The Glorious Flamingo

Flamingos are much more than just pretty pink birds. They are in fact, quite remarkable! Listen and learn…

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of I
Heart Radio. Hey, you're welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh,
and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is
Stuff you should Know. Another animal addition, which everybody loves those,

(00:21):
and so do I. I would love to see a
master list of all the animals that we've covered. Sure,
it's probably longer than I think, twice as long maybe,
But these are about mingoes. I'm super excited because, uh hey,
I mean, who wasn't sort of fascinated by flamingos there
attention getters with their funny one legged stance in their

(00:43):
pink But when we finally went down to the Caribbean
for the first time this year, to the Bahamas, they
had some mingoes on their property and they would do
a you know, you could walk by them and just
say hi and stuff like that, and then in the
morning they would do a little flamingo parade where they

(01:04):
would walk them around the property like people would you
and are you could follow along, which of course we did. Uh,
And that just got my brain thinking, you know, uh,
Ruby has had a painting. We got a ten dollar painting,
like a real painting that someone did with their hands
for ten bucks. That's quite a deal of a tight

(01:25):
grouping of flamingos kind of from the neck up. That's
been in her room her whole life almost, and I
was just like, I gotta learn about these things. That's
a great composition, the group of flamingos from the neck up.
I've seen it before, not necessarily your painting, but I've
seen that that composition before, and it is it's a trope.
It's great. It's good because it could be like trees

(01:48):
or sea grass, like any Spindley grouping of things. Um so,
so this is a painting of sea grass? Well you
know what I mean? Tall ready Spindley Okay, um so
this is a lot like the Possum episode for me,
and that like I generally knew some stuff, but I
learned a bunch of new cool stuff and now I'm
a big flamingo fan. Yeah. Same. So you said something

(02:11):
about them parading around. Apparently, so was there a human
saying like, hey, this way, everybody, the parades going this way,
and the Flamingos would kind of follow. Yeah, they had
like an electric cattle pride, right. Apparently Flamingoes respond to
that really well. No, they had humans that were just
sort of walking along and sort of it seemed like
a just a very gentle, wavy, corralling type of gesture. Right.

(02:33):
So there's a video artist and Israeli video artist whom
went to a zoo in Germany. Um, and she came
up with a video five minute video called sixty nine bows.
I think sixty seven bows. Get your head out of
the gutter, sixty seven pounds, all right, um, And it

(02:56):
was the flamingos responding to a hand gesture or she did,
and all of all the flamingos would bow at once
but really it's like they're ducking. And then the artist inserted, um,
I think, very earnestly, but in retrospect also really hilariously
a gunshot sound, and then the flamingos would duck every
time the gunshot sound went off. It's that was a

(03:17):
little weird. I didn't expect that. Um. This is, by
the way, a video artist named Nira or Nero pereg
give credit where credits due, But that's all the same thing,
and it was it was interesting to see them move
in unison and I watched a lot of flamingo videos.
It's very fascinating the way they move about the earth.
For sure, they do have a certain odd gangly grace

(03:40):
to them, don't they. Yeah. So, um, flamingos actually are
different from just about every other birds. Apparently their order
um Phoenicia terra forms. Um, thank you, I have an
extra letter in there. No, I didn't phansiyop terra forms,

(04:00):
So what's should I quibble? No? I mean I don't
have an eye after the sea. I just have phenice terraforms.
My brain literally was like, nope, we're doing it. I
don't care what you see. Um, we're doing We're adding
the extra so pheniceop terra forms. Stupid brain. Your sounds better.

(04:26):
If that makes you feel better. It does make me
feel a little better. But that's that's the order that
flamingos um belong to. And there's only five species, as
we'll see. But um, they are just the like, it's
just flamingos that belong to the order, and they diverge
from other um birds a really long time ago. But
you know, geneticists and biologists love to to taxonomize things,

(04:49):
so they've tried to figure out the closest living relative
to the flamingo and what we did for a very
long time was like, oh, that animal looks like that animal,
they must be very closely related. And as genetics of
kind of come of age. Starting around two thousand was
I think a really big turning point with the Human
Genome project um that we found that genetically speaking, that's
a terrible way to classify things, and the flamingos are

(05:12):
a good example of that. Yeah, it's kind of lazy,
it is. It's also like a it's old timey and dumb,
yeah sentence, you know what I mean. It is like, oh,
they look like storks, so let's just put them in
that group. And that's what they did for a while,
storks and herons, and then uh no, maybe they're more
like geese and swans and ducks. But that wasn't right.
And finally in the it took a while, I mean,

(05:33):
the early adds in two thousand one is when they
finally said, you know, genetically speaking, their closest to something
called is that a GREEB. I'm gonna go with GREEB
g r e B s and they are sort of duckish.
Olivia helped us out. She said duck like I would
agree with that. Uh, and what What it did though,
was it kind of brought up what we're talking about. Apparently.

