Phoenicopterus roseus
Drawn from open occurrence records in and around Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier 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.
Records exist for February, July, August, September and November, with the widest coverage in February, July, August, September and November. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
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 Ai-Ais/Richtersveld Transfrontier Park, and the 41 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.
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.
Never flush a flock for a flight shot. Each panic burn costs energy budgeted for migration and breeding.