Discussion

Flamingos

The ancient Egyptian text, Book of the Faiyum, depicts the God Set with the head of a flamingo. The ancient Romans ate flamingos, and especially prized the tongue for its exquisite flavor. The Moche people of ancient Peru depicted flamingos in their art. Flamingos are the national bird of The Bahamas. Flamingos are featured on both the obverse and reverse of The Bahamas' silver $2 coin.

Flamingos are protected in The Bahamas today, but in the 1950s, the flamingo population was dwindling with only about 5,000 remaining alive. Depending on the source, there are from 50,000 to 80,000 flamingos living in The Bahamas today.

The collective noun for flamingos is flamboyance; i.e., a flamboyance of flamingos.

Flamingos tend to favor ponds with poisonously high levels of alkaline; high enough to strip the skin off of normal flesh. The scaly skin on their feet and legs can handle it, but the softer skin of their bodies could be at risk. That may be a reason why flamingos stand in water, even when sleeping, rather than float on the surface like ducks and other water foul do.

Experiments have shown that flamingos have leg joints that lock into place so that it takes no effort at all to remain balanced on one leg when standing and/or sleeping. Conversely, standing on two legs requires effort.

Only one side of a flamingo's brain sleeps at a time. This allows for quick reaction when danger threatens.

Flamingos are filter eaters. Their diets consist of plants, insects, shrimp, and fish. They eat by placing their heads upside down in the water and sweeping their heads back and forth, using their tongues to pump water in and out of their bills. Comb-like plates on the edges of their bills trap food for consumption.

The flamingos pink color comes from high levels of beta-carotene in the food they eat.

Flamingos don't just stand around. Sometimes they fly, too. When taking off, they use their feet to get a running start.

Another thing they do is to build nests and use them. Nests are flattened mud mounds. Flamingos almost always lay just one egg at a time. On very rare occasions, they lay two.

Both parents share in incubation duty. Incubation lasts about 28 days.

Chicks are fed something called crop milk. The crop is where food is stored in a bird's gastrointestinal track before digestion. The crop milk consists of protein and fat-rich cells from the lining of the parents' crop and is regurgitated into the mouths of chicks.

Chicks are white or grey when born and have straight bills. The bills start to gradually curve downward at about 11 weeks of age.

It takes from two to three years for juveniles' pink feathers to grow in.

There are six extant species of flamingo living in the Americas, Africa, and southwest Asia. There are plenty of flamingos featured on American lawns, too. They are said to be closely associated with gnomes.

This last photo is here for no other reason than that it is so cute.

Artwork

Since flamingos aren't found in Japan, classical Japanese artwork featuring them is as rare as flamingo teeth. A work of art, a print, by a well-known American artist is offered instead.

John James Audubon (1785 – 1851)

A French/American artist, Audubon's most famous work was his The Birds of America, consisting of large pictures of birds that took him 14 years to produce. It is often regarded as the greatest picture book ever written. Audubon shot the birds he painted himself, then posed them for models. Here is his flamingo.