photo doesn't really capture their vivid colours, nor their gangly grace as they run through the water and take flight.

If you're in Mumbai between November and March, go see the flangamingos.