We don't talk about flamingos: why do flamingos in human care remain such a challenge?

Amongst the most widely adored, popular and (curse me) marketable bird species on earth: Flamingos.

Looking at zoo collections alone, amongst the 6 species in this family they are likely one of the most widely kept and displayed birds across the globe, standing strong, representing the class Aves alongside other charismatic avifauna like penguins, ostrich and pelicans.

As we celebrate another International Flamingo Day, I'd like to share my thoughts on the world's favourite pink bird and explore some challenges of flamingo husbandry both academically and through my own experience.

 

This will make sense later, trust me.

For me, of all the birds managed in collections, it seems fascinating that flamingos find themselves in the conundrum they do. Looking at them from a zoo perspective, thinking more on the finance side of things, flamingos rank up as one of the most popular zoo animals and as such, you would expect them to draw the same levels of motivation and investment as any other species in this setting. There have always been challenges securing large amounts of investment for the "little brown jobs" as Gerry might say. You have to consider the obvious here: zoos are charities in the main, with limited income. This income is based on zoo attendance. Zoo attendance is based on what people want to see. What people want to see is what they see as charismatic, the typical zoo animals, you can probably name them. Now I'm not going to wade into the ethical swamp of doom that is the charismatic zoo species debate, but this has some relevance here.

What I can never grasp about flamingos is how they have all the right criteria to fare very well in a zoo setting. They are not small, they are not quiet, they are one of the brightest and most recognisable birds, they are great, they really are. Any other species, say tiger, giraffe or rhino, would have long been relieved of the simple day to day chronic health problems that we see in flamingos still. Somehow flamingos still struggle with age old issues that seem surrounded with a mix of hyper specific academia and at the other end, wild folklore husbandry bordering on witchcraft. What is it that creates this almost unique situation?

So first we must delve into the elephant in the room: pododermatitis or bumble foot.

This problem has been studied, talked about, ogled at more than any other topic in flamingo care, to the point that I have even heard it be asked in the past that delegates at a conference avoid the topic because it is so prevalent that it can become a distraction from almost all other aspects of flamingo care. It does still seem that this issue lays at the core of flamingos troubles in human care, and there is a wider web of limitations that connect to this that many may have not considered.

I'll rush you through what pododermatitis means for a flamingo, but we won't dwell too long, it's not pretty. pododermatitis is at it's most basic level a bucket of similar issues that crop up in the feet of an animal, but few animals are plagued quite as frequently as flamingos. In flamingos (and many other birds) it manifests initially as hyperkeratosis, usually on the soles of the feet, in particular the soft skin around the foot joints. Sometimes it will be only a thickening of the skin, much like human skin thickens when you walk around barefoot on rough ground. over time this can develop into quite obscene deeper tissue injuries as the hyperkeratosis impacts the use of the foot. There are a few categorical deviations used to describe the types of growths that occur, although the interactions and causes of these are still not clearly understood. luckily for the keeper, they can all be treated largely the same way based more on the severity of the issue rather than the type.

 

Example of fissures, presenting deep inflamed splits between the joints.

 

The categories roll roughly as follows, 

1. Hyperkeratosis - generalised thickening of the skin - very common.

2. Fissures - deep cracks occurring between the joints, usually resulting as an advanced form of the first hyperkeratosis state. 

3.Nodular - these occur almost as tumour like growths on one particular joint (below the foot). 

4. Papilliotomous growths - these are strange outward growing growths that form almost brush like hard skin tissue and are most often seen in advanced cases.

As I said before, in terms of management the severity is the dimension of concern, and this can escalate in a couple of ways.

1. Tissue infection - split inflamed tissue becomes infected, forming abscesses within the foot. this occurs most often in advanced stages or situations where hygiene is very poor.

2. Skeletal contact - some splits can become so severe that they can reach bone and cartilage within the foot, which has very serious implications for both welfare and recovery.

As you can see, this issue is quite broad in its occurrence and in my experience is best addressed from a husbandry direction as a SYMPTOM rather than a stand alone disease.

In almost every instance of pododermatitis I have encountered in both flamingos and other birds, the problem has, when viewed in an honest, wider scale, been a by product of an environmental or physical issue, or lack of a provision that bird needs. That said, it's now more clear what needs to be talked about way more when it comes to managing these birds - environment.

 

Lesser flamingos in Tanzania.

First before we delve into environmental factors, there is another topic we must touch on: pinioning and clipping. When we talk about this as keepers we have to be mature about it and avoid falling into the hysterical pitfalls that society may throw before us, but we must also resist the urge to ignore the by-products of this process as if it did not exist.

Again I'm not going to run foolishly into the ethical debate about flight restriction in human care, but I can assure you that I do think about it a lot.

My current view is this: Some collections have a no pinioning policy, some collections clip, some collections have a mix of pinioned and clipped, some have fully flighted under mesh. Whilst there are some major welfare benefits in terms of behaviour to not pinioning and clipping, including display, mating and mental well-being, three things come to mind when I think about this in relation to flamingos and their feet.

