Flamingo Life Span

With their flamboyant pink and red plumage, long legs and necks, and strong hooked bills, flamingos are instantly recognizable. They have long fascinated people, appearing in ancient cave paintings and even Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass. Today, they’re seen in zoos around the world and, perhaps most famously, as plastic lawn ornaments. But how long do these colorful birds live? In the wild, 20 to 30 years, and in captivity 50 or more.

Flamingos are social birds that typically breed in colonies of tens to thousands of individuals, often living together their entire lives. They live in shallow water and eat a diet of algae, mollusks, brine shrimp, and other small invertebrates. They are also known for their group courtship displays, with flamingos standing together and turning their heads or bowing their necks in synchrony. These displays help to synchronize breeding in a colony so that chicks can be born at the same time and all members of the flock can raise their young together.

Greater flamingos lay one chalky white egg in a nest mound in shallow water, although sometimes they’ll lay two. Both the male and female incubate the eggs, which hatch in 27 to 31 days. They feed their chicks blood-red flamingo “milk,” a carotenoid-rich secretion from their upper digestive tract. These nutrients give the baby flamingos their characteristic rosy color, which they gradually lose as they mature into adults.

Like many wading birds, flamingos have webbed feet that are perfect for walking in soft mud. Their long legs are also very useful for wading in the water and allowing them to get closer to the bottom of soda lakes, where they find the tiny food items they feed on. Flamingos can reach depths of up to 10 feet. Their feet are so sensitive that they can sense changes in the air pressure caused by oncoming rain.

These birds are monogamous, with males staying with a single female during the breeding season and remaining with her for life. After a flamingo has mated, it builds a nest from a mound of mud that is usually 12 to 24 inches (30 to 60 centimeters) high. The nest mound is built to protect the egg from flooding and to ensure that predators can’t reach it. The nest is often close to those of other flamingos, and bickering between nest mound occupants is common.

Once the eggs hatch, flamingo chicks stay on their parent’s nest mound for 5 to 12 days. They then fledge, or leave the nest, and join creches, which are groups of young flamingos led by adults. The adult flamingos guide the chicks to freshwater sources, where they teach them to forage for their meals. As the chicks grow older, they move out of their creches and start to pair up.

In some parts of the world, flamingos have become endangered because their natural habitats have been affected by pollution and water withdrawal for agricultural uses. However, in places where humans have managed to maintain a balance between natural resources and human development, populations of these colorful birds are healthy and stable.