(05:55):
I don't think it was like a firestorm, but I
think it was a case where they said, hey, like,
we should do this better. And this is a prime example.
And the old school taxonomists hung their head in shame
and kind of slunk off and retired and died at
various times. So the word flamingo bears a striking resemblance
to a Spanish word flamenco, which you can't say that

(06:18):
word without putting without snapping one finger at about your
stomach and one above your head. I can, at least
I know it's really the thing to do. And that
that word flamenco um has uh. It means actually the bird,
the flamingo. It also refers to that dance style and
style of music flamenco. And it also refers to a

(06:39):
person from Flanders, which is part of Belgium, right, So
a Flemish person would be called a flamenco in Spanish. Yeah,
and and I'm not sure why those are connected and
used in the same word, but they are all right, Well,
that is weird. Uh, we are gonna guess talk about
the different kinds. The species you said five, is there

(07:02):
not a six? There's okay, So I'm siding with the
ones who say one a subspecies of another. Okay, all right,
you've already put yourself in a particular flamingo camp. I see.
I I have as a matter of fact, and I'm
going to stay there until genetics proves me wrong. All right,
Well we'll start with the greater flamingo. This is the

(07:22):
big fella. Um. They can be five feet tall. They
can weigh up like close to nine pounds, which doesn't
sound like a lot. But if you look at a flamingo,
there's a lot of um money leg and there's not
a lot of body. There a lot of negative space
they don't take up. Yeah, exactly. Uh. These are pretty
pale when it comes to their pink pinkness. And we

(07:46):
should talk and I guess through this, we'll talk about
their distribution because it may surprise you. Um. I kind
of thought it was just like, yeah, they're in the
Caribbean and Florida and that's it. That's not true at all. Um.
These are in Africa, Southern Europe, and Asia, as in
South Asia and Western Asia, and they like one of
the cool things about flamingos is they sometimes will live

(08:08):
where no other animals can or will live, and that
is really saline or alkaline lakes and mud flats in
places like that. Yeah, in that sense, they fill in
a specific ecological niche that there's really not many other
animals that that do. And that's just the first interesting, weird,
unusual fact about flamingos. Right, just get ready, Yeah, I

(08:31):
had no idea. So they eat like stuff in like
the saltiest, briniest parts of Earth. That's where they that's
where they like to be. So the Caribbean flamingo, which
we know of as the American flamingo um, is considered
by some, including myself, a subspecies of the greater flamingo,
which would make their just five species of flamingo technically, right.

(08:54):
And these are the ones that I saw. Uh, they
are smaller, they are super super pink, very brightly colored. Um.
These are the same, very same flamingos, the ones that
I saw that actor Lea Schreiber played with the week before.
Oh did he really? Man? You know how when you
get in a in a car to go to the

(09:15):
place wherever you're going, they liked always like to talk
about stuff like that, and this car driver was like,
you know, I can't do the accent, but he said
that Ray Donovan was here last week and oh, it's
like lovely of Schreiber, and Emily of course looked it
up and he um, if you want to see like
forty pictures of Lee Schreiber's family doing things in the Bahamas, Uh,

(09:39):
you can do that online because that's must be what
it's like to be a real celebrity. I couldn't imagine.
It was this picture after picture flamingos and here he
is at the water slide and it's like, did they
just follow him around with the camera? And I guess
the answers yes. I UM. I started to watch Ray
Donovan Wants on a Flight um, because I've heard nothing
but good things about it. But must have come in

(10:00):
on like season five or something like that, because you
know on Delta they have like Rando episodes. It's so weird. Yeah,
it's so strange. So I and when I came in,
it was like the the either I think the season
premiere of some late season and like he's clearly having
some sort of mental breakdown because he's having a crisis

(10:21):
of conscience, conscience from killing people. And I was like,
oh this again the killer had the killer can't just
take killing any longer. I'm like, I'm not done on this.
I'm done. Yeah. I enjoyed we and we both love
that show, Emily and I for uh, probably the first
three or four seasons, and then it was one of
those that was like you should have known when to stop,

(10:41):
and then we kind of just quit watching. Yeah, I
mean that happens a lot, it does in America. That
was the good thing about our show. We we knew, well,
actually Science Channel knew that. It's a while we were ahead.
You know what about the Chilean Flamingo. What's up with
that fella? These guys are particularly string an, unusual and
fascinating because they like to live in the cold. Um

(11:04):
they can handle cold weather at least um they live
in Chili in a lot of South America. In fact,
I don't know why Chile got the um the naming rights,
but they typically have pink bands on their gray legs,
which are something that kind of sets them off from
the other ones. And there, I guess the third in
line as far as size goes, there smaller than Caribbean

(11:26):
flamingos bigger than the lesser flamingo though, which is another right. Yeah,
it's such a sad name to call something the lesser flamingo. Uh.
They are the smallest. They're about three to three to
five pounds ish. And they are also in Africa on
the eastern uh and southern uh well, I say coasts,

(11:47):
but they can go inland as well if they've got
some good, good alkaline lakes going on, but also in
places like Yemen. Yeah, you'll find flamingos and yemen in Pakistan,
in India. These have the dark bills and the really
really red eyes that are just beautiful to look at.
And I believe this is the most abundant flamingo species, right, Yeah,