1.Flamingos are very long lived birds and collections with mixed flocks of both pinioned and clipped birds are going to house pinioned birds for decades to come. Even policy cannot remedy this immediately.

2. Flamingos are so popular that the chances of them never occurring in human care anywhere in the world are 0. This is not a species that is likely to be phased out on welfare grounds (nor should it with the right care).

3. The realistic idea that any aviary anywhere can offer a flighted flamingo the type of meaningful flight space to perform any level of athletic performance is naive.

So considering these factors we can reasonably assume (ethics aside) that very few, if any zoo housed flamingos will ever achieve the level of flight activity that they might in the wild, so you can pinion, clip, not clip and the physical result is largely similar. The reason this is significant is that in removing the option of flight, you are also removing a certain percentage of time that a flamingo can spend not putting weight on it's feet. Of course this can't be easily quantified because a baseline does not exist for a zoo animal like this. We could make use of wild data but it still would prove largely unhelpful because these flamingos are not wild, and are not in the wild, so what seems most sensible is focussing on what the tolerances are in collections, rather than trying to jump for a bar that is largely unreachable within the limitations of human care (at this point).

That considered we can reasonably infer that our flamingos are spending more time on their feet than they were designed for, lack of flight being the first offender.

 

Interestingly, young flamingos do not develop issues until they are several months old at least.

 

Secondly let us consider that flamingos are primarily a water bird. Their entire lives evolve around it and I personally believe that it is considerably more important to zoo based flamingos than many realise.

Wild Flamingos live quite a different life to those in the zoo, not only can they fly freely as discussed, but they also love to swim, and I'm talking properly swim, like a duck might. Their living relatives the Grebes are highly aquatic and in some cases almost exclusively bound to water. Why then do we not see flamingos in human care swimming like this? this would surely offer more much needed relief to our flamingos overburdened feet?... Correct padawan, you have it.

For some reason, probably historical, whenever anyone has built a flamingo pool they have in most cases insisted of creating something like a large circular children's paddling pool (more on historical cultural husbandry crimes later) and these types of pools are problematic for 2 reasons:

1. They are often too shallow for a flamingo to fully submerge and raise it's legs into a swimming position in the first place.

2. There is seldom any motivation for the birds to make use of their swimming behaviours. They will like most birds only do things for a reason, and even if they have that depth, they often need a reason to swim which seldom occurs in a zoo setting.

So to gently conclude that portion, we can I hope, without being able to crunch any juicy numbers, agree that the removal of meaningful flight and real physical swimming behaviour will significantly impact the percentage of time a flamingo spends on it's feet. We cannot resolve the pododermatitis issue entirely, but more conscientious management could provide a percentile of relief to our birds and make an intolerable situation more tolerable for them, but it does require this kind of proactive husbandry that can predict problems before they arise; an approach I have always been an advocate for - there is often method in my madness! 

Moving on to the second and by far more immediately addressable portion of this dive, I present to you the historical crimes and folklore that have cursed (almost) every flamingo enclosure I have ever encountered.

First in the dock - Concrete.

Concrete is by far one of the most convenient but simultaneously inappropriate materials to find in a zoo. Ignoring it's awful environmental profile, it is hard, thermally very unhelpful and in this case, very abrasive on soft flamingo feet.

The two main reasons bare concrete is problematic are firstly it's thermal properties - on a basic level it draws heat from the surfaces that touch it, that is why when you put your hand on it you will feel coldness, it is literally wicking heat away from your tissues. In a natural sense it behaves thermally more like rock, likewise heating up in excessive sun. Granted flamingos do have systems in place to deal with cold, they are able to regulate blood flow to maintain heat within their body, but just because they can do this doesn't mean we must expose them to it. These abilities are largely evolved to offer protection to the birds in cooler water, not cold surfaces and cold air.

The second and more direct problem unprotected concrete presents is it's roughness and the way in which a flamingos weight is distributed through the foot. Imagine if you will for a minute, spending a day in a swimming pool made of rough concrete, you would I'm sure by the end of the day have some soreness, particularly around the joints and tips of your toes. The same is true for flamingos, who's soft feet were evolved specifically for use mainly on flat, soft mud. It may at first seem a trifle anthropomorphic to make this jump, but if you accept that physics apply equally to all things and that the exact pressure points which often present with hyperkeratosis in flamingos are the leading walking points of the foot.

 

Pleasant eh?

 

How does concrete get even worse? Slopes.

One way to really accelerate the deterioration of your birds feet is to increase the angle of the concrete, which creates even more pressure on specific points. Again, Flamingos are designed in the main for flat habitats, an those big ol' floppy feet were not made for rough slopes. You would be amazed how often I still see bare concrete slopes in flamingo enclosures.

