Rose Waders

Overview

Rose waders are the pink birds that arrive in thousands on a flooded pan of the Rimward Basins, seemingly from nowhere, within days of the water. They come for the pan shrimp, and their coming is the surest sign the kindreds know of a good year.

Appearance

A rose wader stands taller than a child, nearly all of it thin pink legs and a long, curving neck, with a small head and a heavy bill bent sharply downward in the middle, pink with a black tip. Its plumage is soft pink, deepest on the wings, which show a band of crimson and black flight feathers when spread. Young birds are grey and grow pinker with every year of feeding. They stand on one leg to rest, walk with a stiff, high step, and fly with neck and legs stretched out straight, in long lines and skeins. A flock keeps up a ceaseless goose-like honking and gabbling that can be heard from the rims.

Habitat and Range

They live where the brine is shallow and full of shrimp, and nowhere else, so they are seen in the Basins only after a storm, and in great numbers only on the Long Pan in a good year. A few appear in rare wet years on the pans of the Glassbelt. Where they go between floods nobody on the far side knows.

Behaviour and Temperament

A rose wader feeds with its head upside down in the water, sweeping its bill from side to side and straining the shrimp and the green scum through fine combs inside it. Flocks feed, rest, and move together, and do everything in unison: thousands of birds turning their heads one way, or rising together in a pink cloud. They are shy and will not let people approach on foot, but they ignore herds.

Life Cycle

In a long-lasting flood they breed on the pan itself, building mounds of mud a hand high with a hollow on top for a single egg, crowded together in a colony. The grey chick leaves the mound within days to join a creche of young. If the water dries too soon the colony is abandoned. Rose waders live thirty years or more.

Uses and Dangers

The kindreds take their eggs from the mound colonies and sometimes the birds themselves, and their pink feathers are worn and traded. They do no harm.

Lore and Belief

When the waders come, the word goes round the camps that the year is good, and kindreds who have not met for years pitch beside one another on the Long Pan's edge. The kindreds say the birds are pink because the pan blushes, and the pan blushes because the storm remembered it. Some say the waders spend the dry years on a sea nobody has seen, and that they will lead a kindred there one day. Nobody has followed them.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Animals