Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - Flamingos

Episode Date: October 6, 2025

Alex Schmidt and Katie Goldin explore why flamingos are secretly incredibly fascinating.Visit http://sifpod.fun/ for research sources and for this week's bonus episode.Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Flamingos, known for being pink, famous for being on one leg. Nobody thinks much about them, so let's have some fun. Let's find out why flamingos are secretly incredibly fascinating. Hey there, folks. Hey there, Cipelopods. Welcome to a whole new podcast episode, a podcast all about why being alive is more interesting than people think it is. My name is Alex Schmidt and I'm not alone. I'm joined by my co-host Katie Golden, Katie!

Yes. What is your relationship to or opinion of flamingos? I love them so much. They're such weirdos. Everything seems backwards and upside down. with them like their legs confused me their heads confuse me i think my first like interaction was with flamingos was like some wall art in my pediatrician's office when i was a kid of like a bunch of flamingos i was like i just assumed it was abstract art i was like these animals don't exist

and then we went to the zoom i'm like oh my god these animals exist they're real and they don't make any sense. I find their anatomy to be really funny and interesting. And yeah, I'm excited because I feel like I know some stuff about flamingos, but I am certainly not like a flamingo specific expert. So I'm ready to learn. Yeah. As folks know, I prep this show and also Katie has her wonderful podcast creature feature all about animals and science. So she may have some stuff she knows, but we'll see. I don't know. I also often will like learn, like do reasons. for an episode, learn a bunch of stuff, and then just it kind of gets put in like a filing cabinet somewhere deep in my brain that I don't really access. And I'm like, yeah, flamingas,

they're those weird guys with the beaks. Yeah, most of my brain lobes are for a snoopy archive of various strips and doodles and what spikes up to with the cactus. So it can be hard to hold at all. It's, yeah, it can be tough when you're trying to remember specific Garfield strips. and the biology of a flamingo. And sometimes, frankly, the flamingo's got to make space. Yeah, yeah. What about you? Alex, so what's your, how do you feel about flamingos?

In Illinois, I think we found them very exotic. And I don't think my zoo had them, but I've seen them at other zoos. And it tends to be what feels like a hundred of them in a tiny pond. Yes. And I knew even less about them than I thought when I started researching. like it turns out they fly for instance it's it's been really revealing researching this they're walking around is very dizzying and i yeah i don't know how they keep them from flying at zoos i would assume it's wing clipping um wing clipping yeah turns out so so wing clipping is they

don't chop off their wings they don't chop off any flesh they find the um flight feathers and then trim the flight feathers so they just can't really take off it's It's how not all people, but a lot of people, like, if they keep birds who fly, when I had parakeets, they came with their wings clipped. And I just never got it redone. So then, like, at a certain point, they're just, like, flying around the house. And it's like, oh, they'll come down when they feel like it. Yeah, and I basically learned how wing clipping works by researching this, because I didn't know it's just you trim the feathers so they don't escape. It's like a prison haircut or something.

Like, you're imprisoned by the haircut and you're okay. And it has to be done professionally because if you cut too far up the feather, you actually do get to living tissue because, like, part of the feather near the base does actually have blood and nerves in it. Sort of like trimming a dog's claws. Like, you want to be careful trimming too close. Better matter for than my haircut. Yeah, yeah.

Right. Like, some people argue against it just because behaviorally, like, well, but flying is cool for them. So it's like, sure. Behaviorally, it would be ideal if they were able to fly. But I guess you can't just have a bunch of flamingos flying around San Diego. And we'll talk a little later about that happening kind of lots of places. Fun. So it's exciting. Yes. And I guess fast programming notes, we're not going to cover lawn flamingos. Those are sort of their own topic, the plastic decorations. They're their own species. As far as internet factoids go, there's two ways of spelling the plural of this, either with or without an extra E toward the end, like an O-S-ending or an O-E-S-ending.

Most dictionaries I found said both are correct. And then there's also a factoid that one collective noun for flamingos is flamboyance. Yeah. That's sort of made up. The Smithsonian National Zoo says we also call Flamingo Group, say, flock. a colony, a stand, a Pats, like all those collective nouns are just stuff people kind of invented to have fun. It's not really a thing. I think it was one Victorian guy who wrote a bunch of this stuff down. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah. There's not more to it. We do use a murder

of crows, like not scientifically. But that's the one time I've heard it used by more people, even though I think that that's not usually used by biologists, by scientists, usually they use flock. But yeah, technically there's a bunch of individual words. I think like for peacocks, it's like an ostentation of peacocks. Right. Somebody just thinks that's fun. But yeah, a flamboyance of, I would, based on my experience at the zoo, I would call them a stink of flaming. They stinky.

I finally know why they smell so bad because I thought I was being a jerk at the Flamingo exhibit at not Brookfield Zoo where I saw a bunch of them and I was like, am I just being sensitive about their smell? No, they smell bad on purpose and we'll talk about why. They smell so bad for being a pink bird. They're very pretty, but they very stinky. I mean, it's a similar thing with the penguins. Like if you've ever been to a penguin colony, they're very cute. Yeah. They look like little gentle.

But gosh, are they stinky? I guess we call penguins and colony. I don't think I've ever heard of a flock of penguins. And I wonder if that's because they're flightless. Flock and colony are two words that we can just use for all sorts of bird groups. And then people use them more or less based on vibes. That's kind of it. Yeah, the vibe.