Second in the dock - Folklore and legacy enclosures

We need to be real, Flamingos are a highly specific and evolutionarily unique family, yet like so many birds they often do not receive the level of attention to husbandry that they deserve. This is, I believe, down to their incredible resilience. In spite of having their selective issues they are very sturdy birds in general, they live a long time, they don't tend to suffer huge amounts of pathogenic disease and are able to hide their discomfort for a long time. There is also a strange phenomenon I have noticed with flamingos in particular that I have never noticed in other species.

"The Elysian Flamingo Lawn"

If you think about the times you have seen or worked with flamingos in a zoo, there are likely a few instances where you have seen them pottering over a bright green lawn in an almost disneyesque fashion, something like Alice in wonderland. Seems harmless enough, but where did this come from and why does it exist?

Andean flamingos enjoying that sweet soft mud.

For every other animal in human care we consider deeply what type of habitat the species comes from and do our best to replicate that as much as reasonably possible. Aviculture has a particularly rich history here, creating densely planted aviaries for small passerines, open grass plains for ratites, more sparsely perched, high aviaries for our vultures, who require a more open plan. So HOW did our poor flamingos get lumped with paddling pools and verdant lawns?

The direct answer to this question is probably completely by accident, and that old villain of progress in aviculture, folklore husbandry. For some reason keepers seldom thought deeply about the real habitats of these birds and just copied what they had seen elsewhere, or made adjustments to a hand me down enclosure. There are also some subconscious cultural connections between flamingos and lawns, flamingos and beaches, flamingos and cocktail bars... you get the idea, all have little connection to living wild flamingos.

The reality for flamingos is MUD. Soft, preferably inert mud. If you seriously look at wild flamingos all across the world there are three things flamingos look for in their habitat; flatness, mud, water and combinations of both. In some cases these birds are living in very extreme habitats that are inhospitable to almost everything (again thanks to their resilience) but those three requirements stay largely the same.

Walking on mud both on the land and even more so in the water is very gentle on feet. It moves and yields to the pressure of those joints, it does not resist them like hard ground, concrete or rock.

 

Greater flamingo in Southern France.

 

I find a strange satisfaction in seeing muddy wet zoo flamingo habitats with large deep pools that are made up largely of these soft types of substrate. Sand also is great for relieving pressure, small particulate sand has been shown to be particularly helpful in this respect.

It should be mentioned that several collections have made considerable efforts to improve indoor housing for flamingos, making use of softer rubber liners to cover concrete, adding indoor pools and internal substrates, but these have by and large been in reactive response to the increased pressures added by shutting birds into the houses, rather than a routine effort to create overall more helpful spaces for the birds year round, which long term we need to design from the ground up.

To try and conclude on what is a very deep and entrenched topic, I'd like us to consider the network of challenges that human care has thrown at flamingos and see that many are avoidable. Consider our tough pink birds, missing in many cases their options to fly and properly swim, compound that with the Alice in wonderland worlds they sometimes have to inhabit that are doing nothing at all for the health of their already overused feet and you can maybe see on wide scale how this very common issue is a manifestation, a symptom of a wider issue that flamingo custodians could do better to remedy.

I'd like to give you with a few info bites that highlight how we often fall into accepting the state of husbandry as acceptable because it seems difficult to change.

- Flamingos are probably one of the most well studied birds living in zoos, pododermatitis in particular having been extensively documented, so the academic literature to tackle this is available and has been for some time.

- Studies of wild flamingos show an almost 0% incidence of pododermatitis - the wild is offering something we are currently not. On average around 90% of flamingos in human care suffer with some level of pododermatitis by comparison.

- The most Northerly population of flamingos exist in a feral state in Germany and fly out to the coast in winter once the chances of ice set in - Generally speaking flamingos avoid cold and ice when they can, and this can be seen in their natural distributions and migration patterns. I don't think cold is a sole cause, but have a hunch that it presents a significantly bigger issue than we currently think.

 

Are you sensing a theme here?

Takeaways from today -

- We need to recognise the attention these birds deserve and think harder about how flamingos live in the wild and try to mimic that.

- We need to have a high attention to detail when it comes to management, a small issue for us could be big for the birds and they can't easily tell us.

- Flamingos do not live on lawns outside of children's books.

- Pododermatits is a largely a symptom of environment and not a stand alone disease

- Question the science behind received husbandry - is this based in science and observation or is it just something someone else has done that has been neither net positive nor negative?

- Stepping away from these species and abandoning ship is not the answer: there can be a much better future for these birds across the board with effort.

I hope this has been helpful, insightful and has turned you all into flamingo husbandry detectives hell bent on improving the lot of these fantastic, lanky, pink wonders.

Till next time,

C.

 

P.S - for a bit of fun, have a look at this -  https://www.audubon.org/news/uh-what-flamingo-doing

And this  - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQAMiqyZDnw

NEWS: If you've made it this far and are still excited to learn more, you might be interested to know that we have recently set up a facebook group to help push forward thinking bird
keeping and discuss challenges and ideas. You can find it by searching Aviology: aviculture 2.0 on facebook, or using this link

I may see you there!