This is the only bird in the world that adheres to the special “life and death” friendship rule.
Flamingos are one of the few creatures in the wild that adhere to the rather special rule of making friends in life. They live together, fly together, stand side by side and die together.
This bird also possesses features that make the scientific community work hard to explain.
The life, culture, and love of flamingo couples are said to be rare in the natural world, even they have rules like humans in choosing a mate.
Flamingos relationships maintain close, glued bonds for decades. It’s married couples, same-sex friendships, and even groups of three or four close friends.
Flamingos specialize in wet places and nest in waterlogged areas. When the hen was lying in the nest, the male went to pick up each straw and brought it under his wife’s bed to dry. In particular, the male bird is very careful, carefully selecting each straw and using his beak to shake the straw back and forth to let insects or garbage fall out before using.
It is easy to see the close flamingo couples because they always stand close to each other, close to each other.
The highly social flamingo is very careful in choosing its playmates and may shy away from certain individuals. If one bird gets too close to another, the other will use its long neck and huge beak for a prompt attack.
The flamingo’s beak has a unique structure in the world of birds, the upper beak is the part that can move and is also much smaller than the lower beak. This is how the flamingo adapts to a particular diet by using its beak in a paradoxical way.
That’s because their main food is algae and small crustaceans. That is the reason why flamingos are pink because they contain carotenoid pigments.
Red pigment is common in nature and is also the reason tomatoes and carrots are red. Over the years, this pigment that builds up in flamingos slowly turns their white or gray feathers red or pink.
Why do flamingos stand forever on one leg without getting tired?
Just like horses that always sleep standing up or bats that sleep upside down, flamingos evolved to “fix” their legs to help conserve energy.
To explain this, experts believe that the key point lies in the special leg joints of flamingos. When the foot is in place, the foot joints are almost automatically fixed, no matter how the shin moves. Even on flamingo carcasses, this mechanism works the same way.
“The results of the study show that muscle activity when standing on one leg of flamingos is actually lower than when standing on two legs,” the experts said.
Researchers in the US have discovered the truth that the flamingos’ legs have a correct and suitable postural support structure so that their legs are kept straight and in place. In other words, they hardly expend much muscle strength when maintaining that posture.
This may sound a bit confusing because normally, we humans will think that standing on 1 leg is actually much more difficult and laborious than 2 legs. But nature is like that, always full of surprises and unpredictability.