(12:08):
there's like they'll gather in packs of like millions, one
and a half two million, or at the very least
that's how many of there are total. But they do,
they do gather in huge flox as we'll see, Yeah,
into the millions. That wasn't a hyperbole, by the way,
chuck Um, Flamingos in Yemen is an excellent album title,
oh man, not kidding. I mean talk about the album

(12:30):
art too. It would be wonderful. Yeah, that could see like, uh,
I don't know who would do that, Franz Ferdinand or
somebody Franz Ferdinand or um what was our What did
Ian Bowers say our brit pop band was something Star?
I don't remember. That would be a great something Star
album Flamingos and yam and we're claiming that for our

(12:52):
band that we create after we retire. Okay, I just saw,
by the way, Franz Ferdinand is opening for the Pixies
on their leg which goes to Atlanta sweet when uh
in June. That's pretty cool, man. Yeah, I used to
love those guys. I've been on a huge Pixies kick
right now, um, which I had been way off the

(13:13):
Pixies for a while, Like, man, am I ever going
to like the pixie First new music? I haven't heard
any of the new stuff. I've just been. I just
got off of their old stuff and then I got
back into um Trump Lamont, which I mean it's just
so good from start to finish. So yeah, I love
the Pixies again everybody. And I don't really like Ray Donovan.

(13:34):
So there's the two things you need to know about
me from this episode. They're new when that came out
late last year. Is Okay, it sounds like a Pixies record,
but it's just it's not as weird. Oh yeah, it's
kind of polished. I don't know. It just sounds like, hey,
we're gonna make a Pixies record, so let's do that.
And I don't know. I mean, I think the new

(13:54):
bass player is doing a great job. But do Miss
Kim deal? So I mean, yeah, you gotta respect that though.
The not just like we're going to cash in on
the you know, three five albums that everybody's crazy about
from the eighties and early nineties and just tour on that,
although that's mostly what they played, thank goodness. So let's
let's um, let's talk about I think the coolest Flamingo,

(14:15):
or at least the most interesting of the flamingos. Obviously,
the Caribbean Flamingos, the Money Flamingo far and away the best,
just because it's so pink and pretty and perfect size
and all that stuff. But the Andean Flamingo, for my money,
is the most interesting of all. Yeah, they're very rare,
and it's just h I had no idea that they
could live high up in the Andes Mountains like that. Um.

(14:38):
I was just blown away by that because I thought
they were really exclusively um, you know, like I said,
sort of coastal birds. But um, there aren't a lot
of about eighty thousand of them. And you will be
very saddened to know that those lithium batteries that we
all love because they last so long, lithium mining in
climate change are driving them away and destroying them. Batteries

(15:00):
kill flamingos, that's right. So yeah, there's about eighty thousand
of them alive, and they are I think under threatened status,
which is one step down from endangered and very much
threatening to move into endangered. So I don't know the
andian is vulnerable vulnerable Okay, so that's which is one

(15:21):
step down. Okay, I got you, Thanks, no problem. And
then James's flamingo is the one that you don't consider
like a full fledged flamingo. No, No, that's its own.
That's a species. That's the Caribbean flamingo that I consider
a subspecies of the greater flamingo. All right, James's flamingo
is um. They thought it was actually extinct um in

(15:44):
the nineteen twenties, I believe. But then in the fifties.
It's a whole Cela Camp comeback story because they discovered
that there actually were James's flamingos that were mixed in
with Chilean and Andy and flamingos in South America. Um,
and not mixed in like they were interbreeding like the
these huge flocks like we'll get across. The flocks of

(16:06):
flamingos in the wild are so enormous and so populous
it's crazy. But um, these flocks will there are these
different species will kind of flock together, but they keep
their distance from one another. And that's where they rediscovered
the James flamingo that wasn't extinct after all. Yeah, named
after the British naturalists who studied them, Harry Berkeley James,

(16:30):
and I guess he just felt good enough about his
work where he said, I'm gonna name you after me. Now,
let's go have some mead, right, all right, I think
we should take a break and have some mead and
we'll talk about their pinkness right after this stuff. You

(16:54):
should know, all right, we're back. One of the things
I did know about flamingos, but only in a rudimentary way,
was that they're pink because of what they eat. I

(17:14):
did not know this at all. Really. I think that's
a kind of a common like basic flamingo fact, which
is why are they pink? Because this stuff they eat?
Otherwise they oh no, not another one, not another seraph.
Everybody knows that, you moron. Well, then could you do

(17:35):
us the uh, the honors please and explain this? No, no,
you go ahead, you're explaining it fine. I was just teasing. Well,
it's because what they eat is rich in beta carotene,
and what they largely eat is algae um. They stick
their face down. If you see flamingos walking around in um,
I guess like ankle too, whatever their knees would be

(17:57):
knee deep water, you'll see them stick their face down
there a lot and rummage around, and sometimes they'll just
leave it down there, like fully dunked. And what they're
doing is they're eating their filter feeders like a baleen whale,
and they're just moving muddy water around and letting water
swish around in their mouth, and they have these little
uh what is it like a little filter yeah, described

(18:20):
as like a comb like filter along. They're lower bill okay, no,
their upper bill, yes, because they're upside down, so their
upper bill is now their lower bill when they're feeding,
and that's where the filter is, right, so they're they're
kind of like that oil pulling. You know, some people
swish essential oil in their mouth to like fight cavities

