WATCH: Baby Flamingo Learns to Stand on One Leg

When you think about flamingos, you probably immediately associate them with their one-leg stand.

For the flamingo, this famous stance is learned early. One young chick was caught attempting the move.

As with all adorable baby animal videos, the footage of the flamingo has garnered many positive responses, as well as some pretty funny replies.

One user noted the trouble the chick was having with completing the signature move.

Another looked past the baby to its parental bird figure’s leg bling.

One man was quick to make a classic flamingo-themed joke:

Many users questioned the reasoning behind the one-leg stance.

For those of you wondering, instead of just enjoying the cute video, Discovery has the answers:

According to researchers Young-Hui Chang and Lena H. Ting, any given flamingo has a great reason to stand on one leg: It’s just easier. You might be astonished by exactly how much easier it is, however. In videos of eight juvenile flamingos at Zoo Atlanta, they saw that not only did the birds easily fall asleep while standing on one leg but that when they were sleepy or restful, they would sway much less on that one leg than when they were awake on two. That suggests that flamingo joints have a “locked” resting position that secures them in place — as long as they’re standing on one leg. But just to make sure, they wanted to prove that a flamingo could stand on one leg without any muscle activity whatsoever. And what better way to do that than by trying to balance deceased flamingos?

The grislier part of the experiment used two (previously) deceased flamingos from the Birmingham Zoo. Lo and behold, once the researchers were able to put the birds in the correct, one-legged position, they were able to stand up no problem. That’s … probably a bit further than we would have gone to prove a point, but at least we finally have an answer to the question, “Can dead flamingos stand up?” Yes. Yes, they can.

Read the full article here.

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