The Science of Birds - Flamingos

Episode Date: July 8, 2022

This is Episode 55. It’s all about birds in the avian family Phoenicopteridae. These are the flamingos.No doubt you already know a fun fact or two about flamingos. These birds are crowd pleasers that get a lot of attention. But today we’re doing a deep dive into their biology. I’m hoping that along the way, you’ll pick up some new flamingo trivia that you can impress your friends with.~~ Leave me a review using Podchaser ~~Links of InterestUnderwater Flamingo Feeding [VIDEO]Flamingo courtship dance [VIDEO]Over a Million Flamingos | The Great Rift: Africa's Wild Heart [VIDEO]Link to this episode on the Science of Birds websiteSupport the show

Imagine you're exploring an alien planet. You've hiked into an arid volcanic zone in the mountains. Here, a vast but shallow lake fills a valley between jagged ridges. Plumes of steam rise from the lake in several places, indicating the presence of hot springs and geysers. Analyzing a sample of the lake water, you discover that it's highly alkaline and salty, not so great for supporting life. But walking further along the barren lake shore, you begin to hear a clamor.

It grows much louder as you reach the southern end of the lake. Could there be life here after all? And then you find the source of all the noise. What at first appears to be a gigantic pink blob undulating across the lake's surface is soon revealed to be a swarm of thousands of. upon thousands of strange rose-colored creatures. They're tall and gangly, with s-curved necks and twiggy legs. The head is oddly shaped, dominated by a thick beak that bends sharply downward in the middle. Dense clusters of these pink aliens march in unison through the shallow water.

Necks stretched up to full length, they jerk their heads left and right. This all looks like some sort of choreographed dance routine. It's one of the weirdest scenes you've ever come across in all your travels, and one of the most beautiful. But here's the twist ending. Just like at the end of the original 1968 movie Planet of the Apes, you were on Earth the whole time. Those pink creatures are flamingos. But you knew that. Of course, you knew that. Of course, course, since I'm sure you saw the title of this podcast episode. The scene I just describe is pretty much what we find in places like Lake Bogoria in Kenya. Amazingly, there can be over one million flamingos on this lake at certain times of year. Massive flamingo flocks like this are among the

world's most incredible natural spectacles. The birds themselves are beautiful, strange, and fascinating. Well, hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted, guided exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. This is episode 55. It's all about birds in the avian family phenocopterity. That's phenocopterity

with a pH, like the word Phoenix. This is the Flamingo family. No doubt you already know a fun fact or two about flamingos. These birds are crowd-pleasers that get a lot of attention. But today, we're doing a deep dive into their biology. I'm hoping that along the way you'll pick up some new flamingo trivia

that you can impress your friends with. This family of birds, phenocopterity, was chosen by my supporters on Patreon. Every so often I poll my patrons to find out what bird or bird family they'd like to learn about next. This time, the flamingos came out victorious. If you would like to wield the awesome power of choosing the subject for podcast episodes, think about signing up to become a supporter. Just check out patreon.com slash science of birds. All right, there's lots of cool stuff to cover here, so let's start yapping about flamingos. First, let's look at the shapes and sizes of flamingos. Now, I know you're familiar with the basic, iconic shape of a flamingo.

Your average three-year-old could recognize one of these birds from 300 yards away, in a snowstorm, at midnight. extending from a flamingo's oval-shaped body is that long, sinuous neck. At the back end of the body is a relatively short tail. The whole contraption is held up by long, slender legs, and the feet are webbed for swimming. Flamingos are famous for standing around on one leg, either in the water or on the shore. They rest and sleep in this position. But why do they do that?

Biologists have been trying to answer this question for decades. Some ended their professional careers in frustration and shame because they just couldn't figure out why Flamingos stand on one leg. Why? Other biologists were driven to alcohol and drugs, or they just went insane and wandered off into the woods, never to be seen again. Although the riddle hasn't been solved for sure, there seems to be one leading hypothesis. The one-legged yoga pose in flamingos is likely an adaptation for conserving body heat. We'd say it helps with thermoregulation. Even in tropical environments, a bird wading around in water can lose heat through its legs.

