Gertrude the flamingo tucks in her long legs each spring and sits next to other female flamingos as they warm eggs in their nests. Gertrude seemed content to never have hatched a chick of her own. When the greater flamingo reached age 70 last year, it was a safe conclusion that she would spend the rest of her life as a grand-auntie among a flamboyance of 63 other flamingos at the Pensthorpe nature reserve in Norfolk, England.
“The average flamingo lives for 30 to 40 years in the wild, so Gertrude is quite unique,” said Ben Marshall, manager of the reserve. “She’d just been unlucky in love and had never found a boyfriend.” That changed last month to the surprise of Marshall and other bird keepers at Pensthorpe.
In late April, they noticed that Gertrude - normally shy and not one to cause a kerfuffle in her flock - was suddenly flirting with Gil, 37, a male flamingo about half her age. “She and Gil were giving each other wing salutes, bowing to each other, and displaying some of the other 136 different courtship and mating dances that flamingos have,” said Marshall, 31. “Gertrude normally sits in the back and has never showed an interest in pairing up during breeding season, but now she was really putting herself out there,” he said.
“It was lovely to see her natural instinct kick in with her ‘toy boy’ boyfriend.” The next surprise came in early May, when one of the flamingo keepers noticed that Gertrude had made a volcano-shaped nest out of mud and wa.
