Lake Rosa

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Lake Rosa, also known as Lake Windsor, is a huge wetland that occupies much of the 184,000-acre Inagua National Park, which in 1965 became the second nature reserve assigned to the fledgling Bahamas National Trust. The history of the park is inextricably entwined with the survival of the flamingo, which a traveller named G. J. H. Northcroft described in 1900 as the “king” of Bahamian birds. In his book, Sketches of Summerland, Northcroft noted a disturbing trend:

“Formerly plentiful on the larger islands (the flamingo) is now becoming scarce. The reckless way in which the young are taken, often when just hatched, and the older birds shot for their flesh or wings or captured for sale as curiosities, is lamentable. This wholesale destruction — as cruel as it is short-sighted — is causing the flamingo to go the way of the dodo.”

Although The Bahamas later passed a law to protect wild birds like the flamingo, when Robert Porter Allen, of the National Audubon Society, surveyed the Caribbean in 1950 he found that many flamingo nesting sites had already disappeared — crowded out by expanding human populations. On Inagua itself he reported that their numbers had dwindled to about a thousand.