Rebecca Reid, Auckland Zoo
Remember those grey, gorgeous balls of fluff that were breaking flamingo records back earlier this year?
These young birds have been named Eleanor and Sullivan, and now at half the size of their parents they better resemble a flamingo, and continue to amaze our keepers who didn’t know what to expect from the flock-raised chicks.
Remember the wee chicks that were born earlier this year? Well they’re really starting to spread their wings.
These chicks are still mainly grey but have just started to produce a few pink feathers under their wings, as flamingos gain their pink colouring from pigments found in their food. Pridelands keeper David Crimp said these young chicks have “blown expectations out of the water” as they became well-integrated with the flock, bathed in the water, and gained confidence in all aspects of flamingo life. These are behaviours they didn’t witness in hand-reared flamingos until a later stage.
Forced to watch from the side-lines, David and the Pridelands team are overjoyed the parents are doing such a great job at instinctively raising their young, and are please to now have two more “well-adjusted” flamingos in the flock.
