A living symbol

Men have always thought of flamingos as something magic and the silhouette of these birds appears in objects of art thousands of years old.

The tall and graceful figures are actually represented in rupestrian paintings found in Spain and dating back to more than 7,000 years ago. Furthermore, in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs the concept of "red" was just rendered with a flamingo. A bronze object of Celtic origin dating back to the third century B.C., which was found near Brno, presents a flamingo-head-shaped decoration.

Unfortunately, once flamingos had lost their symbolic meaning, it often happened that men fell foul of these peaceful birds. In recent past, the practice of capturing individuals for zoos or for private collections and of despoiling nests of their eggs meant a real threat to this species. But the worst menace of all for the flamingo is the destruction of its habitat. For this reason in the last few years an international strategy was worked out for the preservation of this species. 

The first step is knowing the birds and their habits: every year many hundreds of young flamingos born in the Camargue and in Fuente de Pedra are marked with coloured plastic rings. On every ring are impressed letters and figures legible at a distance: it is thus possible to identify the marked birds in the whole Mediterranean basin. On the basis of these studies it was found out, for example, that flamingos have some "preferential routes" and that in the last few years there was an increase in the exchange between the populations of Eastern and Western Mediterranean.