PINK FLAMINGOS

The other day I made my first trip to the Gulf of Mexico's beach ten miles north of here. It's been eight or nine years since I've seen the ocean, so you can imagine my pleasure seeing the big waves moving in, smelling and feeling the cool, salty air, and watching the gulls and terns fishing offshore.

The beach is OK for swimming but not to be compared with Cancun. It looks great for beachcombing, however, with more large, ornate seashells than most such beaches. On the beach itself during our late afternoon visit there wasn't another human being.

Before reaching the beach we'd crossed some mudflats where about a thousand American Flamingos foraged for food.

In years passed I've seen flamingos at the big coastal national parks near here, Celestún and Río Lagartos, but there you had to take boatrides to see the birds. I was unprepared when our road -- the same one passing by Komchen and where I jog each morning -- emerged from a mangrove thicket and there stood all those flamingos, many quite nearby. Ana María said that sometimes they come right up to the road's edge.

You hardly know what to think when you see something like that. Imagine, the late-afternoon blue sky shimmering above a broad, silvery expanse of shallow water, and all that vivid, animated pinkness milling about in it.

The flamingos, evenly spaced across the flats maybe twenty feet from one another, slowly glided through the shallow water on legs so long and slender they always seemed about to break. Perched so high above the water, when the birds lowered their heads, their heads were almost upside-down. Then you saw how those huge, banana-shaped beaks were used. Held right-side-up the beaks look comically awkward but when the head is held almost upside-down the beak becomes a perfectly formed scoop that scrapes into the mud and filters out the birds' food, which is algae and small marine life such as snails and bottom-dwelling insect larvae. There's a fine description of flamingo feeding habits at www.seaworld.org/infobooks/Flamingos/fdiet.html.

Flamingos need long necks because their long legs put their bodies so high above the water. The long legs are not used for wading deep water but, rather, for giving the bird's bodies a high-enough position to make it easy to swing the long-necked head through a lot of water, without having to move the body too much. At first glance the flamingo's construction looks too awkward to be real, but, when you study the matter, everything makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is the shear prettiness of flamingos being themselves at dusk. When you come upon a big flock of flamingos in a silvery mudflat at dusk, you know that the Creator has an intention beyond just exercising such mundane matters as evolving life to higher states and transferring energy from one trophic level to another. Also, it brings up the question of why we humans are created so that we regard such things as beautiful

Flamingos prove that the Creator not only has a fine sense of humor, but also a certain flair. Also, they prove that even if the Creator isn't caring much about what happens to us humans on a daily basis, She's at least cared enough about us over time that, when we allow ourselves, we can be really tickled with what we are, where we are.

Sea World provides a very nice flamingo page at www.seaworld.org/infobooks/Flamingos/home.html.