Flamingo Ankles

Here’s how it all started. Like many of you, I often wake way before sunrise with questions such as “Why do some animals have knees that bend backwards?” Reasonable question. Understandable.

This leads us, more or less, to look at flamingos….

Flamingo Fun Facts: perilous predator protection

Fun Facts from Wildlife Workshop:

Flamingos spend most of their day feeding on crustaceans in shallow mudflats. The mudflats also provide perfect perilous predator protection.
The flamingos’ name comes from Portuguese or Spanish Flamengo, “flame-colored,” in turn coming from the French, Flamenc, “Flame.”
Male and Female flamingos work cooperatively to build the family home, incubate the eggs for a month, and feed the chicks.
Flamingos can detect rain from more than 300 miles (500km). Scientists are not quite sure how they can do that but assume they can sense minute changes in barometric pressure.
Flamingos are not just pink on the outside, but pretty much all over. The pigments from their crustacean diet also dye their skin as well as their blood pink. If your social media feed has images of pink flamingo egg yolks, well, the yolk is on you, it’s been photoshopped.^[1]
The long fluid kneck of the flamingo is made up of nineteen vertebrae. Compare that to the seven in giraffes!

And from Folly Farms:

Did you know that when a flamingo chick is born, it isn’t pink at all? In fact it’s a dull grey colour. The familiar pink colour comes from their diet. Their natural diet would consist of mainly algae, shrimp and plankton. All these have what they call ‘carotenoid’ (the same pigment which makes carrots orange). It’s this pigment, or colouring, that turns flamingos pink.
How many eggs do they lay? They lay only one egg a year.
Why is their beak shaped like that? It’s designed that way so they can filter feed in the water. They actually hold it upside down to filter out the small bits of food in the water and it actually looks like they are ‘nibbling’ the surface.

^[1]WLBOTT WONDERS: If the Internet is lying to us about flamingo yolks, what else is it lying to us about?

Flamingo Eyes

I will review with the Elders the need to write a BLOTT specifically about weird animal eyes. I’m flashing to a certain junior high history teacher.