Article Article Lesser flamingos seem to be very tough birds, considering their extreme natural habitat and nomadic way of life. I wish more zoos would discover their uniqueness and keep them in adequate enclosures and make more efforts to establish a self-sustaining captive population. To just keep a few pinioned birds, gloomy standing on a lawn as a nice accessory, doesn´t make these birds justice.
Luckily more and more zoos ( and privat persons ) are putting enforts in keeping the Lesser Flamingo in a more proper way and more and more breeding results are archieved. In captivity Flamingos ( together with cranes ) are among the longest living birds and age-es of 50 years and more are reported already several times. That they reach such life-spans also in the wild is however new to me !
I agree and fortunately so also for the other flamingo taxa. We have had a lousy past with breeding these (severely neglected before).
What a fascinating story. I wonder why the flamingoes chose to show up at that lake fifty years ago. Maybe their home lake was filled in by development, or maybe there was an extremely harsh drought that year or something.