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 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 sweat.
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.
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.
