Flamingos are one of the most striking animals in the world.
Their long legs, bright feathers, and hooked beaks make for a very unusual yet beautiful creature. This video from the Cincinnati Zoo shows how these strange birds make for some incredible parents.
The video, which was posted on Instagram by a zookeeper, praises the chick’s parents for paying close attention to their little one.
“Look at those little legs go! Both Mom and Dad keep a close eye on their chick as they test out the waters. #BirdsAreAwesome.”
This video has collected over 22,000 likes and a couple of hundred comments, but what stood out the most to animal lovers was the active role both parents took their offspring’s development. This is a behavior that is rather uncommon in the animal kingdom.
Male birds don’t usually play a large role in raising their offspring.
Most actually leave and never meet their children at all. Not flamingos, though! For flamingos, both the mother and the father play equal roles in incubating and raising their little ones.
Fun fact: Both parents can nurse their chick from a special gland which allows both genders to produce a substance similar to a mammal’s milk.
Another thing to notice is the chick’s vocalizations.
The little guy is a pretty vocal animal who calls to its parents for help. This squawk allows the adults of the family to determine when their chick moves into the flamingo creche. This is basically a flamingo pre-school where the little guys learn how to find food and other essentials for survival.
These flamingo creches could be populated with thousands of chicks, and they are guarded by an unrelated adult. The chicks still find their own parents when it is time to eat. This is a rather interesting arrangement because it allows baby flamingos to practice adult behaviors while the adults split up their babysitting duties.
Why are baby flamingos not pink?
Don’t worry, the baby flamingo is not sick, it will turn pink as it matures and eats more food. These birds live in wetlands so their diet is mostly algae, insect larvae, shrimps, and mollusks. These foods are loaded with a reddish-orange pigment known as beta carotene. The flamingo’s digestive system will actually extract pigments found in their food and deposit them in new feathers which causes the flamingo’s color to slowly shift into pink.
Adult flamingos’ colors range from pale pink to deep red depending on its diet. Their diet is largely affected by where they live. That’s why flamingos in the Caribbean are a different color than the flamingos in Kenya. The birds in the Caribbean have more access to beta carotene-rich foods so their color is stronger and more striking. In Kenya, they eat a lower concentration of the pigment, so their feathers are pale pink.
The flamingo chick seen in the video will probably start its most drastic color change around his first molt when he loses his gray feathers and starts replacing them with more mature feathers with pigment deposited on them.
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