(18:41):
or whatever. I didn't know that that's essentially what they're doing.
They use their tongues to kind of switch the water
back and forth and then spit it out and get
some more water. And apparently they can do this like
four times in a second. They're that fast to just
gather really really small stuff. But the stuff that they're
eating is so full of beta carotene um carotenoids actually

(19:01):
that the flamingos um livers break the break them down
into a pigment. Which is a fun word to say,
and I'm about to say it. You ready can't as anthon?
Oh wow, that's way better than I what's I love it?
It's one of my new favorite words. C A N
t h A x A n t h I N
can't as anthon? Yeah, good job. So it ends up

(19:25):
in their feathers, in their skin, which turns them pink.
And this is why Chuck, I think that lesser and
Caribbean or Caribbean is a subspecies of Greater. Sorry, because
the big distinction, I mean, yes, the Greater is a
little bigger, not ridiculously bigger, but a big distinction is
their coloring. And I think that it's because the Caribbean

(19:46):
has more carotenoid rich diet than the Greater, and that
they're really genetically essentially the same species, they just have
different diets available to them. I think you're probably right, um.
And you know, because they like to put flamingos in
places like zoos for a long time, you're like, hey,
you feed these things red peppers and carrots and orange things,

(20:10):
and they turn and they keep that color. So we're
just going to feed them that and which is terrible
and a very lazy kind of point of view. Um,
But I think you know, now zoos are mostly on board.
I think with I was saying, okay, maybe we should
just feed them what they like to eat. That also
keeps them pink. And also you can turn orange everybody
knows for meeting like too many carrots or mangoes or

(20:32):
something like that, sweet potatoes. Um. And that's a condition
is called kademia, which will turn up in our Lives
show eventually. Oh, that's right, look for it. That's a
nice little tease. Watch for it this fall on stuff
you should know. Speaking of to her, we should just

(20:54):
go ahead and mention, um, because people are kind of asking.
We are doing these first three shows in real time
this week, that will be by the time it comes
out in Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco. But we are
aiming to do six more shows in tiny little groups
of three, hopefully in the in the late spring, in
the early fall. And um, we haven't nailed the cities down,

(21:16):
but you know that's that's what we're trying to do.
Not nine shows this year. You really put all those
questions to rest. Well, I mean, should we mention some
of those cities? I don't want people to be disappointed?
Yeah kind of No, I mean they're going to be
disappointed eventually. White might as well just disappoint them now
so they can be disappointed all year. Well, I think

(21:36):
we're gonna finally hit in Nashville. Yeah, I think we're
gonna do Orlando again and finish up in Atlanta again,
our hometown shows. It's right, what about in between? Uh? Well,
we're um, out of the four I think we're gonna
pick three from probably Boston, New York, d C in Chicago,
all cities that are great for stuff you should know,

(21:59):
rich with suff you should know listeners. Yeah, and if
we're gonna do this, like, you know, maybe nine shows
a year, we're gonna have to mix it up because
it's so easy to just go to like the same
banger cities every time. But we've been to so many
cities that turned out to be banger. Like surprisingly, Kansas
City was a great show. Uh. St. Louis was a
great show. Cleveland was a great show. Kansas. Yeah, Austin's

(22:23):
always the jam. I mean, we've been to a bunch
of places that were like this is this is actually
really great time we want to come back. It's just, um,
you know, if we're doing nine shows this year, we
we guys, we just started out with our our usual
how about that. Yeah, we're dipping our toe back in
the live show pun but we we also like to
add a brand new state. And that's why we're going

(22:43):
to Nashville this year. So, uh, take Heed, take Heed,
take heed. Boise. Yeah, that's good of Boise. We go
see our old friend Dave Ruce, that's his stomping ground.
Yeah all right, I think you can't tell is incredibly
chipper and positive personality. That's true, very poisyan. And by

(23:08):
the way, Chuck Um, we should give a shout out
to Dave's podcast, A Bible Time Machine, Right, Yeah. Dave
is a bit of a biblical scholar and takes a
very sort of analytical view of the Bible in this podcast.
It's not like a preachy thing, right right. So if
you want to get to know Dave, Ru's one of
our great writers that works for stuff you should know.

(23:30):
You can get to know him a lot more wherever
you get podcasts Bible Time Machine. Yeah, dare I say
a sort of stuff you should know, like approach to
biblical matters. I mean, how could it not be, you know? Yeah,
I know. Can we go back to flamingos for goodness sakes,
because this is where it gets really interesting to me.