So the flamingo tucks one leg up close to its warm, feathered body while balancing on the other leg. Do that for a while, then switch. One recent study found that flamingos are actually more stable when they stand on one leg instead of two. The researchers figured out that when a flamingo stands on just one leg, it barely needs to use any muscles to be stable. So it doesn't need to spend much energy. The bird's joints sort of lock into position while standing in the one-legged posture. The wings are of medium length relative to the body size. In all flamingo species, the flight feathers are black.

Returning to the head, let's look at that crazy beak, the bill. Flamingos have a unique bill shape. It's thick and has a dramatic kink in the middle, where it bends downward at a sharp angle. Bill color varies among species, from pink to whitish to yellow. But all flamingo species have some black on the bill tip. We'll come back to the function of this strangely shaped bill when we talk about the diet and feeding of flamingos. In terms of overall size, there's a tie for the largest species. Both the greater flamingo and the American flamingo have body lengths between 47 and 57 inches, or 120 to 145 centimeters.

Our smallest species is the lesser flamingo at 32 to 35 inches, or 80 to 90 centimeters. Those are body lengths, but differences in height are even more dramatic between the largest and smallest species. Greater flamingos can be almost five feet tall. They tower over lesser flamingos that don't quite reach three feet tall. I'll include a photo of these two species standing side by side in the show notes on the Science of Birds website. Okay, so what's the first thing that pops into your mind when you hear the word flamingo? I'm going to take a wild guess that it's the color pink. Flamingos are outstanding birds for several reasons, but I bet they wouldn't be as well-known

and loved if they weren't pink. Despite what we've learned from cartoons and plastic flamingo lawn ornaments, not all flamingos have plumage that's uniformly a vivid pink color. There's some variation among species and among individuals. Even the color of an individual can change over time. At the species level, the pinkest of the pink is the American flamingo, phenocopterus ruber. Some people refer to this as the Caribbean flamingo. These guys can be full-on hot pink. However, the American flamingo's close relative, the greater flamingo, phenocopterus, rosaeus, has a mostly white body in neck. Most of the greater flamingo's pink color is concentrated in the wings.

You may already know that flamingos get their flamboyant, rosy color from the things they eat. The algae and tiny critters that flamingos slurp up from shallow water contain carotenoid pigments. We've talked to them. about carotenoids before. There are many kinds of them out there in nature, and they come in shades of red, orange, and yellow. Flamingo feathers and skin get their color either directly from the assortment of carotenoids in their food, or they modify those carotenoids in their cells to make their own pigments. There's even a carotenoid named after flamingos. It's called phenycozanthin. Remember that the name for the flamingo family is,

phenocopterity. Same root word there, right? Phenocinicopterity. And while we're still talking about the general traits of flamingos, I should say that these birds are highly social. They spend a lot of time in flocks that number in the thousands. Their specialized diet and way of feeding, which I promise we're getting to, often forces flamingos to concentrate in specific habitats. The same goes for their nesting requirements. The social behavior of flamingos isn't only a safety-in-numbers thing, and it goes beyond just hanging out together wherever there's food and nesting habitat. These birds have complex social lives within the flock. A recent study of Flamingo's social behavior in captive populations

found that it's common for these birds to form strong bonds. Not only do many mated pairs stick together, but Flamingos also form same-sex friendships. We're talking bros hanging with bros and ladies chilling with their besties. An individual Flamingo usually pals around with three to six friends. And those friendships were shown in this study to be stable, many of them lasting at least five years. Flamingo friends display their bonds by standing close to each other, day after day, year after year. So if a handful of birds are your friends, what does that make all of the other individuals in the flock?

Many of them are just forgettable randos. Who cares about them? But some birds in the flock might qualify as your enemies. Most flamingos haven't read The Art of War, that famous book by Sun Tzu. So these birds aren't familiar with the well-known quote, keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Flamingos keep their friends close, it's true,

but they don't keep their enemies closer. They keep them at least one neck length away. That's because flamingos who hate each other fight using their heavy bills. They stretch out their long necks and peck each other when they squabble. So when a flamingo sees one of its enemies nearby, it's like, yeah, that's right, Bozo. you better stay over there. Stay out of my neck zone. You're just lucky I can't reach you. Otherwise,

I'd give you such a whack with my beak. You'd be crying pink tears. The last general trait I want to cover is the voice of flamingos. What did these birds sound like? We got a taste of that in the intro to this episode, where we heard thousands of lesser flamingos in Kenya. In general, flamingos make strident, honking, grunting noises. They're pink-like pigs, and they grunt-like pigs. They're generally a noisy bunch. Here's the sound of some greater flamingos. Next we have some James's flamingos recorded in Bolivia.

