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Today on Animal Fact Files we’re talking about flamingos. You can join our flock by subscribing! Val Ees requested today’s fancy fliers. There are six species of flamingos and although they sort of look like the cross between a stork and a duck, they’re not related to either. No matter the species, flamingos are some of the most recognizable birds on our planet, and they have their food to thank for their colorful plumage.

Probably the best word to describe a flamingo is “goofy”. They have goofy legs, goofy beaks, and goofy stances - they look goofy when they walk in groups, act goofy when they’re guarding their nests, and sound goofy whenever they want to communicate. Heck, they even live in goofy environments. Flamingos are drawn to shallow lakes and pools with harsh water conditions. Some of the watering holes they frequent are twice as salty as the ocean, but the flamingos don’t mind. They’re after food - food which thrives in these usual habitats. Flamingos eat by turning their heads upside down and filtering water over small, filter-like plates in their bills. As water flows through a flamingo’s beak, these plates catch small crustaceans, small fish, and algae, and it’s from these primary food sources, the flamingo’s iconic pink coloration is derived.

In much the same way eating too many carrots can change the color of a human’s skin, the carotenoid pigments found in the flamingo’s diet causes their feathers to turn pink. How pink a flamingo can get has a lot to do with how much they’re eating as well as their species. Higher ranking members of the flock appear brighter in color as this demonstrates their food finding capabilities; but, at the same time, even the highest ranking officer in a great flamingo flock likely won’t ever appear as bright as a lower ranking individual from a Caribbean flamingo flock.

Different species of flamingos are usually able to coexists because they don’t all eat the same kinds of food. The larger flamingo species, such as greater and Caribbean flamingos, can be almost five feet (1.5m) tall thus giving them access to deeper areas of water where smaller species, such as lesser and James’s flamingos, are unable to reach. It’s not always easy to tell flamingo species apart, but one way to check is to look at their beaks and feet. Can you spot the differences? …

In the wild flamingos may live to be twenty or thirty years old, however, it seems they aren’t the most successful breeders. A flamingo begins life as an egg laid on a mound of mud constructed by its parents. Both the mother and father flamingo incubate the egg for about a month at which point the fuzzy grey chick will hatch. Within one to two weeks the chick will leave the nest and join up with all the other chicks born around the same time. Luckily for them, the parent flamingos can pick out the individual calls of their baby in a crowd. Their parents will feed them a substance called crop-milk. This substance is pink in color and will actually drain the parents of their own pink color while their feeding it to their young! It’ll take two or more years before the flamingo babies develop pink feathers of their own, and it might be another few years after that until they’re ready to mate. How they find mates is another goofy spectacle of the flamingo world.

For more facts on flamingos, check out the links in the description. Thank you for watching, and be sure to give a thumbs up for more Animal Fact Files.