Greater Flamingo in Nairobi National Park

Phoenicopterus roseus

Chance of an encounter
Uncommon

Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Nairobi National Park, aggregated onto a 10 km grid. A cell is matched by its centre, which can sit up to 16 km outside the boundary, so this covers the surrounding country too.

Occurrence records measure where people looked and found something, which is not the same as where the animal is. This is a relative likelihood, not a probability.

The evidence here

Grid cells
2
Records
8
Cell size
10 km
Years covered
1985 to 2022

A grid cell is a square of the map, not a sighting: 2 squares of 10 km carry records for Greater Flamingo in and around Nairobi National Park, and the 8 records behind them were collected by other people and published openly. Nothing here counts animals, and a place with more records is not always a place with more animals.

About the Greater Flamingo

The pale pink tide that sweeps the Walvis Bay lagoon each year is the greater flamingo, the largest and most widespread of the flamingos, standing up to a meter and a half on legs that seem borrowed from a taller bird. The species numbers in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, and coastal Namibia hosts some of the greatest gatherings in southern Africa, tens of thousands feeding in the shallows alongside their smaller, deeper-pink cousins. The color is diet, carotenoids from the invertebrates it filters; a flamingo eats its way pink. When the inland pans flood after good rains, flocks commute hundreds of kilometers overnight to breed on the mud, one of the region's least witnessed spectacles.

The full field guide entry, and everywhere else it is recorded

Before you go

Never flush a flock for a flight shot. Each panic burn costs energy budgeted for migration and breeding.