This species, Phinecoparous James-Eye, is also called the Puna Flaminger. Let's move on to look at the diversity of flamingos, their global distribution, and their habitats. name phenocopterity is a mouthful. I know. It comes from Greek and means crimson winged. Makes perfect sense, right? The word flamingo comes to us from Latin, and then it got modified through Spanish. It means flame-colored. If you're like me, you've spent more than one sleepless night trying to understand the connection between the words flamingo and flamenco. the traditional dance of Spain. I was recently in Spain.

I saw flamingos there, and I went to a flamenco show. Both were spectacular to see. But I just kept wondering how or if these two things are connected. I wish I could tell you. But it seems no one really knows. It may just be a coincidence that the words flamingo and flamenco are so similar. Anyway, the family phenocopterity. This is the only family contained in the order phenocopteraformis.

That there's just one family in this order should suggest to you that flamingos don't have any close relatives. But what other birds do you think are the closest relatives of flamingos? Maybe herons? No? How about cranes? Storks? Ornithologists have struggled for over a hundred years to unravel the evolutionary relationships between flamingos and other birds. Genetic data to the rescue!

Studies of flamingo taxonomy in the last couple of decades have used molecular genetic data to reveal that the closest relatives of flamingos are Grebes! Yes, grebes, those adorable swimming birds that belong to the family Podisipedity. Grebes will get their own podcast episode here someday. The relationship between flamingos and grebes is now supported by not only DNA evidence, but also some diagnostic anatomical features, like certain bone, wing, and egg features. But what about those other pink birds that stand around in water?

Ever heard of the roseate spoonbill or the scarlet ibis? Those birds also have vivid pink plumages. But they're only distantly related to flamingos. It's just that they, too, eat small aquatic critters that are chock full of carotenoids. So pink coloration among these birds is an example of convergent evolution. Flamingos, roseate spoonbills, and scarlet ibis' independent. independently evolved to be pink. Shifting gears now to look at diversity.

There are only six flamingo species in the family phenocopterity, and these are divided into three genera. So you wouldn't call this a diverse family of birds. But as a group, flamingos have a pretty wide distribution. You can find one flamingo species or another in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, Southern Europe, India, and some isolated patches in Central Asia. Here in North America, we have the American Flamingo. Sort of.

This species is mostly restricted to the Caribbean region, the northern coast of South America, and the Galapagos Islands. But once upon a time, there were breeding populations of American flamingos in America, in Florida specifically. But sadly, those populations were pretty much wiped out in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Flamingos were hunted for their meat, eggs, and colorful feathers. The good news is that American flamingos appear to be slowly returning to Florida.

Hopefully, the real birds will soon outnumber the kitsy plastic lawn ornaments that bear their resemblance. Across the pond, over in the pond, over in Europe, the species you're most likely to see is the greater flamingo. These birds breed in scattered wetlands there, mostly in Spain, France, and elsewhere in southern Europe. The American and greater flamingos were lumped together as one species. But today, most ornithologists agree that these critters are indeed distinct species. The most numerous flamingo species of all is the lesser flamingo. As I said,

these guys gather in flocks in African lakes, where there can be over a million of them at once. And speaking of lakes, let's look at the habitats of flamingos. The lake I mentioned earlier, Lake Bogoria and Kenya, supports so many flamingos because it's teeming with the microscopic cyanobacteria and diatoms that lesser flamingos eat. These microorganisms live in alkaline, hyper-saline water. And of course, hyper-saline means super-duper salty. Flamingos thrive where there are shallow, salty lakes or lagoons. These water bodies provide the tiny plants and animals that flamingos eat. And these sites often have the mud that flamingos need to build their nests. Flamingos have some hefty salt glands that sit over their

eyes, in the sort of eyebrow area. The birds can drink salt water and then excrete the excess salt from those glands. Many seabirds like gulls and albatrosses have similar salt glands. We might imagine flamingos living on tropical coasts where it's warm and there are palm trees everywhere. And sure, many flamingos live in habitats like that. But you also find some of their alkaline water bodies in pretty hostile and barren landscapes. Several flamingo species live in high mountain valleys of the Andes in South America. In places like this, flamingos might be among the few large animal species that can find enough food to eat.

