Phoenicopterus roseus
Drawn from open occurrence records inside Namib-Naukluft, aggregated onto a 10 km grid.
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 January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November and December. A quiet month can mean the animal was absent, or that nobody was looking.
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.
Intensely gregarious. Group courtship is a massed, head-flagging parade ground march, and crèches of gray chicks are minded by a few adults like a kindergarten.
Walvis Bay at low tide, light behind you: reflections double every bird. Panning at 1/60 turns a take-off run across the water into motion silk.
Never flush a flock for a flight shot. Each panic burn costs energy budgeted for migration and breeding.