29 May: Pink Flamingo Day

It's Pink Flamingo Day. Here's all you need to know about these long-legged birds.

1. The word flamingo comes from the Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, meaning "flame-coloured". The name of the family they belong to, Phoenicopterus, comes from the Greek for "blood red-feathered".
2. There are six main species of flamingo: the greater, Chilean, lesser, Caribbean, Andean and puna, although there are several subspecies. The greater flamingo is the largest and can be up to five feet tall when standing erect. The lesser flamingo is the smallest and is about three feet tall.
3. Flamingoes don't weigh much for their height. A greater flamingo never weighs more than eight pounds. This lack of body density is what helps them fly. Although they are most often seen wading, they can fly very well when they need to, reaching speeds of up to 35 miles an hour. When they fly the Black feathers on the underside of their wings become visible. Flamingoes are also strong swimmers.
4. Flamingoes eat brine Shrimp and blue-green algae, which they obtain by stirring up the mud on the bottom of the water with their feet and filtering the yummy shrimp and algae through their specially adapted bills. Their upside down bills are perfect for doing this. The characteristic Pink colour comes from their diet, aqueous bacteria and beta-Carotene, to be exact, which is broken down into pigments by the flamingo's liver. In the wild, the pinkest birds are the best fed and therefore the strongest, best at finding food and the most desirable mates. A pale or White flamingo is probably malnourished. Flamingoes in zoos tend to be paler because, although they are well fed, they don't get the concentration of beta-carotene the wild birds get.
5. They have backward bending knees. Actually, that isn't true. The joint in a flamingoes leg which we can see bending backwards is actually its ankle. Its knees are much higher up his legs under the plumage and aren't usually seen at all. They do have long legs - up to 30-50 inches long, which is longer than their entire body.
6. Why do they stand on one leg? Nobody actually knows. The most widely accepted theory is that it's to conserve body heat, because they are wading in cold water and their little tootsies get cold. However, flamingoes which live in warm water do it as well.
7. A flock of flamingos is called a stand, colony, regiment or a flamboyance.
8. The flamingo is the national bird of the Bahamas. A type of flamingo is also the official bird of the city of Madison in Wisconsin, USA - plastic ones. Plastic lawn flamingos (Phoenicopterus plasticus) are an American cultural icon introduced in 1957 by artist Don Featherstone. They are less popular these days and in 2009 Madison made the plastic flamingo its official bird to try and revive their popularity.
9. In Ancient Egypt, the flamingo was thought to be the living representation of the god Ra. In Ancient Rome, however, they were food - flamingo tongues were a delicacy. Miners in the Andes believed that flamingo fat was a cure for tuberculosis.
10. Flamingoes in the wild generally live to be about 20-30 years old, but in captivity they can live a lot longer and reach 50 or even 70. The oldest flamingo in the world died at the age of 83 in Adelaide Zoo in 2014.

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