(23:51):
Is a lot of this stuff in the next five minutes,
namely namely their age. Did you know that lived this old? No, dude,
twenty to sixty years and the oldest flamingo on record
was eighty three years old. Yeah, his name was Greater.
He was a greater flamingo and they named him Greater
at the Adelaide Zoo. He showed up at the zoo

(24:13):
in the thirties and he died in two thousand fourteen.
And he was just this amazing resident. And apparently the
Adelaide Zoo had like a flamingo encounter where their flamingos
were able to mix with humans, and that turned out
very badly. Four Greater in two thousand and eight because
four scumbag teenagers beat him almost to death for no

(24:34):
reason other than he was there. He was an animal.
And I looked so hard to find out what happened
to those teenagers, and all I could find was that
they were charged no follow up whatsoever, which really makes
me think that they were released to their parents custody
and they've probably been torturing animals ever since. Yeah, this
this one was really tough to read about. I don't

(24:56):
need to say anything else about it. And it's disgusting. Yeah,
it is disgusting. And know that Australians are like the
opposite of that as people. I know, it's really surprising.
Hopefully they got hit in the butt with a giant
boot like on the Simpsons, or maybe they gave the
old outback treatment. You know what I mean, A dingo

(25:17):
ate my scumbag. See if you can find your my
own boys. Uh, that's not of course I don't. I'm
not supporting, like you know, killing teenagers in retribution. But
also we're not supporting teenagers beating up animals and getting
away with especially an elderly animal too. It wasn't even
like a young animal. It was three well let's see,

(25:40):
so he was in his seventies, mid se flamingo that
they beat up. I didn't mean to spend this much
time on it, but I am a little worked up
about us. Still, no, no, no, I'm with you, man,
it's it's awful. Um. Flamingos may want to travel occasionally.
They're considered non migratory, but they will get out of
dodge if they need to. Um, if they you know,

(26:03):
if the food isn't good or whatever there, or the
waters um too higher, too low, they'll they'll go to
greener pastures. And they'll do so with um a plum.
Because they can travel. Man. They like to travel at night.
They like those red eye flights and they can go
like three hundred to four hundred miles a night. Yeah,
they traveled between about thirty to forty miles per hour typically,

(26:26):
so that's forty six kilo. That's pretty fast. Yeah, especially
over ten straight hours, that's pretty impressive. But yeah, they
typically like to stay where they are. It's just if
the environment changes, they're like, all right, we're out of here,
we gotta go find us a new alkaline flat. Yeah.
What about the way they stand, because that's what really

(26:47):
every time I've seen flamingos, and this is one of
the main reasons I dug into this was why in
the world did they stand there on one leg? Well,
they thought for a long time it was to conserve
body heat, which is another It must have come from
the nineteenth century taxonomous don't get that that bony little
leg and gonna conserve any heat. Um. But I guess
they were like, well, there's no feathers or anything on it,

(27:07):
so I guess it's a huge thing to lose heat.
But there was more investigation that was like, no, actually,
they have a really good system for conserving heat in
their their bony little legs. Um, So that's not it.
And they think probably it's just that it's more stable
and possibly more comfortable for them to stand on one
leg because they're able to lock the um the tendons

(27:31):
and ligaments and muscles and joints and everything in the
leg that they're standing on, and it's just like you're
not you're not gonna fall over. Um. And then there's
one other thing about this, chuck um. They have a knee.
It's not what you think. It's not in the middle
of their leg. That's not their knee. Their knee, which
allows them to move forward and backward is um where

(27:51):
they're where our hips are. It's up in their body
about where our hips are. That's what their knee where
their hips. I don't know. I saw that they have
hips though that they do have hips. They're similar to
other birds, but I don't know if that was a
reference to their actual knee. Interesting. Yeah, you can tell
they're locked in like when they're standing there, they're not.

(28:12):
They're not swaying around Like put me on one leg
for a little while and you're gonna see a little movement. Yeah, yeah,
you are. They tell you not to like lock your
knees um for very long because you can faint for
some reason. We'll have to do a short stuff on
that sometime for humans. Yes, well, well you're not flamingo
esk in that respect, No, not at all. Uh. You

(28:33):
mentioned their communities and this is just amazing. They their
their colonies or their flamboyance, which is we did a
whole episode on on those names. Um, a flamboyance of flamingoes.
I've seen other places say a regiment or a flurry
or a stand, but why would you not say a
flamboyance of flamingo Don't know, I just just just lock

(28:54):
that in like a ligament, that's right. Yeah. So, um,
I think there was a study that was done in
that kind of uh looked at these groups and started
to like actually pay attention to individual members of them,
and found that like that, the the the groups have
incredibly complex social relationships and interactions, and there's clicks within

(29:17):
these larger groups, and um, some members will have enemies
and um, this is actually something I liked about flamingos.
They tend to be very peaceful. Like it's not one
of those things where you like, oh, that beautiful pink
bird likes to eat tear the heads off of lizards
and beat up one another or something like that. They're
actually super peaceful animals. They like to avoid their enemies.

