96 Fun Facts About Flamingos

Which pigments in their food give flamingos their pink colour?

Carotenoids, the pigments that also colour carrots, reach flamingos through the algae and small crustaceans they eat; zoos add pigment to the feed, because without it the birds' plumage fades.

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the Queen's croquet game uses live flamingos as what?

Mallets, and poor ones: each time Alice gets her flamingo's neck lined up for a shot, it twists round to look up into her face, and by then the hedgehog ball has unrolled and crawled away.

What colour is the down of a newly hatched flamingo chick?

Grey or white: a flamingo is not born pink, and the colour builds up only as pigments from its food reach the feathers, which takes two or three years and several moults.

The largest flamingo species can stand 1.5 metres tall, but about how much does it weigh?

About 3 kg: even the greater flamingo, the largest species, weighs only 2 to 4 kg, because most of its height is slender leg and long neck around a small body.

What is one leading theory for why flamingos stand on one leg?

To conserve body heat is one theory, since a leg tucked into the feathers loses less warmth than one in cold water; yet flamingos also do it in warm water, so nobody is sure.

How do flamingos take their food from the water?

Straining it, bill upside down: a flamingo feeds head-down, pumping water in and out of the bill so that comb-like plates along its edges catch algae and tiny invertebrates, while its feet stir prey up from the mud.

What is the term for a group of flamingos?

A flamboyance fits twice over: flamboyant comes from an Old French word for blazing, and flamingo itself probably goes back to a Provençal word for flame.

What do both flamingo parents produce to feed their chick?

Crop milk is secreted by both parents from glands lining the upper digestive tract, and making it drains so much of their own colour that their plumage can fade to pale pink or white.

Which U.S. state is the plastic lawn flamingo most iconically associated with?

Florida's flamingo image dates to Carl Fisher's Flamingo Hotel, opened on Miami Beach in 1921, and the pink plastic lawn bird became shorthand for Sunshine State kitsch.

Who designed the original plastic pink lawn flamingo in 1957?

Don Featherstone, a young sculptor newly hired by Union Products, had no live flamingo to work from, so he modelled the bird in about two weeks from a National Geographic photo spread.

What did naturalists believe about James's flamingo for decades of the twentieth century?

It was extinct, or so naturalists thought until a population turned up in the 1950s: the bird lives on high salt lakes so remote that it had simply gone unseen.

Unlike an adult's, a newly hatched flamingo chick's bill is what shape?

Straight: the bent adult bill grows in only later, so a newly hatched chick cannot gather food for itself and depends on its parents for every meal.

Which 1980s TV series showed a flock of flamingos in its opening credits?

Miami Vice used a local racetrack's flamingo flock among the first images of its credits; the birds had been brought from Cuba in 1934 to decorate the infield lake and became a trademark of the region.

What are the comb-like structures lining a flamingo's bill called?

Lamellae are comb-like plates along the edges of the bill: as the bird pumps muddy water in and out, they hold back algae and tiny animals and let the water and silt escape.

Greater, the flamingo that died at Adelaide Zoo in 2014, had lived to at least what age?

83, at least: Greater reached the zoo already full-grown in 1933 or earlier, and because the import records are unclear its true age was never known when it was put down in January 2014.

What kind of water body do flamingos usually inhabit?

Shallow saline lagoons and alkaline lakes suit flamingos because water too salty or caustic for most animals still grows the algae and tiny crustaceans they eat, and few predators follow them in.

What do flamingos build their nests out of?

Mounds of mud, pulled together with the bill by both parents, lift the nest clear of floodwater and off ground that can get fiercely hot; the top is hollowed so nothing rolls off.

How many eggs does a flamingo usually lay in a breeding season?

Just 1 egg is the rule, and both parents share the work of sitting on it and then feeding the chick, so a pair raises at most a single youngster in a season.

An isolated population of American flamingos, smaller than their Caribbean kin, lives on which Pacific islands?

The Galápagos flamingos, only a few hundred strong, differ genetically from Caribbean birds, are significantly smaller and lay smaller eggs, so they are sometimes treated as a subspecies of their own.

What courtship behaviour are flamingos famous for before they mate?

Head-flagging group displays, in which a packed flock stretches up and swings its heads from side to side together, bring the whole colony into breeding condition at once, so that egg laying across it is rapid and synchronised.

How does a flamingo hold its neck and legs in flight?

Both outstretched, neck ahead and legs trailing, on wings that can span 1.5 metres; flocks fly close together in long, curving formations, flapping almost without pause.

