Ornithologists, as is their wont, have disputed much among themselves as to whether the flamingo is a stork-like duck or a duck-like stork. Indians accept the former view and call the bird the King Goose (Raj Hans); their opinion was shared by Jerdon, who classed the flamingo among the geese. Likewise, Stuart Baker has given flamingos a place among the Indian ducks and their allies.

The flamingo is both wader and swimmer. It has long legs, the better to wade with, and webbed feet admirably adapted to natation. The bird certainly wades by preference. I have never seen it in water sufficiently deep to render swimming necessary or even possible. Those who have been more fortunate state that the swimming movements of the flamingo resemble those of a swan. I doubt whether flamingos ever swim from choice, but the webbed feet are likely to be useful, especially in the case of young birds, when flamingos are swept off their feet by the wind in a violent storm.

Two species of flamingo occur in India. These are known as Phoenicopterus roseus and P. minor, or the common and the lesser flamingo. As the former is the one most often seen in India let us concentrate our attention on it. It is as tall as many a man, and measures over four feet from the tip of the beak to the end of the tail. Of these four feet the greater portion consists of neck, which is very supple; a flamingo when preening its feathers often twists the neck so that it assumes the shape of a figure of eight. The general hue of the bird is white tipped with rosy pink; the wings are crimson and black, hence the appropriate scientific name, Phoenicopterus, wings of flame. The bill is pale pink, tipped with black, while the legs are reddish pink.

Every Anglo-Indian has seen flamingos in the wild state, if not in India, at any rate from the deck of a ship as it crept through the Suez Canal. The shallow lakes and lagoons in the vicinity of the Canal abound with flamingos. These beautiful birds are to be seen in numbers throughout the cold weather in the shallow lakes and backwaters round about Madras. Flamingos are very numerous in Ceylon, where they are known to the Singalese as the “English Soldier Birds” on account of their “crimson tunics” and upright martial bearing.

A flock of flamingos is a fine spectacle. Some years ago I saw near the Pulicat Lake about two hundred of these birds. They were perhaps half a mile from the house-boat. Their white bodies showed up well against a background of blue water. Some of them were feeding with heads underwater, others stood as erect as soldiers at attention and as motionless as statues; a few were moving with great precision, like recruits under training. Portions of the flock were congregated in small groups, apparently in solemn conclave. Dignity and solemnity are the distinguishing features of the flamingo. After watching the flock for fully half an hour I fired a gun. I did not try to kill any of them. They were out of range. I fired because I wanted to see the birds take to their wings, to see them rise like a “glorious exhalation.” The report of the gun seemed to cause no alarm. There was none of that fluster and hurry that most birds display when they hear the sound of firing. The flamingos rose in a stately manner; they did not all leave the water simultaneously. The birds took to their wings by twos and threes, so that it was not until more than a minute after the firing of the gun that all of them were in the air. As their wings opened the colour of the birds changed from white to crimson, the latter being the hue of the lining of their wings. It was as if red limelight had been thrown on to the whole flock.

During flight, the long white neck, that terminates in the pink-and-black bill, is stretched out in front, and the pink legs point behind, so that the neck and legs form one straight line, broken by the crimson wings, which are flapped very slowly. The great birds sailed thus majestically for a few hundred yards and then sank to the water.

When flamingos are about to alight the legs leave the horizontal position assumed during flight and come slowly forward until they touch the water. The whole flock settles without making any splash. It has never been my good fortune to watch the flight of flamingos at very close quarters. I will, therefore, reproduce from the Saturday Review Colonel Willoughby Verner’s description of those he witnessed in Spain: “What a wonderful sight it was! The curious-shaped heads and bulbous beaks at the end of the long, thin, outstretched, and snake-like necks, the small compact bodies, shining white below and rosy pink above, the crimson coverts and glossy black of the quickly moving pinions, and the immensely long legs projecting stiffly behind, ending in the queer-shaped feet. Surely no other bird on God’s earth presents such an incongruous and almost uncanny shape and yet affords such a beautiful spectacle of colour and movement. Onward they sped, now in one long sinuous line; now with some of the birds in the centre or rear increasing their speed and surging up ‘line abreast’ of those in front of them, and again falling back and resuming their posts, ever and anon uttering their weird, trumpeting, goose-like call. They were flying not fifteen feet above the water, and as they passed abreast of me, the moving mass of white, pink, crimson, and black was mirrored in the placid surface of the laguna below them which shone like a sheet of opal in the setting rays of the sun.”

The beak of the flamingo is a curious structure. It is bent almost to a right angle in the middle, so that when the basal portion is horizontal the tip of the bill points towards the ground, and when the long neck is directed downwards (as must be done when the bird feeds because of the length of the legs) the terminal half of the bill is parallel to the ground, and the tip points between the bird’s toes. Thus the flamingo when feeding assumes the position it would adopt when about to stand on its head! The upper mandible then is placed along the ground, and, for the convenience of the bird, is flattened, while the lower mandible, which is uppermost when the bird is feeding, is arched like the upper mandible in most birds. This arrangement gives the flamingo a grotesque appearance.

The food of this species consists of small crustaceans, insects and mollusca, together with vegetable matter. The quarry is scooped out of the mud at the bottom of the lake. The mandibles are lamellated like those of ducks, hence they, assisted by the tongue, act as sieves and reject most of the mud while retaining the nutritive material. The words “most of the mud” are used advisedly, for it is not possible to sift all out, so that those who have examined the contents of the stomach of the flamingo have usually found it to contain a quantity of sand and mud.

The nest of the flamingo is a mound of earth raised by the bird from shallow water. The only place in India where flamingos are known to breed is the Run of Cutch. In seasons when there has been sufficient rain-fall this curious spot abounds with nests of flamingos.

The older writers believed that, on account of the length of its legs, the flamingo could not incubate its eggs in the ordinary manner. It was known that the nest consists of a mound raised from the ground, and from this it was conjectured that the bird stood up to hatch its eggs. Writing of the inconvenience of the long shanks of the flamingo, Bishop Stanley said:—

“A still greater inconvenience would ensue if it were under the necessity of sitting on its nest, like other birds, for it would then be utterly impossible to dispose of its long, stilted, disproportioned legs. Nature has, however, met the difficulty, and taught it how to make a nest exactly suited to its form and length of leg. It is made of mud, in the shape of a hillock, with a cavity on the top where the eggs are laid; and the height of the hillocks is such that she can sit as comfortably on her nest as a horseman does on his saddle, leaving her legs to hang dangling down at full length on either side.”

In order to impress this peculiarity of the flamingo on the mind of the reader, the worthy Bishop furnishes a picture of an incubating flamingo. A similar belief used to exist regarding herons and other long-legged birds. These were supposed to sit astride the nest, and certain veracious observers stated that they had noticed the legs dangling down. Needless to state, there is no truth in these stories. Every long-shanked bird is able to bend its legs and tuck them up under it when necessary.

Mr. Abel Chapman has actually observed the flamingo folding its legs under its body when it is about to sit on the nest.