And we have so many facts about flamingos. And so let's get into them, starting with a quick set of fascinating numbers and statistics. This week that's in a segment called Pink SIF Pod Club I'm gonna keep on numbering at the Pink Sif Pod Club I'm counting stats and numbers on the world's podcast apps I'm gonna keep stats counted on the Pink Sif Pod Club Pink Sif Pod Club

Nice I don't even know what this song is and I was still bopping my head to it Good that's Chapel Rhone Pink Pony Club Thank you, Isaac F, for an oddly perfect song for this. I'm such an old, I'm an old, old millennial. I do like, I have. It's about West Hollywood in the gay scene, basically. I have listened to one Chappelle Rhone song, and I really liked it. So I really have that because I've listened to, what was it?

I don't even, oh man, I'm so old and bad at bad at music. But yeah. To me, her hit song Hot to Go is not very good, and her hit song, Good Luck Babe, is excellent. Good luck, babe. That's the one I love. I really like that one. And Pink Pony Club's good, too. But yeah, the Good Luck Babe, I cannot.

To me, it's kind of like, it's like Kate Bush has resurfaced, you know? Yeah, good comp. Yeah. Lots of numbers within takeaways this week, too. But the first number this week is five. Yes. Because there are flamingos on five of the world's continents. I get surprised sometimes when an animal is more cosmopolitan than I had assumed.

I would have thought that they would be just like, in one country. I don't know, maybe an island somewhere. And then it turns out they're all over. Yeah, I think there's also an American cultural implication that they're mostly from Miami. Right. But no, they're everywhere. It turns out they live in parts of Europe, Africa, Asia, and both Americas. Yes, they get around.

And in an endemic way. It's not like they were introduced there or something. I kind of had learned this about, like, ducks is they're freaking everywhere. They get everywhere. Of course, there's a lot of different species of ducks. They get around quite a bit, and it's surprising. I was like, how are these ducks getting around? And it's because they can fly pretty long distances without having to touch down.

I would assume we've got something similar going on with these flamingos. Like they can fly probably not as long as a duck, I'm going to guess, but they can at least do it enough that they get to other places or stop at an island and then go from that island to another continent, just pretty amazing. Flamingos are much better flyers than I expected. And another number there is a few hundred because there's a population of a few hundred of the Caribbean flamingo species in the Galapagos Islands. Amazing.

Several hundred miles west of mainland South America. They flew there. They're excellent flyers. Are you going to bring up the fact that some of them, there's like a population of them that live in a sort of acidic wetland? Yeah, yeah. Okay, great. I'll let you bring it up because I can't remember all the details.

So we'll talk about that later. But it's super cool. You guys will find it very exciting. Yeah, because they, I also thought they needed to be in like a cozy Miami type place where it's like nice. Right. With like a Mai Tai, yeah. But they can also be in very arid or dry or extremely salty or high altitude places. And we'll talk about their overall ruggedness later. But the other quick number about their global situation is six because there are six species of flamingos in the world. Yeah, this is also, this was also surprising to me because I'm just like,

you know, flamingo, they're pink. They got noodle necks, backwards legs, and they stick their heads in the water, I did not realize that there were multiple species of flamingos. Yeah, and they're all vaguely the same size and shape. There's some range to it, but there's six species in the world, and three of them live together, which is very cute. The Chilean flamingo, the Andean flamingo, and another one called James's Flamingo, named after a biologist last name James. I just love that there's like, you know, yeah, the Andean flamingo thing. And then you just have, and I'm James. I name these flingos after three James.

Right. It feels like it's a guy trying to promote a flamingo to you that he made at his house. And James. Don't forget James. And yeah, all three of those live in the southern part and the Pacific part of South America. including giant salt flats at very high altitudes that are you would think not flamingo places. I'm sure Alex is going to get into this in more detail, but it does seem like sometimes flamingos have the hardiness to be able to pick a very hostile spot to lay their eggs for their nesting sites,

and then the babies just have to kind of figure stuff out. But it turned, like even though it seems like kind of a jerk, move on the parents to be like, all right, here, like in these deadly salt flats is where you will be born. It ends up being protective for the eggs and for the hatchlings because nothing wants to be there. Exactly. Yeah, like they look like such pink curly cue, goofy birds. Goofuses. But they basically defend themselves by living in very flat, often salty and difficult places where they could see any predator coming. Yeah. And then they're excellent flyers. They just fly away. Like it's a very good system. Yeah. And these three in southern part of South America,

they are Simpatrick. Simpatrick is a technical term for living in the same habitat, maybe sharing, breeding or feeding locations. So half the flamingo species do that there. Then in parts of Africa and southern Mediterranean Europe and Southwest Asia, there's the greater flamingo. And then in parts of sub-Saharan Africa and parts of India, there's the lesser flamingo. Those are basically named after being bigger and smaller than each other. And then the sixth flamingo species is the Caribbean flamingo, also known as the American flamingo. That's everywhere from Cuba to Central America to the northern part of South America, Galapagos Islands. And we'll talk about Florida later.

If you've seen a flamingo hanging out in Florida, it's probably a Caribbean flamingo visiting part-time. Just it's their vacation area. Almost. Yeah, it's sort of like many Americans going to Florida. I don't know. I swing through. I see Disney. I'm out.