In Fantasia 2000's Carnival of the Animals segment, a flamingo plays with what toy?

A yo-yo: one flamingo would rather play with it than join the flock's dull drill, and the other birds spend the finale of Saint-Saëns's Carnival of the Animals trying to force it back into line.

In which country would you find wild flamingos at the Camargue wetlands?

France: the Camargue, the Rhône's delta, is full of brine ponds, which makes it one of the few places in Europe where greater flamingos nest; with a lagoon in Spain it is the chief colony of the western Mediterranean.

What colour is a flamingo's egg?

Chalky white, with no trace of the parents' pink: the egg is laid in the hollow on top of the nest, and both parents take turns sitting on it.

How does a flamingo get itself into the air?

With a running start: a flamingo runs several paces, usually facing into the wind, flapping until enough air is moving over its wings to lift it, and it can do this from land or from shallow water.

In which Spanish region is Fuente de Piedra, Iberia's largest greater flamingo colony?

Andalusia: the lagoon, in Málaga province, is so shallow that it can dry out in a drought year, and when the water goes too early the flamingos abandon their eggs and leave.

What colour are a flamingo's flight feathers?

A flamingo's primary and secondary flight feathers are black, which is why a bird that looks all pink on the ground shows bold black wing edges in flight.

By the time a flamingo chick leaves the nest, what can it already do?

Walk and swim: within days of hatching a chick is mobile enough to leave the nest and join a nursery group of other youngsters, where its parents still come to feed it.

Why have zoos put mirrors in flamingo enclosures?

To make the flock seem larger: flamingos court and breed in crowds, and the mirrors are thought to give a small zoo group the impression of a bigger one, which encourages the birds to nest.

The lesser flamingo is the smallest species, but which record does it hold among flamingos?

Most numerous: flocks of more than a million lesser flamingos gather on East African lakes, yet the species is listed as near threatened, because nearly all of them breed at just a few sites.

How do flamingo chicks in a colony find their parents among thousands of identical-looking adults?

By their calls: a chick starts calling from inside the egg, so parent and chick know each other's voice before it hatches, and a parent can later call its own chick out of the crowd.

The large groups in which flamingo chicks gather while their parents feed are called what?

A crèche can hold thousands of chicks, watched over by just a few adults while the parents are away feeding; a chick that strays from it is easy prey.

In ancient Rome, what part of the flamingo was considered a delicacy?

The tongue: Pliny credits the gourmet Apicius with praising its flavour, and the emperor Vitellius heaped flamingo tongues, pike livers and peacock brains on a vast platter he called the Shield of Minerva.

Where do the plastic birds of the title appear in John Waters's 1972 film Pink Flamingos?

Outside the heroine's trailer: Waters said he wanted a very normal title for so outrageous a film, and later claimed his movie 'wrecked' an ornament people had displayed without irony.

Which country's coat of arms is supported by a flamingo and a blue marlin?

The Bahamas put its national bird on swampland and the marlin on waves to stand for the islands' land and sea, flanking a shield on which Columbus's Santa María sails beneath a golden sun.

What did a study of flamingo cadavers show about the one-legged pose?

It needs no muscle activity to hold: a dead flamingo set on one leg stayed up with its joints locked in place, yet could not be made to stand stably on two, so the pose may cost a living bird almost no effort.

Which small crustacean is a staple food of many flamingos and helps turn them pink?

Brine shrimp thrive in water too salty for most other animals, so flamingos have them almost to themselves; the shrimp graze on algae and pass its pigments on to the birds.

Which joint is the backward-bending one halfway up a flamingo's leg?

Its ankle, so a standing flamingo is effectively on tiptoe, and the true knee sits up against the body hidden under the feathers. The same is true of every bird.

Which large stork preys on flamingos at their East African breeding lakes?

Marabou storks live mainly on carrion and scraps, often feeding beside vultures, but they also take live birds, and lesser flamingos and their chicks are among the prey.

A flamingo that escaped a Kansas zoo in 2005 was still being seen over a decade later in which state?

Texas: No. 492 left the Wichita zoo before its flight feathers had been clipped and settled on the Gulf coast, while the bird that escaped with it flew north and was never seen again after that summer.

Which alga, thriving in alkaline lakes, is the main food of lesser flamingos?

Spirulina grows only in very alkaline lakes, so lesser flamingos crowd onto the few that have it, and whole flocks move to another lake when the supply fails.

How do greater flamingos touch up their pink while displaying for mates?

