Super cute flamingo chick gets hand-reared at zoo

Watch these adorable tiny American flamingos being hand-reared by dedicated staff at Whipsnade Zoo.

Transcript

00:00We've been hand rearing and feeding young flamingos, we hatched them out here in our incubation room

00:05and then we're going to rear them probably for the next five or six weeks until they're

00:09independent and can join our flock with the four others we have here at Whipsnade that

00:14are already bred in our flock. Adult flamingos actually produce almost a milk to feed their

00:21babies, it's a secretion from the crop so we're trying to emulate that really. So what we're

00:26feeding them are boiled eggs, so it's one whole egg and some extra yolks which gets blended up

00:32with some boiled water, vitamins, minerals and a little bit of corn oil as well to try and

00:36replicate that high protein food that the flamingos create and feed to their chicks themselves.

00:42So about 10 days we start offering them solid food, some of our flamingo pellet that we feed

00:47our adult birds here and a little bit of water and then if they do start feeding themselves a little

00:51bit we start reducing the amount we're offering so that they can sort of get on the process to

00:57weaning really and being independent. At the moment the chicks are off show, if all goes well

01:03depending on whether they wean and feed themselves quite quickly, maybe by the age of two months

01:09hopefully they'll be back in our flock and if you don't see these ones anyway and you visit the zoo

01:13we've got four chicks already in our flock so you'll certainly be able to see some flamingo

01:18chicks here at Whoops Nature.