Flamingos | Phoenicopteriformes

Flamingo's | 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. Everything about the way they live is geared to numbers: they feed, display and breed in dense colonies. In the interior of southern Africa they depend entirely on pans that fill only after exceptional rains; colonies form there with gaps of years between them, and in between the birds move hundreds of kilometres among saltpans, estuaries and coastal lagoons. The red and pink in the plumage comes from the food and fades once that food is gone.

Families in this order

Flamingos | Phoenicopteridae2 speciesThe 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-red, heavily bent bill of the Lesser Flamingo, very finely plated inside, sieves blue-green and diatom algae from just below the surface with the head barely submerged, while the coarser bill of the Greater Flamingo takes brine shrimps, worms and seed from the bottom, stirred loose by stamping paces. 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 thousands walking the pan. 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.