Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE STORK-LIKE BIRDS

THE FLAMINGOS (Suborder Phcenicopteri)

Very peculiar birds indeed are these we shall now consider, having a rosy or bright scarlet plumage, extraordinarily long legs and neck, and a large bill that is bent abruptly downward in the middle as though deformed.

Associated with these obvious characters are other more or less anomalous features which have rendered their systematic position subject to not a little difference of opinion. Some authorities, as for example Garrod, have placed them among the gallinaceous birds, while others associated them with the Anseres, or Ducks and Geese, and still others incline to the view expressed by Huxley, who says that the group is”so completely intermediate between the Anseres on the one side, and the Storks and Herons on the other, that it can be ranged with neither.”Shufeldt, who has very recently studied the osteology of the group, agrees entirely with Huxley, but Gadow, whom we are following, as well as Beddard and others, regards the points of agreement between the Flamingos and the Storks and Ibises as on the whole more numerous than with Ducks and Geese, and consequently ranges them as a suborder of the Stork-like birds (Ciconiiformes), which is immediately followed by the order containing the Ducks, Geese, etc.

It appears that more complete knowledge of their ancestors and life will be necessary before their position can be absolutely fixed. In any event it is beyond question that the Flamingos are a very ancient group, since nearly three times as many fossil forms are known as have been recognized as now living.

The oldest of these fossil forms comes from the upper Cretaceous of Denmark; the others are mainly from the middle and late Tertiary of Europe, with a single Pliocene form (Phce-nicopterus copei) from central Oregon, which is very closely allied to our living species (P. ruber).

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