Yeah. Yes. But that range gets us further into their toughness because takeaway number one. Flamingos are surprisingly resistant to heat, salt, mud, and feces. That last one threw me a little bit. I got to admit. This part of the stink, we mentioned. Yes.

They like to be covered in their own feces a bit. This is a bird thing. Yep. It is a bird thing turns out. But yeah, there's such pink curly cues and also some of the most rugged birds in the world. It's amazing. It's really interesting because a lot of their toughness is like comparable to a vulture, which we're like when we, when a vulture poops on itself for a variety of cool reasons,

we're like, yeah, that sounds like a vulture thing to do. Like they're weird, they're bald, they've got their heads shoved and carry in. We kind of expected of them. But then we've got the Barbie bird doing it as well. Right. In my head, it's such a Miami Barbie bird that is just in a little convertible cruising down a road in Miami. I don't know a lot about Miami. Right.

But no, it's even, you know, every wild animal is tough, but these are surprisingly tough birds. Humans can be so egocentric about our culture where we're like, well, it's pink. So it's got to be kind of girly, right? And act girly because it's pink. And also like it's got these long legs. So it's very barbie-coated, so we're like, this thing must be really fussy and prissy, and it's like, no. Nope. Now, they do do-do on themselves for practical reasons.

Yeah, and lots of key sources here. They're bird guides from Oxford University Press and from National Geographic. Also, science writing by Pai'Al Mota for The Guardian, Joshua Learn Wrap for Discover Magazine, and Lorraine Bosenwa for J-Store Daily. Because again, six species of flamingos, according to one biologist interviewed by Atlas Obscira, all of the flamingo species are so adaptable and so hardy. They are almost, quote, bomb-proof, is the way he put it, which is obviously an exaggeration. These are the cockroaches of the bird world. Yeah, we could nuke them from orbit or whatever. Alex is saying we can nuke flamingos.

So that's a grim comfort. Yeah, first the whales and then, yeah. Yeah. So that's not true, but there's a lot of examples of them withstanding incredible heat and salt. The biggest example is the lesser flamingos, especially in the Great Rift Valley of Africa, where I didn't know this, but there's some particularly saline and salty lakes. Yeah. Especially one called Lake Natron. Lake Natron is heated and formed by volcanic geysers, and it's extremely salty.

it also reaches overall water temperatures of 60 Celsius, which is about 140 Fahrenheit. Yeah, like, what's the, I'm going to look up what the average hot tub temperature is. Oh, yeah, good question. Yeah, I didn't really look at that. It's like 104 degrees Fahrenheit or 40 degrees Celsius. So, you know, not like 140 degrees Fahrenheit. A hot tub also, we need to get in and out of. of lesser flamingos just stand around in this.

Their legs are covered in very thick and tough skin that protects them from the heat and also the salt. Apparently, most other species, their legs would be too encrusted with salt to move well or they would develop caustic burns from the situation of it. Yeah. And the flamingos are so heat-resistant, they've been observed drinking water straight from the geysers,

which is boiling water. My God. They must have pretty tough throw. than like esophagus is. Yeah, it turns out they have that. And then also their heads are set up with glands that let them filter out the excess salt from the water. And it comes out their nostrils, which is gross and also cool. They cry out their nose, salty tears out of their nose.

So a lot of animals who can deal with really salty waters, for instance, sea turtles, they cry a lot of salt out of their eyes. so you'll see a sea turtle and it looks like it's sobbing and it's not sad it's just like it's just squeezing salt water out of its eyes that's a similar thing you see with like crocodiles and alligators right like if they have tears it's excreting salt water uh so next time you cry and you don't you don't want to cop up to it just be like no no no i'm excreting excess saline from my body uh because a lot of animals do it But through the nostrils is pretty funky for the flamingos. Like a snot exhaust. Yeah.

Great. Really good. Cool. Yeah. That's wild about sea turtles. I'm glad I will know not to be sad for them. Don't be sad. That's such a heartbreaking concept if they were sad.

They'll try to make you feel sad so you recycle or whatever. Like, look, here's a crying sea turtle. You should recycle. No, the sea turtle feels nothing. I just start putting the soda six-pack holders on. them? Like, stop whiting. I'm going to start drinking from more plastic straws because these

sea turtles don't have feelings. And yeah, we mentioned the giant salt flats, especially one in Bolivia called the Salar de Uiuni. The Salar de Ui uni, it oddly came up on a passive about batteries because humans are mining lithium. They're also

having trouble doing that because it's so dry, so arid, so broadly hostile to life. But all three South American flamingo species are so comfortable with it. They gather there every November to breed. Yeah. Most other life except some insects, algae, crustaceans can't hang out there. And flamingos are like, yeah, whatever, it's cool.

And this is where I party. If, like, for humans, we would, instead of going out to bars to meet people, I don't know that. I don't think anyone does that anymore. I think it's all online. But, you know, instead of going online or going to bars, we like, go to an act. volcano. And we're like, this is it. This sets the vibes in the mood. Right. It's where I'm most comfortable. You're just melting like Anakin, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. And flamingos pretty much always live in saltwater or in brackish waters, which is somewhat salty water. And that also means, we'll talk in the next takeaway about what they eat, but they get to eat a lot of algae, crustaceans, insects that other animals are just not going out and getting because it's such a hostile place. Right. I also said they're comfortable with mud and with feces. They love mud and feces. That's their favorite two things.

