Corporate Needs and Mother Nature Gave Birth to a Flamingo Haven : Preservation: Once Bahamians ate them. But now the exotic pink birds are helping to produce Morton Salt.

Out of a rouged dawn, before the trade winds awake, come matching birds flying like pink javelins.

Flamingos.

“Aerodynamically, they’re a mistake,” says Ed Rogan, a plane designer, watching the toothpick-thin, lingerie-hued birds.

Several miles away, across knee-deep mud flats, 20,000 flamingos are nesting, one egg per couple.

That this implausible bird is here on an implausible island under implausible circumstances is implausible. Implausible in that the Morton Salt Co. of America is midwife to all those flamingo eggs in an almost unheard of perfect marriage between corporate needs and Mother Nature. Implausible in that a few miles away from this mud and mangrove terrain, pink-and-orange helicopters of the U.S. Coast Guard and the Bahamas are taking off toward Cuba 60 miles to the southwest, scanning sky and sea for druggies.

Pericles Maillis is leader of six people, plus two game wardens, setting out to view the roosting flamingos--and just possibly the rare Bahamas parrot--in the Outback of this Way Out island.

Maillis is fortysomething, seal-shaped, British-educated, a gregarious Bahamian of Greek ancestry, a genius at identifying Bahamian flora and fauna and then cooking them. He’s a botanist who never met a tree he didn’t like, except Australian pines, or casuarinas, which he zealously uproots if they are young enough because they deform coastal beaches and coat them with needles that make it impossible for sea turtles to nest.

Maillis is also president of the Bahamas National Trust, the private environmental conscience of these islands and their seas of many colors. BNT is trying to save them from mascara-hued tourist hotels and condos so gaudy that even a parrot would blush. It is trying to save them from bulldozers, and from too many people in the wrong places. And here, it is trying to save the pink birds from local cooking pots.

That there are 50,000 flamingos on Inagua, the largest colony in the hemisphere, and that a flamingo dinner costs a $500 fine and three months in jail indicate BNT’s success in raising ecological awareness. Flamingos, fortunately, like to be alone. Since the trust owns 287 square miles of foot-slurping mud and shoe-ripping rocks on this 40-mile-long island of only 980 humans, their wish fulfillment comes easily.

Flamingo meat used to be an Inaguan staple. Robert Allen Porter of the U.S. Audubon Society described a hunt on the rookery in the 1950s: “The raiding party, old women, boys, mongrel dogs and all were upon them. Slender necks and legs were snapped like matchsticks until the brown birds with the bright promise of pink beneath nearly developed wings soon lay in heaps and tangled mounds.” The slaughter has ended with the creation of the sanctuary.

Illegal poachers, rains that wash away the mud pedestals where the female lays her one egg, and wild hogs that spook or eat the birds off the roost are now the only threats to the flamingos.

Matthew Town, Inagua’s one settlement, is the remnant of what once was a flourishing island. Cargo vessels used to stop to recruit locals as crew, providing uplift to an economy that once even sported an opera house. The salt company rescued a dwindling population by acquiring land for vast pans of water across the flat terrain in which to evaporate seawater. It is a two-year process, as seawater is gradually circulated from pan to pan.

In time algae, fostered by flamingo droppings, grows in the water and darkens it.

This hastens evaporation by absorbing more sunlight. Then tiny brine shrimp begin feeding on the algae, cleaning the water. And the flamingos feed on the shrimp until the salt is ready for harvesting, leaving everybody tickled pink.

“Morton (Salt) and the flamingos were made for each other,” Maillis says.

Every trip to town, Maillis stops by the company’s seawater pump to check for crabs or box fish or whatever else may have been pumped in from the ocean. The pump is Maillis’ supermarket as he dives in with mask and spear.

As a special concession, Maillis is going to lead this group to within a few hundred yards of the rookery. If frightened into flight, the nesting birds abandon their eggs for good.

In two outboard skiffs, the party sets out across the mangroved vastness for miles. The thigh-high waters teem with herons, egrets, spoonbills and scattered flamingos standing about like suburban lawn ornaments. Maillis finally calls a halt. Everybody starts wading through the mangroves. The only sounds are bird cries and the sucking mud of the trekkers’ footfalls.

A flock of startled spoonbills take to the air. Reddish egrets, the rarest of their species, perch tamely atop the mangrove bushes looking down their long noses at the intruders. Maillis tiptoes as much as one can in ankle-deep muck, shushing everyone as he slithers into a stand of bushes. Then he stops. Beyond the leaves is a wall of pink in the middle distance, 20,000 flamingos.

Their long necks are bent in graceful varieties of French curves. A near group raise their heads straight up, sensing the visitors. Occasional birds in rubbery flight, necks and legs extended fore and aft with strong pink and black wings in the middle, leave and arrive. There’s some squawking but not much. Camera shutters click between whispered “Ooooohs.”

“We’ve saved all this,” says Maillis as he leads his brood back to the boats. “All this” is an Easter parade of the finery of the hemisphere’s exotic wading birds.

The Bahamas National Trust has had some success in transplanting flamingos to their former habitat on other islands in the Bahamas, including Columbus’ argued landfall of San Salvador. There the birds will be pinioned until they get used to the commotion of plane traffic.

The first captive flamingo flock at Hialeah Race Track in Miami flew away when their feathers grew back. Replacements ultimately adjusted to life behind the tote board.

On other islands in the Bahamas, the birds have been greeted “with guns instead of love,” says Maillis. “We can’t stop hunters with hundreds of years of tradition, not with only 1% of the population giving a damn.”

But on the whole, the Bahamas receive passing grades in trying to protect their fragile balance of sea and land.

“In the short run we have an older generation that is used to hunting,” Maillis ruminates while driving a bucking pickup through the bush. “Drug traffic has brought lots of guns to the islands. Those people have no regard for human life, much less flamingos. But our environment is in the school curriculum now. That’s the long run.”

Kids sport “Save the Bahamas Parrot” T-shirts. “Wanted”--to preserve them--posters hang in airports and post offices. Suddenly, two spectacular green-and-blue birds cannonball over the truck. Later, more parrots squawk almost at arm’s length in a tree, hanging by their bills and preening their feathers.

As long as Great Inagua avoids the tourist boom--and there are many reasons to believe it will continue to do so, distance being one, mud and coral rocks being two others--the flamingos are not threatened here. More ominous among the pillowy trade wind clouds are what Maillis calls “circles of depletion.” Where there are concentrations of people, such as Nassau, the conch and grouper are only memories.

Back at camp--two plywood-and-screen bunkhouses with a thatch-covered alfresco dining area--Jimmy Nixon relaxes. Nixon, 77, is head warden and has guarded flamingos ever since they became politically incorrect on Inaguan menus.

“I saved the flamingos, mon,” he says with considerable truth. Each year he dutifully notes, like a Burgundy winegrower, the year’s vintage in a notebook.

“1989. A very good year. 9,046 nesting mounds. 332 eggs rejected.”

“1991. No problems with the hogs.”

Before seeing the light, Nixon used to eat flamingos. And wild donkeys too. What do they taste like?

Nixon muses, then snorts a laugh. “Donkey.”

He recalls days gone by, days BNT hopes are as past as the opera house and the drug traffickers who once made this a lucrative way point. The campfire crackles to embers as the Southern Cross rises to wink at the North Star low on the other horizon.

“Killin’ all those birds,” says Jimmy Nixon. “It was a sin, mon.”