That works out nicely for the flamingos because that means there probably aren't many predators around to give them trouble. Do flamingos stay in these habitats all year long? What about migration? Flamingo species show varying levels of migration among species and among populations. They aren't usually what you'd call long-distance migrants, but some flamingos will fly hundreds of kilometers

between breeding and wintering areas or between different feeding areas. Flamingos come and go in different regions depending on where their food is most abundant. Food availability changes with fluctuating water levels in lakes and lagoons. Scientists have used fossils and molecular genetic data to unravel the story of Flamingo evolution.

We still don't know their entire story, but it's not as much of a big mystery as it used to be. It seems the long-legged beauties of today descended from an ancient, ancient ancestral bird that was highly aquatic. It was a swimmer. And this was possibly the common ancestor of both flamingos and grebes. Then the lineages of flamingos and grebes went their separate ways beginning about 40 million years ago. I mentioned earlier that several types of data tell us that flamingos and grebes are each other's closest relatives. Another thing they have in common, there's a family of parasitic tapeworms found only in flamingos and grebes.

How about that? So, perhaps there was some disgusting little ancestral tapeworm species living in the bowels of that common ancestor bird. What should we call that ancestral bird? A grubingo? A flamingrib? Yeah, flamingribes sounds pretty dope. You heard it here first, folks. Flamingreeb. Anyway, parasites are often highly specialized for living in only one type of host.

When the lineages of flamingos and grebes diverged, the tapeworms went along for the ride. The tapeworms, too, have been evolving for 40 million years. But biologists still recognize them as belonging to the same family. So sometimes parasites can tell us something about the evolution of their hosts, cool stuff. The special traits we associate with flamingos today, their leginess, wading behavior, strange bill, and pink-tastic coloration, those all came millions of years later. Flamingo diversity started to increase about three to six million years ago. New species formed. Some have since gone extinct, leaving us today with our six wonderful species.

Let's take a moment to consider the conservation status of flamingos around the world. Because these birds live a long time and because they reproduce only slowly, their populations can't rebound quickly when they get hammered by human shenanigans, disease outbreaks, or natural disasters. Their lake and wetland habitats are especially vulnerable to certain kinds of human disturbances, like pollution from mining and agriculture. None of the six flamingo species is officially listed as endangered at the global level. According to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the IUCN,

two of the species are in the least concern category. These are the American and greater flamingos. Those guys are doing reasonably well. James's flamingo, the Chilean flamingo, and the lesser flamingo, however, are all in the near-threatened category. And last, there's the Andean flamingo, phenocoparis and dynus, which is the species in the most trouble. It's listed in the vulnerable category.

This bird is also on the endangered species list. of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are between 30 and 40,000 of them left in Peru, Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina. Andean flamingos are hunted for their meat by local communities, and their eggs are collected, too. The high mountain lake habitats of the Andean flamingo are being trashed by other human activities,

mining, agriculture, and aquaculture. Similar threats are faced by flamingos around the world. For example, the lesser flamingo breeds at only five locations on the planet. And one of those locations, Lake Natron in Tanzania, is where 75% of all lesser flamingos breed. If that lake's habitat were to be degraded or destroyed, the result might be catastrophic for those flamingos. For years, there was an industrial-scale soda ash extraction factory in the works for Lake Natron. That would have been big trouble for the Flamingos. But in 2018, the Tanzanian government finally ruled against building the factory. This was in response to the efforts of over 50 African

environmental groups who launched a massive campaign to protect Lake Natron from destruction. They scored a big win for flamingos and a big win for conservation. To me, the coolest thing about flamingos is the way they feed. Among all animals, relatively few are members of an exclusive club called the filter feeders. This group includes baleen whales, some shark and other fish species, and various aquatic invertebrates like barnacles. And then there are the flamingos. Our pink friends have evolved. to specialize on a diet of mostly very small things that float around in salty water.

