Flamingos, their supple necks undulating, their eyes like discs peering out of pink faces, stand around in the blazing heat all day, wade on impossibly long, knobby-kneed legs, balance on one webbed foot or both. A perfectly round eye stares from the juncture where pink face meets black bill, the smooth, black hook that inspired the queen in Alice in Wonderland to grab a flamingo and use it as a croquet mallet. These are tough birds. They live in an environment so harsh it is hard to believe they are so pink, so much the color of little girls' ballerina shoes and princess costumes.

Huge Flocks Gather
Huge flocks of these exotic birds, several hundred thousand at a time, cluster like expanses of flower petals in alkaline lakes along the Great Rift Valley in East Africa, their webbed feet treading across gritty mud mixed with salt, soda, sulphate and fluoride. The stilt-like thinness of their legs seems almost a cruelty in the intense heat, which can reach 140° F., as it offers almost no surface area to touch the water and cool the birds' body mass. Yet they seldom submerge their pink and white feathers. Until recently, according to ornithologist L. H. Brown, who studied and wrote about flamingos in Africa for 20 years, it was believed that flamingos did not swim at all.

Different Types of Flamingos
More flamingos live in Tanzania and Kenya than anywhere else in the world. About 4 million Lesser Flamingos (three feet tall) and 50 thousand Greater Flamingos (five feet tall) populate four soda lakes: Lake Natron, Lake Nakuru, Lake Elmenteita, and Lake Magadi. (Four other species of flamingo live in other parts of the world.) Although both Lesser and Greater Flamingos live in the same bodies of water, they eat different things. Lesser Flamingos eat blue-green algae by waving their heads from side to side and filtering gallons of water through comb-like hairs and small teeth in their bills called lamellae. Greater Flamingos feed from lake bottoms by picking up small animals such as copepods and chironomid larvae, especially at Lake Elmenteita. They also eat algae.

A flamingo lives an average of 20 years in the wild. Usually one egg is laid each year, rarely two. Both parents tend the egg during its 28-day incubation period until a downy, gray baby hatches. Then both parents feed the chick, which seems to recognize its parents by voice, for about 65 days.

The greatest natural threat to flamingos is the Marabou Stork (also known as the "hangman stork"), an intimidating, prehistoric-looking bird that has seriously reduced flamingo populations in recent years. Flamingos in Tanzania also fall prey to eagles and, occasionally, lions and leopards.

Flamingos Fly at Night
Curiously, flamingos fly only at night. L.H. Brown regularly observed them in flight just after dusk, "perhaps going nowhere." The reasons for their movements are not known but may have to do with the availability of food and fresh water. In any event, thousands of flamingos will fly back to the soda lakes in the morning, exposing with each beat of their wings the black fringe of feathers that lines the trailing edge. There they will live out their extraordinary adaptation to an environment that can support almost no other form of life.