American Flamingo

About the American Flamingo

The American Flamingo needs no field guide - five feet of impossible pink standing in salt water on legs like reeds, with a thick, sharply bent bill that works upside down. The pink is dietary, built from carotenoid pigments in the brine shrimp, small crustaceans, and algae the bird strains from hypersaline lagoons; a flamingo fed poorly literally fades.

That bent bill is a precision filter: the flamingo swings its inverted head through the shallows while the fleshy tongue pumps water past comb-like lamellae, trapping food. Flamingos are intensely social, breeding in vast colonies on Caribbean and Yucatan lagoons, where each pair raises a single gray chick on crop milk - one of the few birds outside pigeons and penguins to feed young that way.

Wild flamingos in the United States were long dismissed as escapees, but attitudes changed as banded wild birds from Mexico turned up - most famously the Yucatan-banded bird "HDNT" that wandered the Texas coast for years, sometimes in company with an escaped African flamingo, a saga followed by birders across the state. Hurricanes have since blown additional genuine wild flamingos onto Texas shores.

Any Texas flamingo remains a headline bird: scan the shallow hypersaline flats of the Laguna Madre and coastal lagoons, and check the legs for bands - the difference between an escapee and a wild wanderer is part of the story.