flamingo by ernesto enkerlin

Flamingos

What do flamingos look like?

Nearly everyone knows what flamingos look like ---pink birds with long legs. You can see them at just about every zoo. You can find them in storybooks. Alice uses flamingos as croquet mallets in Through the Looking Glass (by Lewis Carroll). Images of flamingos, standing under palm trees, appear in paperweights and snow globes. Plastic flamingos make colorful lawn ornaments!! But did you know that some flamingos live high up in the Andes Mountains of South America? Flamingos can swim, and flamingos can fly.

Ornithologists (scientists who sturdy birds) spent many years arguing whether flamingos are more like ducks, or more like storks, until they decided that flamingos belong in a group by themselves.

There are 5 species of flamingos that occur throughout the world. The greater flamingo is as tall as a grown-up person is. The lesser flamingo is as tall as a first-grader.

Where do flamingos live?
Why are flamingos pink?
What do flamingos eat?
How do flamingos live?
Flamingo Conservation
References

Species	Scientific Name	Georgrahpic Range
`Caribbean flamingo (also known as American, Cuban, rosy, or West Indian)`	`Phoenicopterus ruber ruber`	`widespread in Caribbean`
`Greater flamingo (also known as European)`	`Phoenicopterus ruber roseus`	`Europe, Asia, and Africa`
`Chilean`	`Phoenicopterus chilensis`	`temperate South America`
`Lesser flamingo (also known as African)`	`Phoeniconaias minor`	`Africa and India`
`Andean`	`Phoenicoparrus andinus`	`Andes mountains of South America`
`James`	`Phoenicoparrus jamesi`	`Andes mountains of South America`

Where do flamingos live?

Flamingos live in lagoons, or lakes, where there is lots of mud and water. Flamingos use a variety of habitats: mangrove swamps, tidal flats, and sandy islands in the intertidal zone. The depth of the water is especially important not only for feeding but for nesting. Lakes may be far inland or near the sea.

Why are flamingos pink?

Feather color varies with species, ranging from pale pink to crimson or vermilion. Caribbean flamingos have the brightest coloration: crimson or vermilion. The Chilean flamingo is pale pink.

A flamingo's pink or reddish feather color comes from its diet, which is high in alpha and beta-carotene. People eat beta-carotene when they eat carrots.

What do flamingos eat?

The typical flamingo diet consists of diatoms, seeds, blue-green alage, crustaceans, and mollusks they filter out of the water. Using their long legs and partially webbed feet, flamingos will stamp on the muddy bottom of lagoons to mix the food particles with the water. Different species of flamingo have slightly different shaped bills; the different shapes helping it obtain slightly different types of food. Flamingos drink fresh water.

feeding flamingo by mwilkinson

How do they get the food out of the water?

Flamingos use their large beaks to filter small food items from the water. A flamingo lowers its head into the water, upside-down. It moves its head from side to side, collecting the food/water mixture. The spiny, piston-like tongue acts to pump the water mixture past the toothlike ridges on the outside of the beak and the lamellae, or finger-like projections, inside the beak. The lamellae act as strainers to remove the food particles from the water.

How do flamingos live?

Flamingos live in large groups all year long called colonies. Tens of thousands of flamingos can live in one colony! Within a colony, flamingos breed in pairs. Every pair of flamingos does not breed every year, however. Breeding

Flamingos are able to reproduce by the age of about six. There is no specific season associated with breeding, but it seems to be correlated with rain. Nest building may depend on rainfall and its effect on food supply.

When they are ready to lay their breed, birds will form pairs. Within the whole colony, groups of birds will be engaged in courtship displays -, a predictable sequence of displays including marching and head turning, calling and preening. Several hundred to several thousand flamingos are all doing the same behaviors at the same time. This helps to synchronize breeding within the colony, so that most of the birds are laying eggs or raising young at the same time.

Nesting

Every flamingo does not nest every year. When they do nest, they typically lay one large, white egg. The nest is built of mud, small stones, and feathers on the ground and is in the shape of a volcano. Mounds can be as high as 30 cm (12 in.). It can take a pair of flamingos up to six weeks to build their nest. Both parents will take turns incubating the egg for 26 to 31 days.

Newly hatched chicks have gray or white down feathers, a straight red bill, and plump, swollen red or pink legs. In these large colonies, parents can recognize their own chicks by their vocalizations (voice). The parents will only care for their own chicks. When it is about 4 to 7 days old, the chick will fledge (leave the nest). All the fledglings from the colony and a few adult birds will group together, forming a crche. The crche is like a big nursery school for the young flamingos. Within about three years the chicks will turn from gray to pink.

What do nestling flamingos eat?

Parent flamingos do not regurgitate food for their young the way most birds do. They feed their nestling a liquid substance called 'crop milk', a secretion of the upper digestive tract stimulated by the hormone prolactin. Crop milk is dark red in color and very high in fat and protein and is produced by both male and female birds.

Conservation

Are flamingos endangered?

Not too long ago, in 1924, the James' flamingo was believed to be extinct. This species of flamingo lives in remote salt lagoons of the altiplano (high altitude region of the Andes Mountains in the region of northern Chile). It was rediscovered in 1957!

There are several official agencies that produce lists of endangered species, each agency having its own method of deciding conservation status. For example, no species of flamingo is listed as endangered under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Some species were thought to be threatened, but are now listed as near threatened. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) lists the Caribbean, greater, Chilean, Andean, and James' flamingos as in need of protection and considered to be threatened. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)/World Conservation Union lists the Andean and James' flamingos as species of concern and in need of legal protection.

In reality, all flamingo populations could undergo a rapid decline in their populations, since they live in large groups in concentrated numbers in fragile wetland habitats that could easily become polluted, fragmented (divided up into smaller usable pieces).

A flamingos worst enemy is man, who destroys the bird's habitat, directly by using the land for other purposes or indirectly by changing the natural processes that occur on that land (water depth, water quality, salinity).

References:

Brown, L. 1959. The Mystery of the Flamingos. Country Life Limited, London.
Gallet, E. 1950. Flamingos of the Camargue. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Kear, J. and N. Duplaix-Hall. 1975. Flamingos. T & A D Poyser. Berkhamsted
Ogilvie, Malcolm and Carol Ogilvie. Flamingos. Gloucester, England: Alan Sutton Publishing Ltd., 1986.
Yeates, G.K. 1950. Flamingo City. Charles Scribner's Sons, New York.
Books for Young Readers:
Arnold, Caroline. Flamingo. New York: Morrow Junior Books, 1991.
Burnie, David. Birds and How They Live. New York: Dorling Kindersley, Inc., 1992.
Carlstrom, Nancy White. Fish and Flamingo. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1992 (fiction).
Hirschi, Ron. What is a Bird? New York: Walker and Company, 1987.
Oppenheim, Joanne. Have You Seen Birds? New York: Scholastic Inc., 1986.
Pallotta, Jerry. The Bird Alphabet Book. Watertown, Massachusetts: Charlesbridge Publishing, 1986.
Troughton, Joanna. How the Birds Changed Their Feathers. A South American Folk-Tale. Second edition. New York: Blackie and Son Limited,
1986 (fiction).