Flamingo

Diet: Omnivore

Average life span in the wild: 40 years

Size: 47-57inch (120-145cm)

Weight: 2.2 kg

The coloring for a Flamingo ranges from various shapes of pink all the way to a crimson red. Some of them are shades of orange too. They also have colors of cream and white mixed in. They are lovely creatures and they seem to be very calm. These animals are very social and they thrive on interaction with each other. Colonies of Flamingos in the wild can be thousands in number. Many of them are small though with only about 50 in them. The largest group of Flamingos is found in East Africa where a single colony has more than 1 million members. If a flamingo is cut off from its group, it can eventually die due to stress.

Flamingos often stand on one leg, the other leg tucked beneath the body. The reason for this behaviour is not fully understood. Recent research indicates that standing on one leg may allow the birds to conserve more body heat, given that they spend a significant amount of time wading in cold water. However, the behaviour also takes place in warm water. As well as standing in the water, flamingos may stamp their webbed feet in the mud to stir up food from the bottom. Young flamingos hatch with greyish reddish plumage, but adults range from light pink to bright red due to aqueous bacteria and beta Carotene obtained from their food supply.

Flamingos filter-feed on brine shrimp and blue-green algae. Their beaks are specially adapted to separate mud and silt from the food they eat, and are uniquely used upside-down. The filtering of food items is assisted by hairy structures called lamellae which line the mandibles, and the large rough-surfaced tongue. The pink or reddish color of flamingos comes from carotenoids in their diet of animal and plant plankton. These carotenoids are broken down into pigments by liver enzymes. The source of this varies by species, and affects the saturation of color. Flamingos whose sole diet is blue-green algae are darker in color compared to those who get it second hand (e.g. from animals that have digested blue-green algae).

Flamingos are very social birds; they live in colonies whose population can number in the thousands. These large colonies are believed to serve three purposes for the flamingos: avoiding predators, maximizing food intake, and using scarce suitable nesting sites more efficiently. Before breeding, flamingo colonies split into breeding groups of between about 15 and 50 birds. Both males and females in these groups perform synchronized ritual displays. The members of a group stand together and display to each other by stretching their necks upwards, then uttering calls while head-flagging, and then flapping their wings.