Yeah, and I'd never seen a flamingo nest. Because in that zoo exhibit, it's just a pretty little pond and they all stand next to each other. Like they're at a concert or something. And do the head thing where it's like, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Yeah. It's really cool. A bunch of little radars like, did-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-de-dee. Real tennis crowd vibes.

Yeah, yeah. Scanning, scatting. When flamingos make a nest, they make a giant pile of mud to put one egg in sort of a top of. Yeah. It's very just getting sloppy like a hippo to me. Yeah. Yeah. They are not neat birds.

I mean, they're neat birds, but they're not neat birds. Yeah, like pig pen from peanuts or something, you know? Yeah. He's neat in his spirit. Yeah. The grossest part is that they dump their own urine and poop all over. their own legs. Yeah.

And apparently this is a behavior among some birds, not just flamingos, it's called Eurohydrosis. Eurohydrosis. Where they cool themselves down by pooping and peeing on their own legs and leaving it there. Evaporative cooling, dog. Yeah. Look, if you don't sweat like a human being, you got to have a different way of evaporative cooling.

So we squeeze saline out of our pores onto our skin. And that cools us down because when it evaporates, the thermodynamic process of evaporation basically leeches heat from your body to energize the water to vaporize. So we do it, but we don't use poop. Some birds use poop. I know vultures do it. I'm trying to think of other birds that do it. Apparently storks.

Some storks do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, some seabirds. So when you have a lot of surface area, you have a lot of evaporation area where you have a lot of blood circulating through it. And so if you can have evaporative cooling on the place where you have a lot of surface area, then it's great because it cools down the blood that's going through out the rest of your body as well. It's so clever. And then to many human sensibilities where like get that poop off of you.

Yeah, well. That toughness also, the person who called them bomb proof was, exaggerating, and we're seeing that in some ways they're handling climate change well, but most ways not. Because one odd example is around the Indian city of Mumbai, the flamingo population has tripled in the last few years, and we think it's because increased pollution in Mumbai increased the algae supply, which the flamingos eat. Right.

On the other hand, flamingos in those East African lakes could lose their food supply if rainfalls increase. And either way, flamingos do not love hurricanes. Yeah. So as hurricanes have intensified, especially in a place like Florida, we'll link two different stories where Florida zoos put their flamingos into bathrooms or offices to shelter and wait out major hurricanes. The Miami Metro Zoo did that in 2016 for Hurricane Andrew, and Bush Gardens in Tampa did

that 2017 for Hurricane Irma. I love this photo of the flamingos in the bathroom with a bunch of hay on the floor because this is exactly like every bridesmaid's Hindu I've ever been to because like them all huddling together in like a filthy bathroom probably like trying to fix each other's bras and like talking about stuff and just being kind of disoriented and drunk like this is just a this is a this is a Bachelorette party that I'm looking at. Now that we're all together without the bride, do any of us like Lormand? Do any of us like him? No. I was trying to use a name no one has. I don't want to insult him.

She could do so much better. I know, right? So much better. Yeah, anybody but Lourman. He's weird. So, yeah, they're both incredibly tough and like the rest of species we need to take care of the climate. Yeah. And the next astounding maneuver they do is takeaway number two.

Flamingos catch their food and turn themselves pink by generating aquatic mouth tornadoes. Ooh, mouth tornadoes. I love that. Me too. And the insides of their mouths are so weird. Like, it turns out. You take, this happens over and over again. You take a pretty innocuous animal, a penguin. a sea turtle, a flamingo. You look in their mouths and then you get like a Boschian horror, the likes of which you cannot fathom.

Right, like you just think it's going to be a bird beak that snap stuff up. Yeah. You would think. Like what else does it need to be? It's a whole bunch of things. It's a lot. Right. Like I've seen the inside of like, you know, a Robin's mouth and things look pretty okay in there.

I'm like, yeah, it's like a mouth. But, yeah, I don't expect the unholy horror inside of a flamingo mouth system that seems to be like an invertebrate torture chamber. Also, I've seen the inside of a European robin's mouth a lot because of your bird's rights activism. It really keeps talking. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and KeySource here, there's a study from May of 2025 published in proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences that found some extra. new stuff about this. There's also Smithsonian Magazine, Popular Science, Ars Technica, writing about other

findings with it. The various flamingo species eat lots of stuff in water, algae and plant seeds, insects, crustaceans. And folks might know an element of this, which is that the pigment in flamingo's food turns their feathers a pinkish color. That's why they're that shade. Yeah. And all the flamingo species, they eat at least one pigmented thing.

For example, those lesser flamingos in those salty African lakes eat a kind of red algae called arthrospera. There's other flamingo species that eat brine shrimp that have pigments and also eat pigments and stuff. So just by eating reddish things, that leads to a light red, a pink, in their feathers. Yes. This also means flamingo babies start out with gray feathers, which is very cute. We'll link flamingo chicks.

They're very fluffy and cute, yes. They also apparently can't walk initially. So in their first few days of life, they scoot by lifting their head and wings all at once. Which is really sweet. What starts to turn the baby's pink is crop milk. Hmm. Yeah. This came up on the pastiff about pigeons.

There's only a couple bird species that do this. Yeah. Both the male and female flamingo have an organ inside their throats called the crop. And the crop makes a wet substance that is not dairy milk, but it's sweet. sort of a similar liquid in terms of the purpose. It has a bunch of nutrients in it. And Flamingo Crop Milk is a bright red color because of all the pigments and the parents. And then that starts to turn the baby pink.

