How to spot a friendly flamingo.

26 June 2012

My PhD is investigating the relationships that exist between different individual birds within the flocks at WWT Slimbridge. I hope to expand this to other WWT centres in the future to get an over-view of what types of interaction these flamingos are involved in and why they would chose to have specific "friends". You might think that flamingos are already incredibly social birds as they always live in large groups; after all, you hardly ever see a flamingo in the wild all by itself. Well true to some extent, living in a flock of several thousand birds (or in the case of captive birds at WWT up to flocks in the hundreds of individuals) will make you social but if you look more closely at these groups of flamingos you will see that there are clearly defined "friendships" for want of a better word (!) that you will be able to pick out.

To give you a little tutorial on what to look for if you're interested in seeing these flamingo friendships on your visit to a WWT centre, here is a basic example for you. The photo below shows the flock of lesser flamingos at WWT Slimbridge resting, sleeping and generally relaxing.

Section of the lesser flamingo flock at WWT Slimbridge; so which birds are friends with each other?

To the untrained eye this might appear as simply a group of birds that are just randomly arranged in their enclosure and that have fallen asleep where they stand. But if you look harder, you will be able to see specific groups of birds that are associating more closely together and that may have stronger relationships with each other. The following photos show what I mean here and you can see the little "subgroups" of birds that make up the flock as a whole.

Let's start at the front of the enclosure. These birds are resting more closely to each other. So this would be the first subgroup in this part of the flock.

Moving towards the middle of the photo you can see another subgroup of birds. This group is made up of several pairs that are resting very closely together and this would suggest very strongly bonded individuals. For example, the two fast asleep top-left and the two asleep dead centre.

The last subgroup can be seen at the back of the photo. These birds are preening and resting in a very distinctly separate part of the flock. There do not appear to be specifically closely bonded pairs here, but rather a collection of individuals that "get on" in each other's company.

So I hope that you can see that a flamingo flock is a more complex structure than it might first appear. Keep checking back to the flamingo blog for more stories on who is hanging around with whom and which birds are real social butterflies within each flock that WWT Slimbridge houses.