Flamingo Resources

From Student J:

I’m very interested in learning fun facts about those crazy flamingos — any suggestions for books or websites?

Seaworld has a nice info book section on flamingos which also includes an excellent bibliography of books and magazine articles. Many other zoos have flamingos. When I search for information on animals, I tend to always put the animals name and the word zoo in the search criteria. Upon doing this, I came up with decent information from San Diego, Philadelphia and St. Louis Zoos. I also find that you sometimes get more detailed and reliable information if you use the scientific name — Phoenicopterus ruber (carribean), P. ruber roseus (Greater), P. chilensis (Chilean); Phoeniconaias minor (lesser flamingo); Phoenicoparrus andinus (Andean) and P. jamesi (james).There is also an on-line husbandry manual from the avian scientific advisory group organization. This has decent species background info as well as husbandry techniques.

In our library, we have the book “Flamingos” by Malcolm and Carol Oglivie. It was published in 1985 and it’s ISBN# is 0-86299-266-4. The chapters entail an introduction, detailed species accounts, behavior, breeding, food and feeding and Flamingos and man. It appears to be written in a fairly readable way. We also have a more technical book also called “Flamingos” (written 1975 with ISBN 0856610070) edited by Janet Kear and Nicole Duplaix-Hall. Chapters include Populations, ecologyand conservation; Captivity, Ethology (behavior) and Taxonomy (classification)and Physiology.

A couple of more recent books “The Princeton Encyclopedia of Birds” (Edited by Christopher Perrins, 2004 ; 978-0-691-14070-4) and “The Sibley Guide to Bird Behavior”(David Allen Sibley, 2001, 978-0679451235) have very readable chapters on flamingos.