Tiny Baby Flamingo Getting Groomed at San Antonio Zoo Is Stealing Hearts Everywhere
Baby mammals generally resemble their adult counterparts. Kittens look like cute little cats, and whale calves look like miniature counterparts of their massive parents. This is not true in the other animal kingdoms. Most larval insects, for example, are so far from resembling their final form they don’t even look like the same species. And then there are birds, who as babies are far closer to resembling the ancient dinosaurs from which they are descended rather than the feathery grown-ups sharing their nest.
And nowhere is this little display of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny more evident than in a newborn baby flamingo, who appears in this video to be the tiniest, most adorable resident of Jurassic Park rather than the San Antonio Zoo.
In this video, a newborn baby flamingo—small enough to fit into the palm of your hand—sits on a mat while a zookeeper gently brushes its white, downy fur with the edge of what must be cutting edge technology in the world of flamingo husbandry: a toothbrush.
“Does every baby get this spa treatment?” someone asks in comments.
“Yes,” answers the zoo keeper. “It helps get the egg residue off.”
The creature looks nothing like the bright pink, curved-billed, long-legged sea birds familiar to all. Its down? White. It’s beak? Duck-like. What’s going on?
Baby Flamingoes
Flamingo chicks, sometimes called “flaminglets” are born white or gray, with fluffy down and straight beaks. The beaks don’t actually start curving until they are older. Their legs too, are a lot shorter and stubbier. Like many baby birds, flamingoes are relatively helpless when hey are first born. They stay in their nests (or in this case, in the care of zookeepers) for less than a week before they begin to get up and start walking around.
Flamingo Nurseries
Though a pair of flamingoes usually only produces a single egg at a time, flamingoes live in huge social groups that time their breeding so that an entire flock of young flamingoes are born around the same time. These baby birds stay together in nurseries, sometimes called creches, watched over by a few adult birds while the rest of the parents are out foraging. The parents are able to recognize their own babies and pick them up from flamingo daycare. Studies show that flamingoes will only gather and feed their own young, despite the sometimes massive size of these flocks.
Feeding Baby Flamingoes
Baby flamingoes are fed crop milk, a regurgitated liquid produced by both mother and father flamingo. Due to the bird’s diet, this liquid is a shocking blood-red and can look very disturbing to human eyes. The crop milk contains the red dye compounds that give adult birds their coloring. After about 6 weeks, the flamingly is weaned and begins eating the same diet as adult birds, but they stick close to their parents for another few months, as their flight feathers come in.
Even though they can now fly, flamingoes are usually still a gray color for the first year or two of life. Flamingoes live a markedly long life, twenty to thirty years, so this slow maturation process is not at all unusual.
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