Gerhard’s Reviews > Flamingo > Status Update

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.