Flamingos | Phoenicopteriformes

Flamingo's | Flamingos | Flamencos

Very long-legged, long-necked waders of shallow salt, brackish or strongly alkaline water, with webbing between the front toes that keeps them up on soft mud and lets them swim where it is deeper. The bill is sharply bent downwards halfway along and lined inside with rows of horny plates; the bird holds it upside down in the water and sieves its food through it, mainly brine shrimps, midge larvae, small molluscs and algae. Everything about the way they live is geared to numbers: they feed, display and breed in dense colonies, on mud cones they build themselves. Four species occur in the Andes and along the west coast. The Chilean Flamingo feeds in coastal lagoons and in lakes on the high plateau, the Andean and James's Flamingos are tied to the salt lakes of the Altiplano in Bolivia and southern Peru, and the American Flamingo lives in the lagoons of the Galápagos. The red and pink in the plumage comes from the food and fades once that food is gone.

Famílias desta ordem

Flamingos | Phoenicopteridae4 espéciesThe tongue works as a piston, pumping water through the bill several times a second past the rows of horny plates that serve as a sieve; the finer those plates are set, the smaller the food retained. That difference is what separates the two genera: the deep-keeled bill of the Andean and James's Flamingos, very finely plated inside, sieves mainly diatoms from the water of the salt lakes of the Altiplano, while the coarser bill of the Chilean and American Flamingos takes brine shrimps, worms and other small bottom life, stirred loose by stamping paces. The Chilean Flamingo lives both on the high plateau and along the coast of Peru; the American Flamingo has a small population in the Galápagos. The nest is a truncated cone of raked-up mud holding a single chalk-white egg, and both parents feed the chick for weeks on a red secretion from the crop, long after it has joined a crèche of many other young walking the salt lake. That chick has a straight bill at first, which only takes on its kink over a matter of months. In flight neck and legs are held out perfectly straight and the black flight feathers stand out sharply against the pink coverts; flocks often move at night, in long slanting lines.