(29:38):
They don't. They're just kind of like, hey, man, relax,
don't do it, you know when you want to get Yeah,
they have friends, um, they and they also are serial monogamous,
as we'll see. Yeah, they get together, uh for a
mating season, and they typically change it up after that
mating season and get a new partner, but they stick

(29:58):
together through that mating season in and they will um,
they will, they will co uh. I guess well, I
guess we should talk about their breeding. They breed when
they want to breed, which is kind of cool. It's
not like a certain time of year or you know,
any particular season. It's just got to be like the
right spot, the right um circumstance, and then they get

(30:22):
it on. And if you want to see some fun stuff,
just go on an internet video player and just um
check out Flamingo Mating Dance Ritual or something like that,
and just watch all the beautiful myriad videos that are
online from the BBC and other places of these huge

(30:44):
groups of like hundreds and like you said, they can
group in the millions. At least there was the hundreds
of thousands. But yes, I'm all thought there was a
flamingo flock once that hit million and they were like,
we did it a flock a flamboyance. I'm sorry, thank
you for saving me from I sell uh. And they
just you know, they move around and dance and if

(31:05):
you know, a lot of um mating rituals include dance
in the wild, but it's usually like a male dancing
to attract the attention of the female. But in this case,
they're both trying to impress one another. And the most
um I guess prolific maters are the ones. They're about
twenty years old, by the way, which is right in

(31:26):
the wheelhouse, but they are the ones that have the
most dance moves and the the best ability to switch
between those moves. And it's really kind of cute, you know.
It's like literally dancing and how impressive is your dance? Right?
And it's it's it bears a strong resemblance to how
humans mate, where like you're at a club and you're

(31:46):
dancing together to see how you connect, and if it's
just right, then you go off together and stay together
for a year, right, And that's just like flamingos are, right,
and back to that when they do finally get together,
the both the male and the female UM will help
nurture that egg and sit with that egg because it's

(32:07):
only one egg. Um, the incubation period is pretty short,
it's about a month, and so they they're really both
involved in that process, which is kind of cool. Yeah,
it's remarkable actually, Um, some of those dance moves to
there like stuff you'd expect, you know, like them flapping
and bending their heads and sticking their tails up and stuff.
But they also do huh, a lot of headwork, that's right, Yeah, yes,

(32:32):
so then that's what you would think with a flamingo.
But they also have at least one move where they
put like a wing point in one direction and the
leg points in another, which very much brings to mind
John Travolta on the cover Saturday Night Fever. And there's
actually a name for that move. It's called the disco finger.
So Flamingos do the disco finger. So if a flamboyance

(32:54):
of Flamingos doing the disco finger isn't enough to make
you love Flamingos, then there's something really wrong with you. Yeah,
that's another bumper sticker. We've got batteries killed Flamingos and
flamingos with the disco sticker for the exactly. Here's another
kind of fun thing when it comes to mating season
is the ladies will almost adorned makeup. Um. There is

(33:18):
a gland on their tail which produces you know how
they have that that that coloration. It produces a really
rich version of that carrotinoid oil, and they will they
will wipe it on their bills and on their wings
as like like pretty in themselves up a little bit.
And it gets even better because after they have made

(33:41):
it there, after mating season, they stopped doing that. They're
just like, I'm not gonna bother anymore. Just like humans, man,
Flamingos are a lot and I think it's actually both
um sexes that do that that makeup. I don't think
it's just females. But yeah, they're they're just like whatever,
we we already landed a eat? Was that just flamingo

(34:01):
sexist a little bit? But that's okay, you didn't mean.
There's also another remarkable thing about flamingos that they're part
of just a small handful of birds that produced milk
for their young. And you're like, whoa, that would make
them mammals? Wrong? There's actually like pigeons, flamingos, and I

(34:22):
don't remember the other one. There's maybe one or two
more that produced milk and what this is called crop milk,
and they produce it through um glands that line all
along their digestive tract and it's full of that carotenoid
um rich fatty rich um food. There's also a lot
of red blood cells, which I suspect probably imparts to

(34:44):
their young um like immunity to like disease and stuff
like that. And it's like really red um. So people
are like, wow, that that flamingo is killing the other
flamingo is dripping blood all over it. That's actually it's
it's crop milk. And that's pretty cool because as Chuck,
both sexes produced the crop milk in both sexes take
turns not only caring for the chick but feeding the

(35:06):
chick too. And Chuck, by the way, they only lay
one egg at a time typically, so a couple, this
monogamous couple will both be feeding their one kid milk
at the same time. Well not at the same time probably,
but you know, in the same rearing. How about that
and both letting their appearance go. That's right. It's the

(35:27):
same time, not wearing any makeup. They both look very tired. Uh.
This Um, the parents care for this little chickie for
about a week in the nest and then they kind
of go to daycare almost uh. And that they go
off with all the other little babies, and they're called
crutches and there are a few adults sort of watching
out like daycare workers. Uh. And then nine to thirteen

(35:50):
weeks later, and we should say they're born um basically
sort of kind of grayish white or brownish white. And
then once they start, you know, eating all the stuff,
then they get that pink hue. But nine to thirteen
weeks is when they're gonna kind of, you know, get
ready to go and beat full fledged flamingos. They can
also perhaps form same sex couples, right like there there

(36:14):
was a pair at the Denver Zoo, very very sweet. Uh,
Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass. Uh. Lance was the Chilean flamingo.
Freddie Mercury was an American flamingo and or say was
I guess is I think they're still around, but sadly
not together. They got together before the pandemic in twin

(36:35):
and we're surrogate parents, basically for breeding couples that abandoned
their eggs, and then apparently about a year later, after
the pandemic hit, they said too much. I've had enough, right,
but we'll part close friends. The human lance Bass is
surely honored to have had a flamingo named after him