By rubbing on preen-gland oil: the oil carries the same pigments as the feathers, and the birds spread it over their plumage more often in the breeding season, a habit researchers have described as putting on make-up.

At roughly what age can a young flamingo first fly?

Three months or so: a young flamingo cannot fly until its flight feathers have finished growing in, and until then it stays with the colony's other youngsters and is still fed by its parents.

Suetonius says which Roman emperor was splashed with a flamingo's blood shortly before his murder?

Caligula had flamingos among the exotic birds sacrificed each day in the temple he built to his own godhead, and Suetonius counts the blood that spattered him among the omens of his assassination.

Kenya's Lake Bogoria, a famous flamingo lake, is also known for what?

Hot springs and geysers line its shore, while the strongly alkaline lake itself grows the algae that draw the flamingos.

About how long does a flamingo egg take to hatch?

One month, give or take a few days: zoo records put it at 27 to 31 days, with the two parents taking turns on the nest throughout.

Which Indian conglomerate's chemicals arm proposed a soda ash plant beside East Africa's main flamingo breeding lake?

Tata Chemicals planned to pump the lake's brine and extract washing soda for export; more than fifty conservation bodies campaigned against it, and in 2008 the company said it would not go ahead.

Which Mexican state's Ría Lagartos reserve is famous for its American flamingos?

Yucatán: the birds live along the state's northern coast, where Ría Lagartos lies, and vast flocks spend the winter at Celestún, a second reserve on its western shore.

The zoologist who named the flamingo family in 1831 was a nephew of which ruler?

Napoleon's nephew Charles Lucien Bonaparte, son of the emperor's brother Lucien, spent several years of the 1820s in the United States studying its birds before he set up the family Phoenicopteridae in 1831.

Flamingos carry feather lice of a genus otherwise found only on which birds?

The shared Anaticola feather lice, otherwise found only on ducks and geese, were once used to argue that flamingos were really waterfowl, an idea molecular studies later overturned.

What does Mirandornithes, the name of the flamingo-grebe clade, mean?

Wonderful birds: the name joins Latin mirandus, 'wonderful', to the Greek for bird, and was coined in 2005 after molecular studies showed that flamingos' closest relatives are the grebes.

A 2014 genome study grouped flamingos with sandgrouse and which other birds?

The 2014 Jarvis et al. genome study placed flamingos and grebes with doves, pigeons and sandgrouse in a clade it named Columbea, confirming that flamingos are not waterfowl.

Who formally described the Caribbean flamingo as Phoenicopterus ruber in 1758?

Carl Linnaeus named the species in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae, leaning on the description and colour plate that the English naturalist Mark Catesby had published some thirty years earlier.

Bonaire, the Caribbean island whose airport is called Flamingo International, belongs to which European country?

The Netherlands: American troops stationed on Bonaire in the Second World War built its airfield, opened in 1945 as Flamingo Airport.

What foot feature separates the two Phoenicoparrus flamingos from the other four species?

No hind toe: Andean and James's flamingos stand on three forward toes alone, while the other four species keep a small fourth toe at the back, and the gap is one reason the pair get a genus to themselves.

The Andean flamingo is the only flamingo with legs of which colour?

Yellow legs mark out the Andean flamingo at a glance among the two commoner species that share its high salt lakes, which is how observers pick out the rarest flamingo of the six.

Harry Berkeley James, namesake of a flamingo species, managed what kind of business in what is now northern Chile?

A saltpetre mine near Iquique was run by the Walsall-born James, who later paid a museum naturalist to collect birds in the Andes, and the new flamingo among the skins was given his name.

One theory traces the word flamingo to a Spanish nickname for the ruddy-faced people of which region?

Flanders: Spanish flamenco also means Fleming, and one dictionary takes the bird's name as a joke about the pink-cheeked Flemish, while another derives it from a Provençal word for flame.

The northernmost natural breeding colony of greater flamingos, near Lake Tengiz, is in which country?

Kazakhstan: Tengiz lies on the open steppe at about 50 degrees north, far enough from the tropics that in October 1976 a returning Soyuz capsule came down on the lake and broke through its ice.

A feral flock of zoo-escaped flamingos breeds at Zwillbrocker Venn in which country?

Germany: the bog reserve lies right on the Dutch border, and its flock, begun when six Chilean flamingos settled there in 1982, leaves each year to spend the winter months in the south-west of the neighbouring country.

Which bird is the main predator of flamingo eggs and chicks around the Mediterranean?

