A flock of pink flamingos atop a mountain sounds like some sort of weird hallucination … After all, don’t these long-legged wading birds live in low-lying wetlands, like the American Flamingo?
Incredibly, there are three flamingo species that make their homes high in the Andes Mountains of South America: the Andean, Chilean, and James’s Flamingos. The James’s Flamingo is the smallest and rarest of these, and was first described to science from Chile in 1886. Also known as the Puna Flamingo in recognition of its high-altitude habitat, the James’s Flamingo was thought to be extinct for several decades, with no observations by ornithologists after 1924 until 1957, when the species was found breeding at a site in Bolivia. Though the James’s Flamingo population numbers more than 100,000 individuals today, it is considered Near Threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) because of its limited range.
Read on to find out more about the James’s Flamingo: https://abcbirds.org/bird/jamess-flamingo/
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