yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Flamingo Breeding | Flamingo Dads Adopt an Egg | Magic of Disney's Animal Kingdom


3m read
·Nov 10, 2024

Down by the tree of life lives a haunting flock of pure blankness. I'm coming to check on our lesser flamingos. These guys are from Africa.

Hi, guys. Good morning. How are you doing? Hi, everybody. It's egg-laying season for the lesser flamingos. And the potential parents are busy. But it hasn't always been this way.

We've had absolutely no luck breeding these birds. We have had one chick in 20 years. We always have a plan, but in nature, our plan doesn't always fit in with the reality. So sometimes that we can have what we feel is a fantastic season. Lots of rain, lots of nest building, but no eggs. It's a bad time for no breeding.

All species of flamingos are under some type of environmental pressure. Out of all the species, lessers are probably the one that are the most threatened at this time. They're feeling a lot of pressure in the world in regards to habitat loss and habitat destruction.

To encourage more romance between looks for ways to improve the habitat itself. The team decided they wanted to try something different with the nesting material. It was an email that I received from Animal Kingdom, and it was a big surprise. Disney's Animal Kingdom asked if they could borrow some baseball play for their flamingos.

It's a special combination of clay and sand that really works well with this Florida climate, with the rain and the humidity. It's really malleable when it's wet, but it hardens really strongly when it's dry, and the birds just really took to it. Containing more clay than Florida soil, the infield mix passed the flamingo nest test, and an egg appeared, and then they were on a roll.

I don't know what's in this clay, but we're going to call it Magic Clay because we're already at egg five or six. They're really excited. We thought we had our plan together, and the flamingos are on the same page.

But only one egg proved fertile. And for the parents of that egg, disaster struck. The father suffered from a leg injury, so we had to take him up to our hospital. There are processes; the paper lays the egg, and then one incubates while the other one eats and then they swap. But the mom couldn't raise the egg by herself.

Flamingos are serially monogamous, so with the biological parents down, the team looks for another solution that can be found in nature. In the wild, it's not uncommon for same-sex pairs to bond. They build these strong relationships that can last for years.

We decided that our best option was actually to give the egg to our really great pair of male birds. A same-sex pair, blush and bashful, swoop in to the rescue. These two boys have been together for a long time. They've never shown any interest in any of the females that have come over to Discovery Island.

We don't want to give the egg to the other pairs because that would stop them from possibly producing their own. These potential dads quickly make a connection with their new responsibility. The blushing, bashful got the egg, and the whole time they were talking to the egg, which is very important; it connects them to the chick.

So they were making that connection and building that bond. The boys tucked the only fertilized egg safely under their caring wings. The future of the flock now rests on them.

We're hoping that instinct will kick in and they'll know exactly what to do.

More Articles

View All
How Elon Musk Spends His Time
How do you spend your days now? Like what do you? My time is mostly split between SpaceX and Tesla. And of course, I try to spend a part of every week at OpenAI. So I spend most—I spend basically half a day at OpenAI most weeks. And then I have some OpenA…
Your Guide to San Francisco | National Geographic
[Narrator] San Francisco is a rush. A rush of art, flavors, history, and innovation. (funky rhythmic music) It’s all packed into a seven-by-seven-mile square, between the Pacific Ocean and the San Francisco Bay. The city has long attracted trailblazers an…
The Tween Brain | Brain Games
While it might be easy to recognize twins growing older, predicting what their brains will do is not so simple. To gain insight to the tween brain, we’re asking people on the boardwalk some questions about good and bad ideas. Is it a good idea to eat sal…
How the End of the Cold War Led to Birth of the International Space Station | Rewind the '90s
NARRATOR: Our story opens with revolution. After decades of cold war, the mighty Soviet empire is collapsing. MAN: The wall is effectively down. NARRATOR: Just weeks before the 90s begin, the most famous symbol of the political divide between east and w…
Evolution | Middle school biology | Khan Academy
[Speaker] How many different species or kinds of birds are there? Take a guess. 100, 1,000, more? Well, biologists have estimated that there are at least 10,000 different species of birds all around the world, and some biologists think that there are ev…
Hide Out On the Border | Badlands, Texas
This is the end of the road right here, a church. Oh, there’s in Mexico! Go see Fred. I try to come check on him, you know, at least once a month. Down here I get tainted; he needs something, I’ll bring it. This is Fred’s little hideout here. There’s Fre…