Flamingos are filter feeders, the bird
equivalent of baleen whales. They skate slowly through their chosen wetland, as
stiff and pompous as Monty Python’s philosophers on a soccer field, treading
through mud and water with their webbed feet, panning for brine shrimp, algae,
insects, larvae, whatever the local microbios may be.
A flamingo submerges its head
upside down, allowing its bent upper bill, with its curtain of comblike
filaments, to serve as scoop and colander, all abetted by its formidable
machine tool of a tongue.
The tongue is like a piston - it moves back and
forth rapidly, pumping water into the bill and then squirting it back out the
sides. And so the pumping and squirting continues, until the flamingo has
managed to sieve together some nine ounces of food a day.
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