Eric! Teenage-hood looms.
Teenage-hood is looming as feather quills push the skin and down begins to shed.
The babes are currently being weaned, and someone is none too happy about it! Number 2 is by far the biggest of the three flams, and through a mixture of greed and blind luck managed to wean himself almost overnight. As a result, during feeding time for the other two he gets exceptionally jealous. So much so in fact, that when you are busy with another bird, he tries to self-administer his food! Gone is the nervousness and fear of the feeding tube; they know what it is for and know it tastes grrreat! He is none too happy returning to his bowl of inanimate soaked Lundi and Charnwood pellets, the ingestion of which involves effort and the forgetting of which would involve long-term hunger!
Number 3 however is a totally different kettle of fish... On the very same night as number 2, 3 was also weaned. 3 accelerated beyond the other two in terms of weight and development. One week later however; as if somebody pressed the re-set button, 3 forgot everything. It lost 80g in one day, and panicking slightly we syringe fed him some pre-mixed food. Lo and behold, he is back on 4 feeds a day... There is no explanation for this change. Potentially the feather growth and weight gain took so much out of the bird that it knew it could not be a self-sufficient feeder, or maybe it just forgot... Sadly I cannot speak flamingo to find out! Hopefully, with a bit of show and tell courtesy of number 2, we can get the bird back on track.
Number 1 says no to weaning as if it is a political standpoint from which it must be wrenched. We are confident however that given time and much practice; self-feeding will occur and time will be saved.
To keep them distracted during this frustrating time we keep taking them out and about. Up until recently, they were the best of friends with all the geese on the grazing strip! The Ross' would strut up and down doing a display for them, and the lesser white-fronts would try to nibble them through the fence. The geese would rush up to the fence all in a hurry as if to say "how come you are free to roam?" The flamingos would stand all in a flummox; entirely unsure of how to behave but secretly loving the attention... The day the geese were removed to a winter enclosure, the flamingos refused to walk down the path.
They have several mums and dads, but by far the most doting and (ahem) mildly entertaining is our Thursday volunteer Nick. I wish that I had a dictophone because I would give anything to have recorded all the entertaining puppy talk that has been babbled at these birds since they first hatched! It is always very difficult to photograph the three of them because if they get so much as a whiff of me, they abandon ship and run on over.