It looks like they're vomiting blood onto their baby. I don't know how I was still put it. It looks like they're like here baby and then like vomiting blood onto them as parental care. This is the least fancy bird in real life. And then our picture of it is so, oh, the flamingo. It's very metal. This bird is super metal. It, like, vomits what looks like blood onto their babies.

They poop on their legs for air conditioning. They can survive ridiculous death ponds. It's great. It's like if the movie Legally Blonde was super gory or something. Yeah, yeah. It's a very bright red color. And that's probably because of the carotenoids from all the. shrimp they're eating that's like kind of concentrated into this nutritive shake they make inside

of their throats for the baby that probably smells like Satan's butt. Yeah, almost definitely. And then on top of that process turning themselves pink, they also eat in a way that is sort of like baleen whales that filter feed, but it's not the same. This is weird, yeah. But it's sort of like that. and then also they generate a vacuum suction type thing in the water. Yeah, like if you look, because their heads are upside down.

Right. Researchers are like, that's interesting that they like eat upside down. They are like, oh, so I guess maybe they're using their beaks as kind of like a shovel, right? Because they turn their heads upside down and now you've got kind of like a shovel thing. It's not quite that. It's a lot. There's more weird physics involved in why they're upside down. Right.

Yeah, they just lean down and are upside down in the water. And then on the sides of their beaks, there's sort of filter-type structures. It's not quite like a humpback whale or something, but it catches prey and lets the water and the sediment through. Yeah. And then also in 2025, a team at UC Berkeley led by Victor Ortega Jimenez, they studied a group of Chile and flamingos at U.S. zoos. and they were able to put tiny cameras outside transparent underwater tanks to film a flamingo's beak at 500 frames per second, and they found it generates a set of different vortex-type currents

that I called mouth tornadoes. Yes. They do one snapping motion to make a current that disturbs all the sediment and the hidden prey in it, and then a second pulsing movement with their beak to then suction everything they disturbed into their mouth and then a final tongue motion that pushes the water and the silt back out of their beak

and traps only the food. It's a death tornado in their mouths. Yeah, it's sort of like the video game character Kirby. Yeah. But Wilder, yeah. They're just kind of finding an area that is rich in this. And instead of like, sort of like, scooping up individual prey items or something,

they're just like creating this siphon, vortex thing that like these poor little guys stand no chance in escaping. Yeah, truly powerful hunting across this like brackish shallow ecosystem. Yeah, yeah. Their beaks also have a version of erectile tissue to help form and hold the exact shape they want for this. And then also their feet to a limited extent disturb the sediment under them in a helpful way.

And in 2018, there were ornithologists. studying a different species called Wilson's Fala Rope, which is a different bird. And they found that Wilson's Fala Rope just follows flamingos around because the footsteps and the beak stuff and all of that just disturbs everything so much that Wilson's Fala Rope can feast on the bits of flamingo misses. That's so interesting. Yeah, you do see that where you have one animal that's like a wrecking ball and then stirs up all this food and then these weird little followers go around.

I'm like, all right, you're not going to eat that? I'm going to eat that. Yeah, it's so cool. And then we have yet another anatomy thing that's also famous about flamingos, which is takeaway number three. Flamingos are so comfortable standing on one leg. The leg joints of a dead flamingo settle into that posture. Wow, that's so cool.

Yeah, someone tried this with a cadet. cadaver of a flamingo. Yeah. And found that the cadaver was more comfortable on one leg than two. When the legs are locked in that position, the muscles are actually at rest. Yeah, on one leg specifically. Yeah. Also, just a quick note, their knees are not backwards. That is their ankle joint. Their knees, you can't, they're really high up. This is true of all birds. All birds have, quote, unquote, backwards knees.

that's not actually their knee joint it's the ankle joint which for us goes in the same direction like if you move your foot you notice your ankle goes backwards so just imagine if you sort of like scooched everything up your leg and your knee was like closer to your

butt and your ankle was where your knee is that's how a bird is I was so surprised by this flamingos were by door into learning that about any birds yeah yeah their knee is way hidden up in the little bit there and a tiny upper leg bone. Yeah.

Because they can bend their, because that part of the leg does bend in the same direction as like our knees do. But we think of that almost as their hip joint, but no, that's like their knee. Yes, huge surprise. Yeah. Like he said, their legs flex and bends sort of like ours. It's just the proportions are way different. There's a hip and a knee that to our eye appears to be tucked up in their midsection almost.

It's just under feathers, though. And then they have a very long, basically what would be our lower leg. And then a very, very long what would be our metatarsals in the foot, like between the ankle and the toes. This is actually more or less what how horse legs work, where, except they're kind of ending on like for horses, since they're a odd toad ungulate, they're ending on one toe. You notice further up their leg is the actual knee. Cool. Yeah, we're so human-centric about legs. Yeah. We're like, surely everybody's like me, but no, it's all just under some muscle or feathers or fur and different.

Yeah, but we also, we do generally, like most terrestrial animals, I should say terrestrial vertebrates do generally have all of the joints, the same joints. They just are arranged in fun and wacky ways. Flamingos, it turns out, are not the only bird that likes to stand on one leg, but it Apparently, there have been a few different theories about why they do it. And one involved temperature control. Like people thought, maybe they're tucking one leg so that they can adjust how much exposed leg is releasing heat. It's sort of like how some cats will loaf, you know, sort of thing. Yeah. Now we don't think that's the leading theory because there's a 2017 study by professors Lena Ting of Emory University and Jung Hui Chang of Georgia Tech.

