e were many flocks of them in Florida, but now there are very few
left in this country. They are now found in Africa and in the
countries of southern Asia; a few are found also in Europe.

This is the way the flamingos live. They choose a place in the jungle
where there is a lake or a river, and build their nests all around the
lake, or by the bank of the river. The nest is just a heap of mud
raised up from the ground, with a hollow at the top where the mother
bird lays her eggs. Sometimes many thousands of flamingos are found
together around one place, which is then called a _flamingo colony_.

[Illustration: A Flamingo Colony
Photograph of a group in the American Museum of Natural History, New York]

The flamingo is a very tall bird, taller than a man when standing up.
The flamingo's legs are long and thin, and the neck is also long. The
long neck and the long legs are very useful to him. He stands in the
water on his legs, which look almost like a pair of stilts; then he
bends down his long neck, dips his beak into the water, and catches a
fish or any other small creature that he can find there. And although
the fish or the small creature sees the flamingo's legs in the water,
it does not run away. Why? Because it mistakes the legs for reeds
growing in the water!

When thousands of flamingos in a colony are standing around the lake
or by the river, where they live, it is a very grand sight from a
distance. The flamingo's feathers are a bright red in color, with
white or pink at the edges; so the thousands of flamingos look like an
army of soldiers with red coats.

In former years, when soldiers sometimes wore red coats, travelers who
happened to come toward a lake in Africa would suddenly see at a
distance an army of soldiers, as they thought, standing by the lake.
What they really saw were the flamingos fishing!

But no traveler could get very near the flamingos, for they have
_sentinels_! I have told you that the wild buffaloes have sentinels to
warn them when an enemy is coming. The flamingos have the same. Their
sentinels stand here and there just outside the place where the others
are fishing; and they keep a lookout all the time. If any enemy
comes, they cry out,

"Honk! Honk! Honk!" That means, "Enemy coming! Fly away!"

And of course all the flamingos rise up in the air and fly away to a
safe place, till the enemy goes away.

To see a whole flock of flamingos flying in the sky far above one's
head