The yellow-legged gull, the big gull of Mediterranean coasts, raids the colonies for eggs and small chicks; adult flamingos have few enemies, because so little else can live where they nest.

Which hormone triggers flamingo parents to produce the secretion they feed their chicks?

Prolactin, the hormone behind milk production in mammals, triggers the glands lining both parents' upper digestive tract to secrete the red, fat-rich food they give their chick.

Zoo Basel, where Europe's first zoo-bred flamingo hatched in the late 1950s, is in which country?

Switzerland: the Basel chick was a first for any European zoo, and the flock has thrived ever since, with several hundred young raised and many sent on to zoos around the world.

By legend, a flock of flamingos inspired the red and white José de San Martín chose for which country's flag?

Peru: the story goes that San Martín, arriving on its coast in 1820 to fight for independence, was inspired by a flock of red-and-white flamingos, and the flag he created kept their colours.

Which Indian megacity has a flamingo sanctuary on a tidal creek inside its metropolitan area?

Mumbai: Thane Creek was declared a flamingo sanctuary in 2015, and with the nearby Sewri mudflats it fills with greater and lesser flamingos from October to March; a 2022 count passed 130,000 birds.

Most of the world's lesser flamingos hatch at which caustic Tanzanian lake?

Lake Natron's water is so caustic that few predators can reach the nests on its seasonal salt islands, which is why three-quarters or more of all lesser flamingos begin life there.

Which 2008 Disneynature documentary follows lesser flamingos through a breeding season in East Africa?

The Crimson Wing: Mystery of the Flamingos was the first film made for the Disneynature label, yet after opening in European cinemas it skipped American ones and was released there only on video, in 2010.

Which British group scored the Disneynature flamingo film, yielding 'Arrival of the Birds'?

The Cinematic Orchestra wrote and performed the score, and its track 'Arrival of the Birds' outgrew the documentary: it was used again for the closing scene of the 2014 film The Theory of Everything.

Kenya's Lake Nakuru, long famous for its flamingos, lies in which geological feature?

The Great Rift Valley is strung with alkaline lakes, three of them a World Heritage Site since 2011, and the flamingos shift from one to another as water levels rise and fall.

Which Caribbean island has a private resort islet where flamingos share Flamingo Beach with the guests?

Aruba: Renaissance Island, a privately owned cay just off the capital, has the country's only private beaches, and the flamingos seen on one of them are not native birds at all.

Kamfers Dam, South Africa's only lesser flamingo breeding site, lies beside which city?

Kamfers Dam lies just north of Kimberley in the Northern Cape; lesser flamingos began breeding there only after a mining company built an S-shaped artificial island in 2006.

Stranded Kamfers Dam chicks were flown in 2019 to the SANCCOB rescue centre in which city?

After heat and a halt in pumped water dried Kamfers Dam in January 2019, abandoned chicks were flown to SANCCOB in Cape Town and other rescue centres around South Africa to be hand-reared.

Laguna Colorada, a blood-red Altiplano lake and the main breeding ground of James's flamingo, lies in which country?

Bolivia: the lake sits in the Eduardo Avaroa reserve in the country's far south-west, and its red comes from sediment and pigmented algae in the water, not from the birds standing in it.

Which Andean salt flat, the world's largest, hosts flamingo breeding grounds around its edges?

Salar de Uyuni covers more than 10,000 square kilometres, and after rain a thin film of water turns it into the world's largest mirror, so flat that satellites use it to calibrate their altimeters.

The white islands dotting Laguna Colorada's red water are deposits of what?

The white islands are borax deposits; borax mining at other Andean lakes is a leading threat to the region's flamingos, along with water extraction.

'Flamingo City', a noted flamingo site alongside Nal Sarovar, is in which Indian state?

Gujarat: Nal Sarovar, a shallow lake near Ahmedabad, is the state's largest wetland bird sanctuary, and it fills with migrants, flamingos and pelicans among them, as soon as the monsoon ends.

A Chilean flamingo's pink-jointed legs are otherwise which colour?

Grey legs with pink joints are the giveaway, along with a bill dark for more than half its length, and they are how the Chilean flamingo is told from the larger greater flamingo it otherwise resembles.

Pink Floyd, a Chilean flamingo that escaped an aviary after a missed wing-clipping, became a celebrity in which city?

Salt Lake City, whose Tracy Aviary he fled in the late 1980s: he wintered on the Great Salt Lake for years, and locals proposed releasing more flamingos to keep him company before he vanished in 2005.

Which continent has flamingos only in the fossil record?