(36:56):
that was in the same sex couple with the flamingo
named after Freddie Mark Greek. Don't you think sure? He
already has a fish named after him, m man, dad,
we should take a break, Yeah, we said, all right,
we'll be right back. Stuff. You should know, all right, Chuck,

(37:33):
we're back, and um. People have really enjoyed flamingos for
a long time, a lot longer than than even just
since we started appreciating flamingos, you and me. Yeah, like
a few days ago. Way longer than that, like thousands
of years longer than that. As a matter of fact,
there's a cave painting from southern Spain that dates from

(37:55):
seven thousand years before present that has a flamingo on.
It's pretty much unmistakable. Yeah, I'll just look at the
cave and they're the answers. They're an Egyptian art there,
you know, since there has been kids books. They've been
all over kids books because kids obviously are going to
be fascinated by flamingoes because they're so striking. That's why

(38:18):
there's one hanging on my daughter's wall. Although I don't
think we have any flamingo books. Oh, you need to
remedy that situation. But if someone hasn't written one about
Freddie Mercury and Lance Bass and there's an opportunity they're waiting.
I have two flamingo dads exactly. Um. But you know,

(38:38):
it probably would also not surprise you to learn that
not too long ago in the nineteenth century, flamingoes were
hunted and killed because the ladies had to have those
lovely pink feathers in their hats. Um, they would eat flamingos. Um.
It was a you know, if you go back to
like ancient Rome, it was a um, a delicacy, and

(39:00):
in other parts of the world too. I think, yeah,
and that's just so just old timey again kind of
dim humans like look at that pretty feather. I'm gonna
go kill that thing that has those pretty feathers, and
I'm gonna kill them so often that they're gonna just
go extinct. So, Chuck, did you know this that they
think at least the Caribbean ones probable that all flamingos

(39:25):
are I'm just making that up, but at the least
the Caribbean um flamingos seemed to hail from Florida. People
consider them um native to like maybe the Bahamas or
Cuba or somewhere else. Nope, they seem to have originated
or be native to South Florida, specifically the Keys. Yeah.

(39:47):
And I think that they were so overhunted. It was
thought that they, like any flamingos in the twentieth century,
were either just travelers who got you know, lost on
the way to the Caribbean, or they were escaped captives. Uh.
And so they tagged one. I think in the twenty
tins there was a flamingo name Conky or Conchi, depending

(40:11):
on how you say the word conk, conch. What do
you say conky? Okay? I said Conky two. Uh. And
they saw this swimmingo. I think they tagged it. It
was near an airfield on Boca Chica Key oh Bosa,
I'm just kidding. Oh. And they gave you the old

(40:33):
satellite transmitter treatment on the leg. And then I said
I'm sure this thing is going to go back to
the Caribbean, and they said, no, this thing is actually
sticking around and is permanent. So, like, I think that's
whether they when they decided, hey, I think these these
are not wayward travelers or captives that have escaped. I
think they're Florida flamingos. Yeah, And they they said, well,

(40:55):
wait a minute, it's possible that they are escaped ones
because there are a lot of nineteenth century eroad tycoons
that built like enormous estates for themselves and imported flamingos
for those estates, because the local flamingos are all dead,
and uh, scientists have said, like, it doesn't matter. We're
just going to say this is the native population rebounding,
and let's just call it that and stop asking questions.

(41:16):
It doesn't matter. Now the flamingos are coming back and
they're from Florida originally. That's right. And I think which
one is actually increasing in population? The Caribbean and I
believe the Greater are both increasing in population, if I'm
not mistaken. Yeah, I think so. Which is great? Yeah,
that is great, it's Greater. Um, they're about twenty thousand.

(41:36):
I heard that. By the way, they're about twenty thousand
flamingos living in um. I say captivity. It is captivity,
but the in in zoos basically, and uh, we have
them here in our Atlanta zoo. You can go buy
and visit them. I guess that counts. At this place
in the Bahamas, they're like fifteen or twenty that they
had probably wouldn't that many, maybe about a dozen. Um.

(42:00):
But they have found that, you know, flamingos like to
be in big, large groups when it comes to these
mating rituals. They like, they like a lot of um choice,
I think in their selective mates. And so they said,
these smaller groups, they're not mating like they should. So
at least one zoo in England, the well it's spelled Colchester.
I'm sure it's not pronounced that way. Um, it's probably

(42:23):
Colster or something like that. Kolki. Yeah, the Kulki Zoo
in England put up big, full length mirrors to trick
them into thinking they were bigger groups, right, and it worked.
They like to look at themselves too, apparently. Yeah, But
I mean it gave them the illusion that there was
way more flamingos than they all started to dance and
get it on and sex with a mirror. Yeah, and

(42:43):
the flamingo population and captivity in England was saved. Uh
oh really yeah, I'm just wrapping it up. Okay. They
clip their wings generally when they're in zoos because they
will fly away of worse. Uh And if they don't
get on those wings enough and they they managed to

(43:04):
sneak out a little more wings size, then they will
fly away and they'll they'll go away and this zoo
flamingo will be found many meaning miles away for years
and years in a row and become little celebrities. Yeah.
Apparently there was a ranger at the Great Salt Lake
who reported a flamingo and was I apparently told or

(43:27):
asked if there was an elephant with it, because there's
just no flamingos at the at the Great Salt Lake.
But this one named Pink Floyd escaped from the Tracy
Aviary in Salt Lake City and was like, holy cow,
a huge salt lake. This is exactly where I want
to be. But sadly, um, I mean he basically lived
there for the rest of his life, but he was alone. Um.

