Inagua

The flight from Nassau to Inagua takes two hours and deposits you at the end of the world. The plane lands on a small airstrip and a customs officer checks your passport with the leisurely thoroughness of someone who has time, because time is what Inagua has in abundance. Matthew Town is the only settlement on an island the size of Luxembourg — eight hundred people, a few streets, a church, a small guesthouse, and beyond the last house: salt flats stretching to the horizon and, on them, approximately eighty thousand Caribbean flamingos. I was not prepared for the number. I knew it intellectually, had read it, but standing at the edge of Inagua National Park for the first time with a park warden named Henry and hearing the sound they make — a low, collective honking that carries across the flat water like a distorted crowd — rewrote the number into something physical.

The flamingos nest at Lake Windsor, a brackish lake in the park’s interior, and the largest nesting colony in the Western Hemisphere congregates there in a mass so dense that from certain angles the lake appears simply to be pink. Henry, who has been guiding flamingo walks for years and has a relationship with these birds that involves patience and genuine affection, moved us into position upwind and downwind with a methodical care that took forty minutes and resulted in us standing fifty metres from several hundred birds feeding in the shallows. Their color is not the pale decorative pink of souvenir flamingos. It is a deep, saturated coral-pink that comes from the brine shrimp and algae they eat, and in the early morning light on the salt flat it read as almost orange. They feed with their heads upside down, filtering water through a specialized beak, moving with a herding, collective slowness that is mesmerizing in the way of things that have been doing what they do for a very long time.

Morton Salt has operated on Inagua since 1936, producing salt from the same flats where the flamingos feed, and the industrial landscape — windmill pumps, crystallization ponds, low buildings with salt-crusted rooflines — sits beside the national park in an arrangement that would seem incongruous elsewhere. Here it makes a strange sense: the salt operation has incidentally maintained the shallow brine habitat the flamingos require, and the company and the park have a functional, if unlikely, coexistence. The Bahama parrot also lives on Inagua in significant numbers, and the night I spent in Matthew Town had a sound to it — wind off the Atlantic, the generator running until ten, the occasional distant pink collective of flamingo noise — that I have not encountered anywhere else. It is the sound of a place that has been left to proceed without much interference, and it is the rarest thing I found in the Bahamas.

When to go: December through May for the flamingo nesting season and the most spectacular concentrations at Lake Windsor. Visits to the national park require a licensed warden guide — the Bahamas National Trust in Matthew Town arranges this, and it is essential to book ahead as the number of guides is small. Inagua’s remoteness is real: accommodation is extremely limited and the island’s only regular connection is the small twice-weekly flight from Nassau.