Australia: its rocks hold several kinds of fossil flamingo, the oldest about 25 million years old and the youngest from the Pleistocene, yet no flamingo lives wild there today.

Which 2023 hurricane scattered flamingos across the eastern United States as far north as Ohio and Pennsylvania?

Hurricane Idalia came ashore on the Gulf coast at the end of August 2023, and flamingos thought to have been crossing from Mexico to Cuba were swept up in it and dropped across the eastern states.

What name was given to the tagged young flamingo whose tracking showed birds living year-round near Key West?

Conchy, found abandoned in Key West and fitted with a tracker, stayed in the bay nearby all year among other flamingos, evidence a 2018 study used to argue the birds are residents, not zoo escapees.

Which Miami-area racetrack's infield flock earned it Audubon designation as a flamingo sanctuary?

Hialeah Park's owner Joseph Widener stocked its infield lake with flamingos in the 1930s, and the breeding flock won the track an Audubon sanctuary designation; escapees fuelled decades of wild-sighting confusion.

Flamingos have no fixed breeding season, so what mainly decides when a colony nests?

Rainfall sets the timetable: the lagoons must hold enough water and food before a colony will commit, so flamingos may nest in almost any month, or skip a dry year altogether.

Greater flamingos have nested since 1993 at the Molentargius salt pans on which Italian island?

Sardinia: the island's lagoons had long been only a stopover and wintering ground for flamingos, until the birds began nesting at Molentargius, a salt-works wetland hemmed in by the suburbs of Cagliari.

Flamingo, a fishing village named in 1893 for the birds seen there, now lies inside which U.S. national park?

Everglades National Park has its southernmost visitor centre at Flamingo; the settlers picked the name for their new post office because the flamingo was the most distinctive bird of the area.

Which spoof honour did the plastic lawn flamingo's creator win for art in 1996?

An Ig Nobel Prize went to him for 'his ornamentally evolutionary invention'; when the maker later dropped his signature from the birds, the prize's organisers called for a boycott of the unsigned ones.

One story says Bugsy Siegel named the Flamingo after which red-haired girlfriend?

Virginia Hill, Siegel's red-haired girlfriend, was supposedly nicknamed 'Flamingo' for her long legs; a rival account credits a Miami racetrack whose flamingo flock Siegel saw as good luck.

Flamingos once flocked in the far south of the United States, so what had all but wiped them out by 1900?

Hunting emptied flocks that nineteenth-century naturalists had put at up to a thousand birds, and for a century afterwards almost any flamingo seen in the region was written off as an escapee from captivity.

The original plastic lawn flamingo was moulded by Union Products in which New England state?

Massachusetts: Union Products of Leominster turned the birds out from 1957 until it closed in 2006; the moulds were then sold on, and production restarted in the neighbouring city of Fitchburg.

Which U.S. city declared the plastic flamingo its official bird in 2009?

Madison, Wisconsin, made it official thirty years after a 1979 student prank that planted 1,008 plastic flamingos on the university's Bascom Hill; the city's soccer club wears the bird on its crest.

Miners in the high Andes once killed flamingos for fat believed to cure which disease?

Miners in the high Andes killed flamingos for their fat, which was believed to cure tuberculosis; egg collecting for sale has been a bigger threat to the high-altitude species.

John Waters shot Pink Flamingos (1972) in and around which city, his home town?

Baltimore, where Waters and most of his cast and crew grew up, also hosted the film's first screening, at the University of Baltimore; his later hit Hairspray is set in the city too.

Which drag performer starred in Pink Flamingos as 'the filthiest person alive'?

Divine, born Harris Glenn Milstead, who later inspired Ursula in The Little Mermaid and played Edna Turnblad in Hairspray. The film was banned in several countries, then added to the US National Film Registry in 2021.

Flamingo Land, a theme park and zoo whose first animals included a colony of flamingos, is in which part of England?

Yorkshire: it opened at Kirby Misperton in 1959 as a zoo in the grounds of a bankrupt country club, took the flamingo's name in 1968 and was relaunched around its fairground rides in 1974, when it was losing money.

Apicius's Roman cookbook says which bird may be substituted in its boiled flamingo recipe?

Apicius's De re coquinaria boils the flamingo with dill and vinegar and serves it with a date-and-spice sauce, noting that the same recipe serves for parrot.

The world's largest Caribbean flamingo breeding colony is in a national park on which island?

Great Inagua's national park was set up in 1965, when the species was close to extinction; it now shelters tens of thousands of flamingos, and birds from it have recolonised neighbouring islands.