Real video of flamingos feeding chicks with blood red liquid?

On August 11, 2024, an X-user posted a video purporting to show a pair of adult flamingos feeding a chick. In the video, one of the adult flamingos can be seen touching the other flamingo's head with its beak, and a bright red liquid can be seen oozing from where the first flamingo's beak touches the second flamingo's head.

A pair of flamingos feed their offspring pic.twitter.com/QXlbMBshVU

— Nature is amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) 11 August 2024

The post, captioned “A pair of flamingos feed their young,” had received around 4,100 reposts and 680 comments at the time of writing. Many of these comments expressed concern that the red liquid in the video was blood caused by one of the adult flamingos injuring the other with its beak.

“What's going on here? Blood?” asked one commenter. Another said, “I was years old today when I discovered that flamingo feedings look like a satanic sacrificial ritual.”

The video, which has been circulating for years in numerous posts on Facebook, X, Instagram, Reddit, and other social media sites, was authentic, meaning it was not created or altered using AI or digital editing software, and actually showed two adult flamingos feeding a chick. For this reason, we rate this claim as “true.”

However, the red liquid seen in the video was not blood from an injury to the head of one of the flamingos.

Instead, Sara Hallager, bird curator at the Smithsonian National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute, told Snopes via email, the fluid was crop milk, a nutritious secretion produced by certain birds to feed their young. Hallager explained, “Both parents feed the single chick a rich crop milk that is colored red (the milk contains carotenoids, which flamingos eat and give them their pink color).”

Snopes was able to track down the original source of the footage by performing a reverse image search for a screenshot of a frame of the video using Google Images and TinEye. From the TinEye results, we learned that the video was available for license from several popular image and video licensing agencies, including Adobe Stock, Shutterstock, and Getty Images.

All three licensing agencies have attributed the video to Stock Footage Inc., a Utah-based company that specializes in producing stock footage, but have provided little other information about the video's origins. Snopes reached out to the company and asked if they could provide details about when and where the flamingo footage was shot and was referred to John Farr, the director and producer who shot the video.

In an email to Snopes, Farr provided photo evidence confirming he was the person who took the footage. Farr also shared a link to a compilation of footage he shot on the same day, which he posted on his personal YouTube page in 2018. Footage of the adult flamingos feeding the chick red crop milk can be seen in this video starting at about 0:15.

Farr told Snopes that he shot the video examined here at the Tracy Aviary in Salt Lake City. The aviary had given him permission to film the aviary's animals, including its collection of Chilean flamingos, in exchange for using the footage for marketing purposes.

Farr described the experience of filming the video in question as follows:

During the shoot, I witnessed an interesting behavior: after the baby flamingos were handed over to their parents, I focused on a baby and its parents with a Red 4K camera. One parent started to feed the baby using the crop and shortly after, the other parent placed its beak on the first parent's head, appearing to contribute to the feeding. This gave the impression that the second bird was hurting the other, but the staff member confirmed that this was not normal behavior for the birds, but not too unusual. [it was] a bit clumsy, since the birds were not particularly smart.

Farr added: “No birds were harmed.”

Hallager confirmed that the birds appeared to be Chilean flamingos based on their beak color and pattern. She also gave an explanation for their behavior:

In this video, a parent is feeding the chick, but his or her partner wants to help and is so excited that he or she also produces crop milk and drools it on his or her partner's head.

According to Hallager, “this phenomenon has been documented in several species of flamingo.”

Because Snopes was able to confirm that the video does indeed show two adult flamingos feeding a chick, we rate this claim as “True.”

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