Photography / Citrine
You may never think about how tenacious life really is. On October 16, in the Longquan Reservoir in the Knife District of Jingmen City, Hubei Province, in the autumn wind and autumn rain, people suddenly found a huge "egret" riding the wind and waves in the reservoir, gliding bravely, and the white body was upside down for a while, and disappeared into the trough for a while, seemingly in a predicament.
And when it soared out of the waves, its body was even larger, not at all like an egret. Bird observers tracked it with a long lens and found that it was a large flamingo, which was many times larger than the egret and extremely rare in China.
Photography / Zhou Zhicheng
The Great Red Stork is the largest flamingo in the world, with an average height of 1.1 to 1.5 meters and a weight of 2 to 4 kilograms, while the largest male bird on record reached 1.87 meters and weighed 4.5 kilograms. The lifespan of the great flamingo is also very long, the average lifespan in the wild is as high as 30 to 40 years old, the zoo captivity is as high as 60 years old, the world's largest red stork lives in Adelaide Zoo, Australia, in 1933 when it was an adult bird, in 2014 due to complications of old age was euthanized, the life expectancy reached at least 83 years. It is simply inconceivable that a bird lives to such an age, even more than the average human lifespan.
The most fascinating thing about flamingos is undoubtedly their pink and white feathers, as well as their unimaginably long legs, which can be used to turn the dirt and then absorb water through their beaks and filter it out to suck shrimp, seeds, blue-green algae, microorganisms and molluscs. The great flamingo population is distributed in Africa, South Asia and southern Europe, and China is not its natural habitat, so why does this beautiful flamingo fall into the Longquan Reservoir?
Birdwatchers found that its right leg curled high behind its tail as it swam in the reservoir, and suspected that it might have been injured; but when it flew up and landed on the shoal, it was painfully discovered that its right leg had been scratched by a branch and had completely necrotic, which may have been the reason why it left its own population and fell to Jingmen.
At present, we have not seen more videos, from this video alone can be speculated that this poor flamingo is estimated to be able to stand on one leg, forage in the shallow water of the beach, if you want to eat more food, you may have to take off again, fly a short distance to another place, no doubt will consume more physical strength, beautiful but heartache!
At present, the wild population of the Great Red Stork is relatively large, and there may be 700,000 in the world. Among them, about 145,000 to 287,000 are in Africa, about 160,000 to 225,000 in the European Mediterranean, and about 240,000 in southwest Asia, which are non-endangered species.
However, China does not have a population of great red storks, and all that is observed are traveling birds and lost birds, which are left alone for various reasons. According to a study published in 2017 in the Journal of Beijing Normal University, since the first discovery of the great red stork in Hami, Xinjiang, in 1997, a total of 144 large red storks have been observed in 54 times across the country by 2016, and they have been recorded in 19 provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the central government, including Beijing, Shanghai and Sichuan, and are showing more and more trends.
Does this mean that this beautiful bird is developing its population in China and preparing to settle down from now on? With the continuous improvement of the ecological environment everywhere, this possibility cannot be said to exist, let us look forward to it and yearn for beauty.
However, the poor flamingo was so badly injured that it probably would not have survived without human rescue. According to news reports, the relevant departments have said that they want to protect this big flamingo in situ, actively rescue, and hope that it can survive strongly, Jingmen is your most beautiful home!