🐾 Greater Flamingo

Greater Flamingo

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Who it is

• Scientific name: Phoenicopterus roseus
• Family & relatives: A tall wading bird in the flamingo family, most closely related to grebes.
• How to spot it: An elegant pink bird with very long legs, a long curved neck, and a big bent bill held upside down to feed.

Its body & abilities

• Size: About 1.1 to 1.5 m tall with a wingspan near 1.4 to 1.7 m.
• Weight: Roughly 2 to 4 kg (4.4 to 8.8 lb).
• Body & adaptations: Its special bill filters tiny food from water, and it gets its pink color from the shrimp and algae it eats.
• Top speed: Flies at about 50 to 60 km/h (31 to 37 mph) when traveling between lakes.
• Strength: It can run a few splashing steps across the water to take off and fly hundreds of kilometers to new lakes.
• Senses: Good eyesight and hearing that help it stay with the flock and find safe feeding lakes.
• Growing up: A single fluffy gray chick hatches, is fed special milk by its parents, and turns pink as it grows over a few years.

Where it lives

• Habitat: Shallow salty lakes, lagoons, mudflats, and coastal wetlands.
• Where in the world: Parts of Africa, southern Europe, the Middle East, and southern Asia.
• Territory: It does not hold a private patch but feeds and nests packed close together in huge shared colonies.

What it eats

• Diet: Eats tiny water creatures and plants filtered from the water, and drinks fresh water when it can.
• Favorite foods: Tiny shrimp, algae, seeds, and small water insects, which also give it its rosy color.
• How it hunts: It stirs the mud with its feet, then sweeps its upside-down bill through the water to strain out tiny food.

How it behaves

• How it moves: Wades on stilt-like legs, swims when the water is deep, and flies with its neck and legs stretched out straight.
• When it is active: Active by day and often at night too, feeding whenever the tide and water are right.
• Family life: Extremely social, living in colonies that can number thousands or even a million birds.
• How it talks: Honks and grunts loudly and marches together in group displays that help pairs find each other.
• Babies: A pair builds a mud mound nest and lays one egg, which both parents keep warm for about a month before it hatches.

Its place in nature

• Role in nature: Helps keep salty lakes healthy by feeding on algae; eagles, foxes, and big gulls prey on flamingos and eggs.
• Conservation: Listed as Least Concern by the IUCN, though it depends on clean, undisturbed wetlands.
• Dangers: Dies mainly from predators, drying-up lakes, cold snaps, and pollution of its wetlands.

Life & legacy

• How long it lives: About 30 to 40 years in the wild and sometimes over 50 years in captivity.
• In our culture: A famous symbol of the tropics, loved for its pink color and its habit of standing on one leg.
• Where to see it: Salty lakes and lagoons in Africa, southern Spain, and India, plus many reputable zoos worldwide.
• Fun fact: Flamingos often stand on one leg to save body heat, and baby flamingos are born gray, not pink.