In other words, plankton. As I've mentioned, these include cyanobacteria and diatoms. But other tasty items on the flamingo menu include tiny crustaceans like brine shrimp and copepods, also insect larvae, worms, mollusks, and algae. The carotenoid pigments that give flamingos their color ultimately come, from cyanobacteria. The birds either slurp up the bacteria directly, or they get their carotenoids indirectly by eating crustaceans that have chowed down on bacteria. As you might guess, the different flamingo species have somewhat different diets. The lesser flamingo, for example,

is highly specialized to eat mostly cyanobacteria. One type of cyanobacteria eaten by these birds is spirulina. Ever heard of it? People sell it as a dietary supplement. Spirulina is supposed to be good for you and stuff. Just maybe don't eat too much of it unless you want to grow pink hair. Or maybe you're a punk rocker and that's the look you're going for. I don't know. I'm not a doctor. Well, I am just not that kind of doctor, you know. So just ignore me if I try to give you any advice about dietary supplements. Other phenocopterid species, like the American and greater flamingos, eat a somewhat more varied diet.

Those birds will sometimes even eat large adult insects and crabs and whatnot. Let's take a closer look now at that wacky bill. As with pretty much any other type of bird, the shape of a flamingo's bill reflects what and how this critter eats. Lining the inside rim of the bill are rows of small plate-like structures called lamelli. These form a sort of filter, like the teeth of a comb. The flamingo sucks up a mouthful of salty water and all the plankton swimming in it. The bird flexes its thick tongue muscle rapidly to pump water in and out of the mouth.

When water is pushed out of the mouth, tiny organisms get lodged in the body. gaps between the lamelli. Then the flamingo uses its tongue to sweep up the bounty of trapped prey items. The tongue is bristling with small spines made of cartilage, and these help collect the food. That tongue, by the way, used to be a culinary delicacy back in the day, in ancient Rome. But those wacky Romans ate all sorts of weird stuff, didn't they? Including mice, lambs, brains, and pig wombs. But why stop there, Romans? How about dining on some stewed hyena toes? Or maybe treating yourself to a bowl of lizard-skin salad tossed with zesty flakes of camel dandruff? Yeah, crazy Romans. The filter-feeding foraging method of flamingos, geez, that was a lot of F-words, wasn't it?

This foraging method is similar to what we observe in cetaceans like humpback whales. Whales catch small fish or krill using their baleen. Sometime in the last few million years, flamingo species split into two lineages, one that feeds on ultra-tiny things like bacteria and diatoms, and one that eats relatively large things like brine shrimp. That first group includes the lesser, Andean, and James's flamingos. These guys have smaller spaces between their lamelli.

So they have sort of a finer mesh for collecting food. American, greater, and Chilean flamingos, however, have lamelli better suited to those brine shrimp and similarly sized morsels. These large flamingo species all belong to the same lineage. the genus phenocopterus. All flamingos feed by dipping their heads underwater in an upside down position. They keep the top of the bill, their upper jaw, close to or pressed against the bottom. That's why the bill has that odd kinked shape. While feeding, the bill is perfectly positioned to be

parallel with the bottom substrate. A flamingo rapidly opens and closes its bill pumping water in and out with that delicious tongue. As they feed, the birds will often use their webbed feet to stir up the muddy bottom. This creates a cloudy swirl of muck and small organisms, perfect for sucking up. In the show notes, I'll put a link to a video of some flamingos feeding underwater in an artificial pool. It's fascinating to see these birds in action, doing what they do best. Flamingos wade around in shallow water Where they can reach the bottom using their long necks

Or they may feed closer to the water's surface They can also swim very well Using their webbed feet Flamingos sometimes paddle out into deeper water to forage So flamingos are out there wading And swimming around in their lakes and lagoons While their heads are underwater You'd think it would be easy for predators to sneak up on them

Maybe, but remember that these birds hang out in large flocks, and they stick close to their besties. At any given moment, while some of the birds have their heads under water, others are taking a breath above the water, and keeping an eye out for trouble at the same time. It isn't likely that a predator will be able to sneak in close. Remember also that many flamingos don't have to worry too much about predators because they live in such inhospitable places. In spite of all that, flamingos do get eaten from time to time.