(43:48):
So there was actually a group in Salt Lake City
called the Friends of Floyd who wanted to import twenty
five more flamingos, and the people running Great Salt Lake,
I guess park where like this is a really bad idea.
These are not a native species. We should not be
importing them in the twenty century. We know better than
doing that. Despite how a lone Floyd is. Yeah, good
for them. Yeah, and I did mention eating them. They

(44:12):
used to eat them in ancient Rome. Uh. There was
a writer for Slate, Molly Olmstead, that was um shocked
to find out about the number of Google searches for
can you eat a Flamingo a few years ago, And
she kind of chalked it up to people not necessarily
thinking like, hey, I want to go eat a flamingo,
but just reading about them and people thinking, well, they're birds.

(44:33):
I'm curious to people eat them. Uh and not a
genuine like um effort to eat a flamingo. No, but
they definitely did eat them, apparently. Pliny the Elder wrote
that they have the most exquisite flavor and um because
they set the tongues specifically too. Oh yeah, I'm sorry,
that's right. The flamingo tongues and flamingo meat tongue is

(44:55):
actually really good. Man, If you're gonna eat an animal,
the tongue is not to be wasted. Typically, I don't
like tongue. That's fine. I'm just telling you. If you've
never tried it before, okay, and you don't like it,
I don't like the consistency. Wait, hold on, let me
do it. You what you don't like tongue? No, I
don't think you should like wasted. I'm glad people eat

(45:15):
it if they're gonna be eating an animal, but it's
not for me. I understand. And yeah, I would never
impress that on you. I appreciate that. But the meat
of a flamingo probably has a really distinct taste, and
that they have, you know, layers of fat because they're
a water bird. Water birds have layers of fat like duck.
Duck is delicious obviously in part because of its huge

(45:37):
fat content, but then also they eat so much algae
that they would have huge levels of Omega three, which
could give them a fishy taste. Right, I think that's
the deal. Two fishy a ducky fishy taste. Yeah. I
don't eat duck either, so I don't know what a
duck taste like, Oh, duck's really good too, is it? Yeah? Yeah,

(45:58):
there's an eat anything I've spent time with. I understand
that's hypocritical for people that out there that are vegan,
So I get it. It's to me the email. Well,
the thing is, if you spend enough time with them,
they'll let their guard down, and that's when you pounce.
There's a Chinese restaurant actually called Pee King Gourmet in
Falls Church, Virginia that makes it a whole roast duck

(46:21):
and it is one of the best things you'll ever
eat in your entire life. Okay, I think it's called
Peking Gourmet. It might just be called Peeking Duck one
of the two. But it's Rember of the Christmas story.
I guess that's it. I mean we uh, I think
we should direct people to our I get Was it

(46:43):
a short stuff on the lawn ornaments? Yeah, yeah it was.
We did a whole short stuff on pink flamingo lawn
ornaments and it's a pretty cool story. So go seek
that out, is what I say. Uh, And there really
isn't anything else. And since Chuck said go seek that out,
of course everybody do. That means it's time for a listener, Mayo. Okay,

(47:05):
I'm gonna call this sort of Laurn mystery solved. You
know the story of when I adopted my um my
buddy Lauren, who was no longer with this. He had
a silver back and that's when Tim Curry referred to
him as looking like a baboon. Right, So this is
solved by Sarah Patton. I think, uh nice things that

(47:27):
Sarah has to say about the show and Tim Curry.
And then that's Chuck mentioned that his silver back eventually
disappeared and it maybe think it could have been a
fever coat prior to birth. The kitten's coat is very
sensitive to heat, but MoMA cat has a fever during
pregnancy from an illness or prolonged stress could potentially affect
the pigments in her. Kittens spur. So a fever coat

(47:47):
is typically great or silver, and then it resolves when
it kittens around four months old, although it can take
up to a year. Even though the kittens pigment um
didn't fully develop while they were in the womb, there
coat is still written in their d n A. There's
no negative implications for our the kitten's future overall health

(48:07):
just a fun quirk when you're young. Wow, like when
you're born with a vestigial tail and it falls off
at age two. I guess so so that I think
that solves the mystery. Um. This is from Sarah Patton
and Sarah's Greyton knows a lot about cat and cat
rescue and is doing a lot of good work in
that realm awesome. Thanks a lot, Sarah. That is pretty cool.

(48:30):
You put that mystery to rest and we thank you
for it. How do you feel good now that it's
it's salved I love it. I need to tell Emily
about the Fever Coach school. Well, if you want to
be like Sarah and put some mystery to rest, we
love that kind of stuff. You can do it in
an email. Send it to stuff podcast at iHeart radio
dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production of

(48:54):
iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the
i heart Radio app. Apple podcasts are were iver you
listen to your favorite shows m HM