10 BULLETIN 135, UNITED STATES NATIONAL MUSEUM 



gun barrel. As soon as the short twilight gave place to darkness, we heard the- 

 honk of the flamingos and soon they began to arrive, each group alighting with 

 a splash in the water near. Soon hundreds had gathered, and although we could 

 hear them wallowing about, so dense was the darkness that neither my guide 

 or myself could see a single bird. 



Behavior. — J. L. Bonhote (1903) gives us an interesting picture of 

 the behavior of a large flock of flamingos, writing as follows: 



I had been watching at a distance an immense flock of 700 or a 1,000, feeding,, 

 preening, and wading about, and, desiring a closer inspection, had approached 

 to within 20 yards of the nearest bird when I stumbled and thus gave them the 

 alarm. As soon as they saw me they all bunched up together, their long necks 

 stretched up as high as possible, and all I could see was a mass of living scarlet 

 streaks. Although I remained absolutely quiet, the birds would not settle down 

 again; at first four or five, then the layer about four deep nearest me, then the 

 next layer, and so on and so on, slowly rose expanding their jet black wings and 

 displaying, as they did so, the pink of their backs and the gorgeous scarlet of 

 their under wing coverts. Thus they went slowly filing off in a long irregular 

 column till not one was left, and, as they wended their way across the sky, one 

 saw first the contrast of black and scarlet till it gave place to an intermittant 

 line of red, gradually fading away in a pink haze on the eastern horizon. Such 

 a blaze of moving color, set in the deep blue of a tropical sky in the light of the 

 afternoon sun, forms a spectacle of natural beauty which cannot be surpassed. 



Doctor Chapman (1908) writes: 



Flamingos in flight resemble no other bird known to me. With legs and neck 

 fully outstreched, and the comparatively small wings set halfway between bill 

 and toes, they look as if they might fly backward or forward with equal ease. 

 They progress more rapidly than a heron, and, when hurried, fly with a singular 

 serpentine motion of the neck and body, as if they were crawling in the air. 



As noon approached, the birds disposed themselves for sleep. The long necks- 

 were arranged in sundry coils and curves, the heads tucked snugly beneath the 

 feathers of the back, and, for the first time, there was silence in the red city. 

 Suddenl}' — one could never tell whence it came — the honking alarm note was given. 

 Instantly, and with remarkable eff'ect, the snakelike necks shot up all over the 

 glowing Vjed of color before me, transforming it into a writhing mass of flaming 

 serpents; then as the alarm note continued and was taken up by a thousand 

 throats, the birds, like a vast congregation, with dignified precision of movement, 

 gravely arose, pressing their bills into the nests to assist themselves. Under 

 circumstances of this kind the birds rarely left their nests, and it was diflficult to 

 determine the cause of their alarm. Often, doubtless, it was baseless, but at 

 times it was due to a circling turkey vulture, the gaunt ogre of flamingodom, 

 which, in the absence of the parent birds, is said to eat not only eggs but nestlings. 

 Possibly some slight sound from my tent, where, with ill-controlled excitement, 

 I was making photograph after photograph, may have occasioned the deep-voiced 

 warning huh-huh-huh. 



Of the notes of the flamingo, he (1905) says: 



The notes of the adults are varied in character. The commonest is the loud 

 huh-huh-huh, already mentioned, the second syllable of which is strongly accented. 

 This call was given in a low, deep tone and in a higher one of less volume, a 

 difference which I considered sexual, the louder voice being, presumably, that of 

 the male. This was the alarm call, and indeed was heard whenever there was 

 any commotion in the colony. Other calls were a deep nasal, resonant honk^ 