Andy and Flamingos, for example, sometimes fall prey to foxes. In Africa, the most common predators are usually other birds. The huge Maribou stork is one of the worst offenders. These handsome devils, and I say handsome while making air quotes,

These birds, with their naked heads and blotchy pink skin, are the terror of flamingo colonies in sub-Saharan Africa. Maribu storks stalk around in the shallows, snatching flamingo chicks, and sometimes even adults. And on that grim note, let me change the subject and point out that the word flamingos could also be pronounced flaming o's. I'm serious. Just look at the word. Flaming O's. It's like the cereal Cheerios, but instead it's Flaming O's. I'm thinking we've got ourselves the next big craze in breakfast cereal here. Hey kids, forget about boring old Cheerios. Now there's a better way to start your day. Try new Flaming O's cereal. It's pink, it's spicy, and because. Flamingos are made with real brine shrimp, they're packed with the carotenoid flavor that kids love. Flamingos! Yay!

Life for a flamingoes isn't all about eating, socializing, and keeping its enemies at next length. Most of that stuff is just means to an end. And that end is making babies. How do flamingos breed and pass down their pink legacies from one generation to the next? These birds have a monogamous breeding system. Some bonded pairs stick together for years. However, at least in some studies of the greater flamingo, it was found that pairs may last for only a single breeding season.

Ornithologists call this phenomenon divorce. when a monogamous pair breaks up to seek other mating opportunities. The divorce rate in some greater flamingo populations is high, about 98% from one year to the next. We talked about how flamingos are highly social, and they have their friends, their enemies, and I can only assume they're frenemies. But they can form same-sex couples, too.

A famous pair of gay Chilean flamingos at the Denver Zoo made the headlines recently when they broke up after several years. Their names are Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass. While they were together, they performed mating displays for each other, they built nests, and they took care of a fake egg that the zookeepers had planted in their nest. Apparently, their breakup was amicable. But the sad coincidence is that Freddie and Lance actually got divorced during Pride Month. Bad timing, guys, couldn't you have stopped? stuck it out a little longer? Before flamingos pair up in the breeding season,

they gather in groups of 15 to 50 individuals to perform their amazing synchronized courtship dances. The birds march around together in their tight groups, flapping their wings and stretching their necks to the sky. They jerk their heads left and right in a behavior called head flagging. The best performers are flamingos in their early 20s. They typically display the widest variety of postures and transitions between postures.

Younger and older birds, on the other hand, just don't have all the right moves. These displays appear to be simultaneously for no one and for everyone. At this stage, a flamingo isn't necessarily trying to impress a single potential mate. This ritualistic dancing behavior seems to just get the proper hormones flowing to synchronize the start of the breeding season. That's my understanding anyway. Small captive populations of flamingos in zoos may not show this synchronized dancing behavior. Getting them to breed can be tricky,

because apparently the birds need to be surrounded by lots of other flamingos for the instinct to kick in. So, some clever zookeepers resorted to bringing in large mirrors and placing them around in the flamingo enclosure. Sure enough, the birds were fooled into thinking their flock was a lot larger, at least in some cases. The flamingos started doing their proper courtship behaviors, and they were soon laying eggs. This reminds me of how some restaurants use big mirrors on the wall to make their establishments look larger. It fools me every time. I look across to the other side of the restaurant, and I see a man over there, a strangely

familiar man. He's staring back at me. I'm like, well, what do we have here? Who is that handsome devil? And I say handsome while making air quotes. But flamingos, most of us would agree, are objectively handsome birds. Their pink plumage is a big part of their appeal to the opposite sex. Or to the same sex, right? Let's not forget Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass at the Denver Zoo. In any case, flamingos seem to find bright pink feathers attractive. It might be that having brighter plumage is a signal, telling your potential mates that you are well-fed and healthy. Amazingly, greater flamingos actually use cosmetics to maintain their vivid rosy plumage during the breeding season. These birds produce a secretion from their euripigial gland that's rich with

colorful carotenoids. Remember that the euripigial or prine gland is above the base of the tail. Birds in general use oils from this gland to coat their feathers, keeping them in good working condition. But greater flamingos, both females and males, make this pink oil and they slather it on their feathers. They are literally using this secretion as makeup. to make themselves look more sexy. A recent study of this phenomenon showed that the pink color of greater flamingo feathers fades when exposed to bright sunlight.