They wanted to study Flamingo babies and how they balance on one leg because they could put those babies on a machine called a force plate, which is, it's like just a metal plate. What are they Anakin Skywalker? What do you mean? They're putting these babies on a force plate. What's happening to these babies? Just the rest of the show is about medicloreans. That's it. So it's basically a really advanced bathroom scale.

Oh, okay. That also lets you see how the thing on it is wobbling and moving and where exactly the weight is going in tiny increments. It doesn't just gather a weight or a mass. That's a lot less menacing than it sounded, Alex. Right. The name sounds like exactly Jedi stuff or combat, but it's just a cute. We'll have pictures linked from NPR and from The Conversation.com. They're just being cute on a little scale.

Nice. They found two surprising things. One is that the babies wobbled the least on one leg versus two, but also that they wobbled even less as they started to fall asleep. Hmm. Sounds like stability. Yeah, it's like truly restful for them to be that way, both anatomically and neurologically. And then as they did this experiment, they learned they had an opportunity, which is that one of the zoos they were working with had a deceased adult flamingo. Nice.

Got to play with its body. Hooray. Like they put a bunch of pins in the body and played with it. Yeah. Woo! Because it's ethical if it's already deceased, naturally. Like, I don't think its family knows what's going to happen there. So, yeah, they had a closed casket funeral.

They didn't realize it had a plastic lawn ornament in there instead. You know, it's all fine. It's all good. No one was hurt emotionally or physically. And, yeah, and here's them describing their experiments with basically propping up and manipulating the joints of the flamingo cadaver. Quote, if you hold the cadaver up by one leg like a lollipop at just the right angle. That's exactly how I would describe a dead flamingo cadaver that I'm propping up as a lollipop, yes. A lollip.

Right, yeah, those are the words I would use. If you hold it up like a lullipop at just the right angle, it palpian. It passively adopts a body configuration that looks like a flamingo standing on one leg. Like an umbrella, man. Like, you know. Yeah. And they say that when they tilted the body forward and backward by up to 45 degrees, the body configuration was stable with the knee keeping a right angle.

And again, the knee is tucked up in the body. So a right angle is the rest of the leg descending straight down like you think of. And then quoting NPR here. the bird was not able to maintain this kind of passive balancing on two legs. As Ting explained when the leg unfolded, the joint, quote, sort of collapsed from its more stable position balanced on one leg and these nested quotes. Yeah, because we're just so used to needing to have both legs involved in balance. But we're not, when you think about human balance, right, bipedal balance,

we're not just on two legs and then we're just standing. are T-posing the whole time, right? Like, we're shifting our weight from leg to leg. Yeah. There's a lot of negotiation in terms of, like, making sure that we're balanced. So actually having, balancing on two legs, there's a lot of complicated calculations are brain and proprioception, you know, muscles are making all the time. So I guess, like, if you had a different system where you didn't need to do that, right,

you just had a stick that you could balance on, that could be a different way of doing that so you don't have the problem of having to your muscles and everything having to calculate. You just like lock it in place and then you don't, your body doesn't have to do anything to stay balanced. That seems to be their deal. Yeah, over millions of years, their anatomy and their minds gotten used to it. It's simply the least energy and thought necessary to stand on one. leg if you're a flamingo.

Right. And then to humans, it's surprising because we're that way with two legs. Right, right. I mean, we don't, but we can't sleep on our legs. Like, if we try to take a little nap while standing, we do collapse. Because, like, flamingos do sleep while standing up. Yeah, on one leg most often. And other birds do also, like, sometimes sleep on one leg.

Usually they're perched on something, and they will sleep standing. There are mammals, of course, who also sleep standing on their legs. But, like, yeah, for human beings, we can't do that. We just fall over. Yeah, we've just each gotten used to very different things as species. Yeah. Yeah, so it's not that flamingos are trying to regulate temperatures so much or avoid pests or something. They just stand on one leg because it's the most comfortable and the least

energy and thought like a lawn ornament i mean this is why the lawn ornament evolved from the flamingo right right that's when darwin went to the galapagos and saw the lawn ornaments there and the variety of them right he said surely yeah like there are ones with little cowboy hats there are Halloween version ones there's a lot of variety like a sort of a lot of evolutionary pressures like some of them look like Elvis. Yeah. Folks, we have more to share about flamingos, but that was three takeaways and a lot of numbers. Let's take a quick break and relax on one leg, and then we'll get back into flamingos.

Folks, we're back, and these last few takeaways bring us to the United States. Starting with takeaway number four, 1800s humans wiped out the flamingos in Florida, and we're not quite sure how flamingos returned. We're so, we loved doing that, didn't we, just like, killing a lot of birds. We were like, passenger pigeons, get out of here. Flamingos don't need them. Bison, I know those aren't birds.

