Y fflamingos Cymru
Today I took a trip over the Second Severn Crossing and journeyed into deepest, darkest (and windiest!) Carmarthenshire to visit WWT National Wetland Centre in Llanelli, for a chat with the folks there about their flock of Caribbean flamingos. As part of my PhD research I hope to be able to include all of WWT's captive flocks in my overall study population and the purposes of this visit was to see how this could be possible at Llanelli. Obviously I am only one man and hence I cannot get to all centres all of the time, so a plan has been hatched to encourage volunteers to take photos of the birds and send them to me for analysis. Hopefully this will allow me to build up a picture of the social interactions within each one of WWT's flamingo flocks.
Llanelli houses a flock of around 40 Caribbean flamingos, all captive-bred by the Trust from WWT Slimbridge. The flamingos arrived at the then brand new Welsh centre at the start of the 1990s and the flock has gone from strength-to-strength. For the past decade, chicks have been hatched with regularity and three grey (still fluffyish) youngsters are currently wandering about the flamingo enclosure. One of the chicks (fast asleep!) can be seen in the photo. So adept are the folks in Wales that when the precious delivery of WWT's second ever lesser flamingo chick was hatched and reared in 2011, it was part brought-up at Llanelli when it was very young.
It was very interesting chatting to Richard (who cares for the birds), Dom and Pamela (from education) and Llanelli's army of enthusiastic and friendly volunteers; it was clear from what everyone said that the flamingos are a firm "hit" with the public and the most popular birds at the place. Llanell's staff (like all at WWT) are to be applauded for the use they make of their flamingos for public engagement, interpretation and creating that "wow" factor in their visitors, young to old. So there you are folks, hard and fast evidence for the oft-quoted remark that flamingos are indeed the most popular zoo-housed bird in the world! And rightly so in my book.
Go give them a visit!
