Card #042 · Birds
Lesser flamingo
Phoeniconaias minor
Uncommon NT · Near Threatened
Field notes
- Classification
- Phoenicopteriformes · Phoenicopteridae
- Range
- East African Rift lakes, southern and West Africa, Madagascar, northwest India and Pakistan
- Size
- 80–90 cm tall (31–35 in)
- Weight
- 1.2–2.7 kg (2.6–6 lb)
- Lifespan
- 40+ yrs (wild ring record)
- Diet
- Cyanobacteria, diatoms
Most Notable
The smallest flamingo is the most numerous, at 2.2 to 3.2 million birds. East Africa holds up to 2.5 million of them, and they have one regular nesting ground: Lake Natron in Tanzania.
The old line is that its pink comes from food too caustic for other animals. The caustic part is the water: strongly alkaline soda lakes. The food is Arthrospira, the same genus sold as spirulina, and its carotenoid pigments are what tint the feathers.
It feeds with its head upside down, pumping water through fine filters in its bill. Caged birds at Lake Nakuru in Kenya filtered about 30 litres of lake water an hour, taking in around 70 grams of dry algae a day.
Lake Natron is East Africa's only regular nesting site. The birds nest on seasonal islands of soda crust, and only when the water is neither too high nor too low. In early 2025 they bred there for the first time since 2019, and about 50,000 chicks hatched. Tanzania ruled out large-scale soda ash mining on the lake that August.
Losing a single site matters. Kamfers Dam near Kimberley was the only place in South Africa where lesser flamingos bred in numbers, and years of raw sewage spilling into it have driven the colony away.
They can live a long time. A chick ringed at Kenya's Lake Magadi in 1962 was found on a Kenyan lakeshore in 2003, more than 40 years later.
Outside Africa, about 650,000 live in South Asia, and they breed in northwest India and Pakistan.
Range: Rift Valley soda lakes, southern and West Africa, and NW India.