Flamingos and writing

What color is your creativity?

The flamingo—synonymous with the color pink, kooky lawn ornaments, and standing on one leg—offers far more as a communications strategy metaphor than it may seem at first blush.

Ah, how I love the noble flamingo. Back in the heyday of a certain bird-like platform, I shared a series of tweets about why this particular bird was in my header image. As I I explore writerly questions, what tools I use when researching, and how small ideas grow into much bigger ones, I also show why flamingos are cool.

Flamingos—or is it flamingoes? Ask the data! Dictionary definitions include both spellings, but Google Books Ngram Viewer doesn’t quite concur. I searched all the books in their collection written in English since 1860, and while the e variation of the plural was once more common, flamingos started a come-up around 1940. Being a word nerd, a data interpreter, and a person who values history and watches trends, this is fascinating to me.

A Google Ngram chart shows “flamingos” becoming a far more common word than “flamingoes” over the past century, in particular since the mid-1980s, yet the e variation hangs on.

Flamingos aren’t always what they seem. Others’ writing about flamingos wows me, consistently. They are shrimp-tinted avian muses. In 2011, a New York Times article discussed how Nira Pereg, a visual artist, fell in love with flamingos:

“They’re very communal, and they deal with each other all the time, fighting, picking on each other,” Ms. Pereg said. “They’re much ruder and noisier than you think, the opposite of the flamingo cliché.” All of which guaranteed, she said, “that I loved them even more.”

The best art is all about tension, as is good storytelling. It’s crucial to find contradictions and explore them to understand how people might misunderstand your messages or mission. In other words, it’s good to recognize what people think, though there’s no need to shy away from upending common beliefs.

Flamingos are kinda feminist, actually. The flamingo is not very sexually dimorphic, meaning males and females look and act the same (unlike most birds). Males have a role in incubating eggs, caring for young, and...wearing makeup. The pinker, the better! You probably know that flamingo feathers earn their pink pink through their diet, particularly from shrimp and algae, but that’s not the only way. Biological research shows that males secrete oils and spread them over their plumage to enhance the pink shade, especially during mating season.

Look beneath the pink. Although flamingos are synonymous with pink, their colors shine even more brightly when they take off and display black flight feathers, mostly on the underside of their wings. The color comes from melanin, the same substance that humans produce for skin, hair, and eyes. As the Audobon Society writes, “Melanin is very strong, and allows the hardest-working feathers to better resist wear and tear.” In flight, the high contrast between their pink and black plumage is striking. Both colors are important for its survival, yet they couldn’t look more different. I can’t help but wonder if the black tip on the greater flamingo’s beak is a bit of color coordination.

They balance grace with utter silliness. Take the flamingo mating ritual, for example, which features a group dance. The photo at the top of this post shows several flamingoes engaged in the dance. The males extend their necks and march synchronously to the left and right, necks stiff and heads stiffly poised, jerkily scanning their surroundings as they move. So many birds have intricate courtship rituals that I adore (I’m thinking of you, magnificent riflebird), but the flamingo’s takes the cake for me. The dance emphasizes the bird’s outrageous proportions, long neck and long legs. The lesson I take from this is to do your thing, even if you look silly, and also that it’s okay for people to dismiss you when you’re confident you’re making the right moves.

What inspires you in your writing, and is it now flamingos?

Flamingo mating ritual photo at top by Pedro Szekely, licensed under CC BY 2.0.