but they got wings. When I remembered the passenger pigeon story where it was such a massive amount of birds that would cover the sky and we still wiped out that species, it helped me understand how 1800s, humans who were colonizers, wiped out the flamingos in Florida. We were committed, committed to the bit

of wiping birds out. We were like, oh, there's so many birds. Like, it blots out the sky. They're so populated. We'll see about that. See about that. Yeah, it turns out flamingos do make some sense as a wildlife symbol of Florida, but before the Colombian exchange, there was a stable permanent population of Caribbean flamingos in Florida,

and today they've reintroduced themselves as part-time residents. Right. In between, we extirpated them. Retirees. And key sources here are digital resources from PBS, and also a feature for Atlas Obsgirate by writer Jessica Lee Hester, and they cite a lot of things from a 2018 study of flamingos in Florida over time. Because there's a lot of records of essentially white birders in the 1700s and 1800s searching for flamingos in Florida and being surprised and concerned that they can't find

any. Yeah. Well, that's what happens when a lot of you shoot them. I'm just saying. Truly, it turns out before the Colombian exchange, there were flocks of 500 or 1,000 or even up to around 2,500 individuals in Florida. And then in 1832, maybe the most famous bird or John J. Audubon. Oh, yeah, that guy. He goes to the Florida Keys looking for flamingos specifically and is sad to not find any, 1832. Yeah. And it's because people hunted too many of them for their plumes and their meat and their skin, apparently. Should I thought about that before having your flamingo sandwiches and your flamingo skin boots.

Right. It's like that I think he should leave meme of we're all trying to find the guy who did this. But he's covered in pink feathers. Covered in pink feathers. Yeah. A suit made out of pink feathers. A pair of like flamingo legs stuck in his hat. A guy in a Vegas showgirl outfit of flambingo stuff.

Yeah. And yeah. And then for the rest of the. 1800s ornithologists would either try to find them or be thrilled to find a couple. And by the early 1900s, rich Americans were booking voyages and trips to the Caribbean to see flamingos because you could not find them in Florida, let alone the rest of the U.S. And then we killed them there. I'm joking.

I'm joking. Of course. We would never. We would, but we didn't. We just didn't happen to you. We just didn't have the time between that and other two. tourist destinations. Yeah, like, apparently in 1920, especially National Geographic and the Miami newspaper combined

on a trip to the Bahamas to see flamingos, and it was national news. Like, Americans getting to see flamingos, cool. Amazing. Because we'd extirpated them from Florida. Extrapation is when you make them extinct in one place. They're not there anymore. Right. And then we don't know exactly how, but around the 1950s, based on public records and

letters, there's a spike in citizen reports of flamingo sightings. That's continued to this day. And according to Zoo Miami, Conservation Ecologist Stephen Whitfield, quote, we do sort of have flamingos, but we don't have the resident breeding population that we used to. Individuals fly in from the Bahamas or Cuba, forage a little while and leave, end quote. Right. I mean, I wonder why they would feel unwelcome in Miami. Yeah, you know, every American thing. Yeah. But yeah, like the Bahamas and Cuba especially are hotbeds of the Caribbean Flamingo.

And a lot of especially American sources will call this species the American Flamingo. And the Americas are a place, you know, but it's really more of a Caribbean animal, that species. Yeah, I mean, America is not just America. There's also America. Right. South America and Central. America. At two whole continents, it turns out, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, I love that about them, that they're like, if you kill us all off, we'll only come back stronger and poop on our legs more. Yes. And, yeah, this week's bonus show is all about some celebrity escaped flamingos elsewhere in the United States. Ooh, exciting. But speaking of flaming and doing their thing, we have one last takeaway number five. Flamingos are such committed parents.

They form everything from group daycares to same-sex partnerships for parenting. Alex, I hope you aren't planning on having this podcast air anywhere in Florida. Sorry, Florida listeners. I'm sorry what's happening for you. I specifically picked this topic to trap Ron DeSantis. I want to ruin his day. He has to admit the flamingos are gay sometimes, and that's fine. And some of them might be, like, romantically and sexually attracted to each other,

but it seems like on top of that, there are also cases of flamingos working together as same-sex parenting partnerships, whether or not they were sexually attracted. Because they're just very committed to parenting. Right. It takes a village, and sometimes it takes the village people, like raising, children is a whole thing. And like, honestly, with homophobia, we're so shooting ourselves in the foot where it's like, like, oh, no, oh, please, like, let's not have more people helping to parent children. That's bad somehow when we have a bunch of kids that need parents. It should be a

gay person on their own. Yeah. Stop it. It's just, just shooting ourselves with the foot. No, the kids should stay in foster care for the rest of their lives, like, uh, fill up those orphanages. We can't, we can't have, uh, flamingo parents. Yeah. No, it's, it's, it's ridiculous. But it's also, I mean, this is a pretty common thing with colony animals where you have aloe parenting. That's like the evolutionary biology term for individuals who are not directly your parents helping to raise. So, cool. It's really, it is very cool. It's like you actually, you see this like in bats. You see this in species from mammals to birds. And so flamingos have been documented doing a lot of different styles and approaches to parenting. It seems like the one unifying thing is

flamingos are committed to raising children. Yeah. It's not like some other species where they just move on after it hatches or it's born. And yeah, key sources for this are a few pieces from the Guardian and also coverage of a 2018 flamingo study by Atlas Obscura. We mentioned, that either sex of flamingo can make crop milk to feed their baby. Pigeons do that too. Also, when flamingos nest, both parents take turns incubating that one egg. And then in some specific zoo captivity situations, we've observed pairs of male flamingos tackling child rearing together. Amazing. Just last year, there were two big examples. There's a zoo in Devon in England where two Chilean flamingos reared a chick who were both male. And the zoosberg

curator said they aren't sure why, but it's likely two other flamingos abandon an egg. And when flamingos see an abandoned egg, they tend to step up to try to raise it. This does remind me a lot of penguin behavior because penguins, they have the colony structure. And you do have cases where two male penguins will just be like, oh, there's an egg. That doesn't have parents. Yeah. We'll take care of it. Or like a rock, an egg-shaped rock that they're like, this is my big.

baby now. And all that happened also at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park in 2024. Amazing. Apparently there's two lesser flamingos who became dads together, and they might also be attracted to each other sexually. Right. They were seen practicing with a fake egg together, like a rock. Right. And then they proceeded to incubate and hatch another flamingo's egg and raise it together. And this also fits the broad practice of flamingo. being monogamous. Yes.

