As Hannibal Smith was so fond of saying, I love it when a plan comes together! The last couple of years haven’t been good for one of the largest breeding colonies of flamingoes in Europe, as the water levels in the lagoon at Fuente de Piedra have been so low. However, following an unusually wet winter, I heard the flamingoes were back in force so I packed up my camera, telephoto and tripod and headed up there one Sunday evening in May.

The lagoon is bigger than the village named after it, so it’s not difficult to find – once you get into the village you just head downhill and follow the signs for the visitor centre. The shop was open so I thought I’d ask about the best place to go. Not knowing the Spanish word for flamingo didn’t help, but the shop was full of them (obviously) so a bit of pointing and asking “¿Como se dice en Español?” yielded the answer “Flamenco” (just like the traditional dance). You learn something new every day I also elicited the information that whilst there were about 50 flamingoes in the small pools near the visitor centre, to see the big flocks I would need to walk around the edge of the lake a fair way. Once I got to the lake I could see what she meant – way off on the horizon I could see hundreds of birds slowly moving around in the shallow water feeding and occasionally taking to the air. I had about an hour to go before sunset so I grabbed my camera and headed off.

The path I was following was getting less and less distinct but after about 20 minutes I found myself as close as I could get to a large flock (there’s a fence that keeps you about 50m away from the water’s edge), with the sun heading towards the horizon behind them. I was using my 500mm manual everything lens, and I think it paid for itself in this one session (previously I’d only used it to get a really good shot of the full moon – more on that later, maybe). In my mind I had a vague of a photo I wanted to get, one or two flamingoes in silhouette reflected in the water. At the time I didn’t realise that I’d reached my goal when I took this photo, so it was a nice surprise when I went through the photos on the computer the next day.

You might have seen this photo before – I submitted it to the readers photos page in a local ex-pat newspaper, Sur in English and it became the third photo out of three of mine to be printed when it appeared on the back page on 12th June.

Taken with a Nikon D1X and a Nikon 500mm lens. 1/10000 sec, f8.

View photo page on main site. Check out the nature page for the other 2 flamingo pictures there.