How to flirt like a flamingo: Dance-floor seduction 101

IN THE flamingo world, it’s all about your dance moves. And the better the moves from the male, the better chance of scoring.

WE’VE all seen that dude on the dancefloor — the one with the best moves, making it look easy. The dude who gets the girls.

Turns out that’s even more important in the flamingo world, where dinner and conversation don’t matter: it’s your dance moves that get the chicks.

A recent study has revealed flamingos with the biggest repertoire are the most successful in finding a mate. And it’s not just the big moves, it’s the ability to string them together that also matters.

Serial monogamists, to a point — they pair up for a year, agree to a mutual separation, then head out each mating season to find a new mate — flamingos invest annually in the dance of love.

Like those early high school discos, it starts with the blokes rushing around in a group, before bravado kicks in, and those with the most talent start showing off to stand out from the crowd — preening, wing-spreading, dramatically dipping heads and beaks and shaking their butts in the air like they just don’t care, all in the hope a female will notice.

It’s spectacular and sometimes hilarious to watch, as showcased in a recent instalment of David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II, in which “flamingo ballet” seduction scenes went nuts on the internet.

It’s a wing-off: Two subjects go for the ‘wing salute’. Picture: Benjamin Vollott

But it’s also serious bonding business, those behind the study into flamingo breeding habits discovered. Asking the question why some flamingo blokes acquired new mates easily, while others were left shuffling solo, researchers unravelled the complicated dance.

They found good dancers with smooth moves won out, mostly with a female who could equally get her groove on.

The study, conducted by researchers during flamingo mating season in southern France, and printed in nature.com saw scientists watch, photograph and video 50 males and 50 females aged from four to 37 trot out their moves.

Flamingos have a WEIRD mating ritual. 😍
1 of 🔟 things we learnt from #PlanetEarth2 👉 https://t.co/XYrhLRFRRy pic.twitter.com/X7gvZ8eC0Z

— BBC Three (@bbcthree) November 14, 2016

They found the average courtship dance sequence lasts five minutes, the number of “strike a pose” postures ranged between two and eight, and the transitions between were anything between two and 17.

In a sort of Dancing With The Stars meets First Dates move, researches crunched those numbers to come up with a “sexual display complexity (SDC)” score for each bird. Then they tracked the dancers to see who succeeded in producing chicks.

In a nutshell, the higher the degree of difficulty, the more desirable the flamingo mate.

While as mating season progressed, all the flamingos improved their dancing and expanded their repertoire, it was those energetic 20-year-olds who had the upper hand: with scores higher than those of the youngest and the oldest birds.

“Our results suggest that high SDC in greater flamingos signals high individual quality and current vigour, and, hence, superior competitive ability to secure a nest site on a crowded breeding island where access to nesting space is very limited,” the researchers said.

Pink flamingos strut their stuff in Aruba in the Caribbean.

Like a group dance audition, it all starts with male flamingos dancing for up to hours, formation-style, before they score a one-on-one.

“Up to several thousand individuals form dense aggregations and perform in synchrony a variety of movements in a more or less stereotyped succession for several hours per day during the pre-breeding period,” the researchers say.

There’s good reason the best dancers get the most chicks, researchers say.

“Good motor function is necessary in reproduction. Breeding in a very dense colony where space is limited requires birds to be adroit, and foraging to feed a chick also requires good motor performance.”

BUST A MOVE

The flamingos’ favourite moves included:

Head flagging: Walking with the neck stretched out, waving the head from side-to-side (far more impressive than head-nodding at the bar).

Preening: Fluffing the feathers — the bird equivalent of playing with your hair.

False Feeding: dipping their beak into water, then snatching it back up fast. Maybe don’t try this in a nightclub, security will think you’re drunk.

Wing salute: Opening the wings wide to display a flash of colour. Thing more “look at me” than flasher.

“Oh Sandra, I’m so embarrassed. I just wish the ground would swallow me up.” #PlanetEarth2 pic.twitter.com/tmT0BILuyb

— BBC One (@BBCOne) November 13, 2016

Inversed wing salute: Head forward, wings thrust forward above it, butt in the air. An advanced style of avian twerking.

Twist-preen: a standard preen, upsized with drama.

Marching: Done in a group and in a rush. Like a flamingo flash mob.

But beware when trying to get your flamingo flirt on: Planet Earth II also featured some spectacular flamingo fails, especially on slippery dance floors.

Even the coolest of dudes can end up skating on thin ice.

Samuel Hilaire

Advanced moves: Drawing by Samuel Hilaire