Private Jet from Miami to Inagua

One bird is why most parties come. Inagua National Park runs to 287 square miles, close to half the island, and the colony of West Indian flamingos on the shallow lakes inside it is the largest breeding colony of them anywhere. The Bahamas National Trust has run the park since it was declared in 1965 and puts the count at around 70,000 birds. The flamingo is the national bird of the country, and this is the place that kept it at that number rather than a remnant of it. The lakes are well inland of the town, so seeing them is a vehicle and a warden and not a walk. Say when you send the dates that the birds are the point: it decides the hour you leave Miami and whether one day on the island is enough. Ground transport at the Inagua end is arranged with the flight.

The flamingos are photographed and the rest of the list is what turns a day into a week. The Bahamas tourism board counts some 140 native and migratory species here and calls the island the national birdwatching capital. Two of them are the reason serious birders make the trip at all: the Bahama parrot, which lives on only two islands in the whole country, and the Inagua woodstar, a hummingbird found nowhere else on earth. Herons, egrets, spoonbills and pelicans work the same shallow water as the flamingos. A birding party travels with optics rather than suitcases, and on a charter that is a weight question and not a bag count. Scopes, long lenses and tripods are declared when you book, per the baggage guidance.

Great Inagua is a salt island before it is anything else. Roughly 300,000 acres of evaporation ponds lie behind Matthew Town, one of the largest solar salt operations in North America, worked by sun and wind rather than by machinery. The two halves of the island are one system and not two. Brine shrimp live in the ponds, the flamingos feed on the shrimp, and the colour of the birds comes from exactly that. Tours of the works are arranged on the ground rather than with the flight.

The Great Inagua Lighthouse has stood on the point outside the town since 1870: a white masonry tower of 113 feet whose light carries about 17 miles. It was worked by hand, on kerosene, for more than a century. The climb is why it is on every list. From the gallery the salt basins and the lakes behind them lie out in one view, and on a clear day the eastern tip of Cuba stands off to the south west, about 55 miles away. It is the one thing on the island that needs no arranging at all, and it is minutes from where the aircraft parks.

Union Creek is an enclosed tidal creek of close to 5,000 acres on the north west shore, set aside as a reserve in the same wave of protection that created the national park. What happens in it is one of the longest running green turtle studies anywhere: the Bahamas National Trust with a university team out of Florida, going back to the 1970s. A great deal of what is known about how green turtles grow and where they travel was measured in this creek. Access runs through the Trust rather than on your own, so it is a thing to ask for when you send the dates.

Little Inagua lies about five miles north east across the channel: 30 square miles with nothing on it at all, described as the largest uninhabited island in the Caribbean and a national park in its own right. A reef reaches as much as a mile off it, and that reef is the reason it stayed empty. Getting onto it is a boat day out of Matthew Town and a question of weather, which is the one part of this trip the aircraft cannot decide for you.

Where the trip is about fish rather than birds, the oceanside flats and the creeks inland hold bonefish. They run large here by Bahamian standards for one reason: almost nobody ever casts at them. This is a wilderness coast and not a lodge coast, so parties book bonefishing and flats access with a guide arranged in advance rather than found on arrival. Rods and gear travel with the aircraft, and anything outside the usual list goes to custom requests.

A private jet charter from Miami to Inagua also works as the far end of a longer route rather than a there and back. Once the aircraft has cleared into the Bahamas the cruising permit is in hand, so it can work its way north through Acklins, Crooked Island, Long Island, San Salvador and Cat Island. Down here that matters more than it does near Florida: the neighbours are an hour apart by air and days apart by anything else. That is what turns one island into island hopping or a wider Bahamas day. Staying on changes the baggage, not the route. Where the next cay has no paved runway the last leg runs on a seaplane or a helicopter, and freight that will not travel in the cabin goes separately as island logistics. Where a yacht is coming out to meet you, that is a yacht transfer, booked alongside the aircraft instead of chased down after you land. The full island guide sits on the Great Inagua destination page, the packaged version is the Inagua getaway day trip and the rest of the chain is on the Bahamas destinations page.