Australia’s last flamingos will go on display this weekend after taxidermists restored the magnificent pink birds.
The last flamingo in Australia (named Chile) died in 2018, the second last (Greater) in 2014 – but they have been resurrected as gay emblems for South Australia’s Feast festival.
Flamingos once roamed the Australian outback, great pink flocks of them feeding on crustaceans near Lake Eyre – those crustaceans that give salt lakes their pink hue were also responsible for the birds’ colour.
But the last ice age meant the end of wild Australian flamingos. Since then Australia’s only flamingos were brought over to live in zoos.
Greater, who came to Australia in the 1930s, was believed to be the oldest flamingo in captivity in the world.
He was 83 when he died of old age, having survived being beaten up by youths years before. Two 17-year-old boys attacked the blind bird, and left it bleeding.
Chile, Australia’s last remaining flamingo, died in 2018 from arthritis and old age – she was in her 60s.
The SA Museum’s taxidermy specialist, Jo Bain, took on the task of preserving the flamingos. Photograph: South Australian Museum
And then there were none. There is a moratorium on bringing flamingos to Australia because of disease fears.
The SA Museum’s taxidermy specialist, Jo Bain, took on the task of freezing and then preserving them.
Bain experimented with new techniques because he was dealing with skin “as strong as wet toilet paper”.
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He told Guardian Australia in September he would wake up every morning at 3am or 4am “thinking about all the things that can go wrong, and how to approach it the next day”.
He made moulds and created new, long-lasting legs to support the birds’ bodies, fixed their elegant necks in place, treated the skin so it looks natural, and painstakingly feathered Chile and Greater.
Adelaide Zoo donated the much-loved pair to the SA Museum after their deaths. Zoo director Phil Ainsley, says it’s “wonderful that their stories and that of their species can continue to be told”.
“Current biosecurity rules mean we can’t import flamingos anymore so for some visitors this could be the only chance to ever get up close to these birds,” he says.
The restored Chile and Greater will be on display at the SA Museum as part of Feast festival 2021 – an erroneous assumption they were both male saw them adopted by the gay community. After the attack on Greater, and the subsequent outpouring of emotion, the LGBTQIA+ festival adopted the two flamingos as its emblem.
After her death, Chile was found to be female.
Flinders University vertebrate palaeontologist Trevor Worthy says flamingos roamed Australia for 30m years. Fossilised footprints and bones in creek beds show it’s likely they disappeared more than 25,000 years ago.
“The world and Australia got exceedingly dry because all the water was locked up in ice,” he says.
“The lakes dried out altogether, all at the same time all across Australia, so there was nowhere for them to go. Too many lakes dried out simultaneously … they were stuffed.”
Worthy said there were four types of flamingo in Australia at one point, but his honours student Tim Niederer has just submitted his thesis showing there were only two in the Pleistocene Epoch (the ice age). A big, stocky flamingo and a smaller one would have waded in the waterways around Lake Eyre.
“You’ve got this vast lake that’s very flat … no hills, no sand dunes, you could walk for kilometres with that mirage in front of you,” Worth says.
“Eventually you’d get close and see the water. I can imagine their legs, that bird in that shallow water. And they’d be in the river beds … the waterholes … gathering in groups of a dozen or two dozen.”
