Flamingos

Two species, which makes this the shortest page on the site and the only group where one more bird finishes it. Both are Old World flamingos, both come to India in numbers, and both live by the same strange arrangement: a bill held upside down in the water, working as a filter, pumping shallow saline water through and keeping whatever is small enough to be worth keeping. The pink comes from what they filter out. A flamingo is coloured by its diet.

They gather where the water is too salty for much else — coastal saltpans, tidal creeks, the vast seasonal lakes of the northwest — and they gather in numbers that make individual birds hard to think about. That is the photographic tension here. The obvious frame is the mass, thousands of birds compressing into a band of pink across the middle distance, and it almost never works, because the heat haze coming off that kind of water at that kind of distance turns everything to mush by nine in the morning.

So the choice is early or close. Early means shooting in the first hour, before the air starts moving. Close means finding somewhere the birds come in to feed rather than roost, and dropping to water level so the necks and the reflections do the work instead of the numbers.