Single and Ready to Flamingle

As popular as they are as zoo animals, flamingos pose some significant challenges for zoo management.  The care of their feet, as noted in an earlier post, is definitely one.  Managing their diet, so that they maintain their expected pink coloration, is another.  And yet another is their reproduction.

With some birds, breeding is as simple as putting a male, a female, and suitable nesting materials together... and some will even forgo the nesting materials.  For flamingos, courtship and breeding are a community affair.  You can't get a pair of flamingos to breed in a zoo.  You also can't really get two pairs to do it either.  You need numbers - and the more flamingos you have in the flock, the more likely they are to breed.  A pair of flamingos, which is what many early zoo exhibits consisted of, won't experience the stimulation.  Shove flamingos together like chickens in battery cages and they'll be delighted.

There's a biological rationale for this.  Flamingos in the wild have very specific requirements for their nesting sites, and since there aren't so many of those sites around, they tend to get pretty crowded as birds cram into them.  If a flamingo pair is by itself and doesn't see other birds around, they may think there's something wrong or unsuitable with the site.  If the place is crowded with birds, then it must be a good place to breed, in their minds.  Besides, flamingo nesting grounds are popular haunts for various predators.  A lone flamingo pair has little chance of defending their eggs or chicks, so why bother even laying?  A flamingo in the middle of a vast flock has much better chances of safely raising young.

I've seen some pretty good-sized flocks of flamingos in zoos - some numbering near 100 birds - which is more than enough to encourage breeding, but nowhere near the size that flocks can get in the wild.  Zoos and aquariums looking to breed flamingos have resorted to various methods to encourage their birds to breed.  Some zoos can mix different flamingo species into one flock (I commonly see Chilean and American flamingos housed together) to give the numbers needed to make a bigger flock.  Some zoos will even surround their smaller flamingo flocks with mirrors, creating the illusion that the actual birds are standing in the middle of a flock that stretches to infinity.