They mate for life and only find a new mate if they're mate passes. And they remain hands-on parents. And then also they parents as a community. Apparently when a flamingo baby is able to walk and swim, they will join a group arrangement called a crash where a group of flamingos raises not just their biological kids, but other kids. Yeah, this is a big shock to people who only have heard the word crush playing Baldersgate it is it is a biological term or sidemeyer's alpha centauri you can build that at your bases

children's crush sure yeah so on top of those two games flamingos and a lot of other bird species too it's it's not a flamingo specific word yeah i mean it sounds like these lesser flamingos are actually more flamingos when it comes to parenting the salt and heat resistance in East Africa and also this parenting, I got really on board with lesser flamingos researching this. And they're only a little smaller. They're not drastically smaller than the others. We're very mean with naming birds where it's like if one's a little smaller. It's like, I hear the lesser flamingo. It's like, but on what dimension? Size is not the only thing that matters. Have you seen the flamingo's heart? The strength of their

character. Was that Teddy Roosevelt's speech? Do not call the flamingo lesser who is in the arena, covered in the blood and the sweat, challenging others. I'm pretty sure that is exactly what he said about flamingos. Folks, that's the main episode. for this week. Welcome to the outro, with fun features for you, such as help remembering this episode, with a run back through the big takeaways. Takeaway number one,

flamingos are surprisingly resistant to heat, salt, mud, and feces. Takeaway number two, flamingos catch their food and turn themselves pink by generating aquatic mouth tornadoes. Takeaway number three, flamingos are so comfortable standing on one leg, the leg joints of a dead flamingo settle into that posture. They can borderline stand on one leg after they die. Takeaway number four, 1800s humans wiped out Florida's flamingos, and we're not quite sure how flamingos returned. Takeaway number five, flamingos are such committed parents. They form everything from group crushes to same-sex partnerships for child rearing. And then on top of those five takeaways, a ton of numbers before and during that,

about everything from the temperatures flamingos can withstand to the global spread of their species to which species live and hang out together. Those are the takeaways. Also, I said that's the main episode, because there's more secretly incredibly fascinating stuff available to you right now. support this show at maximum fun.org. Members are the reason this podcast exists, so members get a bonus show every week where we explore one obviously incredibly fascinating story related to the main episode. This week's bonus topic is three celebrity escaped flamingos in the United States.

Visit sifpod.f.fod.fund for that bonus show for a library of more than 22 dozen other secretly incredibly fascinating bonus shows. And a catalog of all sorts of Max fun bonus shows. Special audio just for members. Thank you to everybody who backs this podcast operation. Additional fun things, check out our research sources on this episode's page at maximum fun.org. Key sources this week include a few reference guides, the new encyclopedia of birds edited by Christopher Perrin's published by Oxford University Press. Also the National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America, edited by John L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer. Also citing so much science writing, in particular from Atlas Obscera. Pieces there by Jessica Lee Hester and by

Kara Giamo. Also science writing for The Guardian by reporters including Pai Almota, Neha Gohiel, and Edward Hellmore, and then lots of digital resources from the Smithsonian National Zoo, the Columbus Zoo, the Cornell Bird Guide, public broadcasting in the U.S., and more. That page also features resources such as native-land.ca. I'm using those to acknowledge that I recorded this in Linape Hoking, the traditional land of the Muncie-Lenape people and the Wappinger people, as well as the Mohican people, Skategook people, and others. Also, Katie taped this in the country of Italy, and I want to acknowledge that in my location, in many other locations in the Americas and elsewhere, native people are very much still here.

That feels worth doing on each episode, and join the free SIF Discord, where we're sharing stories and resources about native people and life. There is a link in this episode's description to join the Discord. We're also talking about this episode on the Discord, and hey, would you like a tip on another episode? Because each week I'm finding is something randomly incredibly fascinating by running all the past episode numbers through a random number generator. This week's pick is episode 98. That's about the topic of tulips, the flour. Fun fact there, tulip bulbs can be eaten as a food if you cook and prepare them right,

and that helps sustain the Dutch resistance through World War II. So I recommend that episode. I also recommend my co-host Katie Golden's weekly podcast Creature Feature about animals, science, and more. If you've ever enjoyed a sciencey or animal-type episode of this podcast, including the Flamingo episode, you will love Creature Feature. Our theme music is Unbroken, Unshavened by the Budo's band. Our show logo is by artist Burton Durand.

Special thanks to Chris Sousa for audio mastering on this episode. Special thanks to the Beacon Music Factory for taping support. extra extra special thanks go to our members and thank you to all our listeners i'm thrilled to say we will be back next week with more secretly incredibly fascinating so how about that talk to you then Maximum Fun A worker-owned network Of artists-owned shows Supported directly by you