These birds live in open habitats where they're constantly bombarded by the sun. They counteract the sun bleaching of their feathers by continually adding pink rouge that they make themselves. Pretty wild. As their dance troops begin to disband, Flamingos sort themselves into bonded pairs.

Each pair then gets to work building a nest. This is a tall structure made of mud. It looks a little like a paper-mache volcano made by a kid for a middle school science fair. It's a mound of mud, a sort of pedestal about 12 inches or 30 centimeters high. There's a bowl-shaped depression on top to hold the egg and young chick. The adult birds are territorial. and will defend their nest from other flamingos. They both care for the egg and, after hatching, the chick.

That's chick singular because the clutch size in flamingos is pretty much always one. The white egg has a chalky texture on the shell. Maybe you remember from my last podcast episode, which was all about bird eggs, that a chalky texture sometimes means the egg has a waterproof coating. Grebes, too, lay chalky eggs like this. This may be another reflection of the shared evolutionary history between flaming o's and grebes. When the baby flamingo hatches out of its chalky egg, it's covered in fuzzy white or gray down feathers.

Its eyes are open and, oh, lordy, it is a cute little bugger. And did you catch that? It's not pink. Flamingos are not pink when they're born. born. They get their color from their diet, right? It actually takes several years for a young Flamingo to finally reach a level of pinkness that Barbie would find minimally acceptable. Mom and Dad Flamingo are attentive parents to their fuzzy baby. They recognize its unique calls from among the hundreds or thousands of other chicks in the colony. The chick stays in the

nest for about five to 12 days. It starts off with nice clean feathers, but after a few days of rolling around in the mud, it looks like a dirty dishrag. What does our adorable, filthy flamingo chick eat in the first months of its life? Well, Flamingo parents make a special liquid called crop milk. We talked about crop milk in the episode about the pigeon family, since those birds do something similar. Flamingo crop milk, also called esophageal fluid, is rich in fat and protein for the growing baby. And get this, flamingo crop milk is blood red. Seriously. Because, of course, it's loaded with carotenoids. Hmm, sounds like the perfect milk to pour into a big bowl of Flaming O's cereal. For the first few months of its life, a flamingo doesn't have that classic Flamingo bill shape yet.

It's not curved, so the young bird isn't able to properly filter feed. It depends on crop milk from mom and dad. When they're about two weeks old or so, Flamingo chicks in the colony start to gather into groups. Each of these groups is called a creche that's spelled C-R-E-C-H-E. A crush is sort of like daycare for birds. A small number of adults watch over the group of precocious little fuzzballs. Parents return to feed their respective babies and maybe take a shift in daycare duty. Eventually, it's time for the young flamingos to stretch their wings and their long necks to take flight,

to seek their own fortunes in briny waters near and far. It will be several years before they reach south. maturity and maximum pinkitude. As I mentioned, these are long-lived birds. A flamingo can live for 50 years or more. Over its long lifetime, it will surely make some friends, and some enemies. And if it's lucky, it will leave behind a multitude of its own babies. That wraps up our exploration of the family Fienic. copterity for today. I really enjoyed researching this episode, and I loved learning more about flamingos. They're amazing birds. I hoped you learned a few things, too, and I hope you had fun

listening. As you might imagine, there are expenses involved in creating a podcast like this. Thankfully, I get help from my supporters on Patreon. I'm grateful for the generosity of my patrons and for their enthusiasm for what I'm doing here. So a big thank you to all my patrons. And a special welcome and thanks to my newest patrons. Audrey Hillman, Christina Dreiger, Amber Zapata, Sebastian Sharkbutt Saintess, Vaughan Turner, Harumi Sururoka, and Heather Bukari. Hi-fives to all of you. Thank you. If you are not a supporter yet, you can always check out my Patreon page over at patreon.com slash science of birds. And if you have something you'd like to share with me, please go ahead and shoot me an email. Maybe you have

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