Status Updates From Flamingo (Animal)

And what does the birds’ creator think? ‘I really like how my flamingo looks – it’s very graceful’, he says. ‘An empty yard is like an empty coffee table – it cries out for something . . . I did something that people enjoyed, something that amused people. That’s so much more satisfying than, say, designing something destructive like the atom bomb.’

It was not until the 1980s that the lawn decorations regained their place in the public’s hearts and minds after appearing in the opening credits of the hugely successful television show Miami Vice.

...a ‘pillar of cheesy campiness’ that has been said to belong to ‘the pantheon of American icons’: the pink plastic lawn flamingo.

Charles Thomson, secretary of the American Continental Congress, translated the Bible in the eighteenth century and specifically listed flamingos among the many ‘birds of abomination’ described in Leviticus (11:13–19).

The twentieth century also saw flamingos inspiring artists from genres that had never before paid much attention to the birds. In 1940, for example, Ted Grouya wrote the classic jazz standard ‘Flamingo’, first recorded by Herb Jeffries and Duke Ellington; British pop band Manfred Mann reached the top of the UK music charts in 1966 with their rendition of ‘Pretty Flamingo’.

...the birds also take centre stage as main characters (as in Bob McCreadie’s children’s book Fred the Fabulous Flamingo of 2012) and major plot devices (as in Susan Trott’s novel Flamingo Thief of 2010). It may have taken nearly 500 years, but flamingos have now firmly established themselves in the English canon.

There are also at least seven plants named after the pink birds, including the flamingo lily (Anthurium andreanum), a popular houseplant.

These bright and personable birds, however, have somehow managed to be cultural wallflowers for the bulk of human history.

According to Abel Chapman, ‘a more beautiful sight cannot be imagined than the simultaneous spreading of their thousand crimson wings, flashing against the sky like a gleam of rosy light’.

Marching displays are initiated when a group of birds gathers into a tightly packed mass in which each bird has its chest pressed up against the back of another. With necks held high and heads tilted slightly back, the flamingos ‘quick-step’ first in one direction, then suddenly switch direction and go back the opposite way.

After their stunning colour, perhaps the next most iconic thing about flamingos is their tendency to stand on one leg. A modern joke suggests that flamingos adopt this position because they would fall over if they lifted up both limbs.

Although some have claimed that flamingos’ eyes are larger than their brains, there appear to be no scientific sources backing up this assertion, and no individual flamingo researchers seem willing to go on record to confirm it.

The bills of all six species have a characteristic bend in the middle. This helps keep the width of the gap between the top and bottom portions of the bill consistent along its entire length, thus improving feeding efficiency. The bend has been said to give the birds a ‘haughty appearance’ and has earned the greater flamingo an Arabic nickname meaning ‘camel of the sea’.

Flamingo feathers rapidly lose their colouration once shed, and scientists have long pondered how the birds could manage to stay so pink between moults. In greater flamingos, at least, it turns out that preen oil contains the carotenoid canthaxanthin, which allows the fluid to be used as a sort of cosmetic.

Although it is often said that flamingos are pink because they eat shrimp, this is only true of individuals of the larger species, which may feed on small aquatic crustaceans known as brine shrimp (Artemia spp.). The more common sources of carotenoids are cyanobacteria, algae and phytoplankton such as diatoms.

Because these birds are often referred to generically as ‘pink flamingos’, many people may not realize that there are actually six different species: