We’ve seen a lot of raptors with their heads turned 180 degrees recently. Jerry Harris dropped me a line to remind me that flamingos are also perverts when it comes to neck posture. Here are three of his photos:

All these photos show multiple individuals curving their necks through 180 degrees so they can rest them on their torsos. In fact, they go much further than 180 degrees, then curve back again: the individual on the right of the second photo, and the one on the left of the last photo. are both curling their necks 270 degrees to the right, then 90 degrees back to the left. That is of course a total of 360 degrees, which strongly suggests these bad boys can crank a full 360 if they want to. (In fact, it has to mean that, unless the necks are asymmetric, and I’ve never heard any suggestion of that.)

And more: this is not some kind of extreme behaviour that flamingos can attain in extremis. This is what they do to relax.

Note by the way that different flamingos are shown here curving their necks in different directions. For example, check out the two birds sitting in the foreground of the third photo. I wonder whether different individuals have different handedness, or whether each bird randomly curves one way, then next time the other. Or even if they alternate handedness for successive rests.

In some senses, what we’re seeing here from the flamingos is the most extreme neck posture we’ve seen in the present sequence of posts. But in another sense, this is much less impressive than the raptors. Flamingos have long cervicals, and they are bending their intervertebral joints laterally to achieve these postures. The raptors by contrast have craniocaudally short vertebrae, and they are twisting the joints to achieve their 180-degree turns. And that is what I find preposterous.

Some time soon, I must get around to posting the osteological implications.

doi:10.59350/vjyh4-v0t83