Sh! Go easy! Pretend you're a horse or a cow.[21] We've gone south with the swallows--it's September you see--and those queer birds over there are flamingoes. The flamingoes are a shy lot; I don't know why. I can't think it's on account of their looks; for there's the kiwi, the hornbill, and sakes alive--the puffins! _They_ all have funny noses, too, but none of them are particularly shy, and you can walk right up to a Papa Puffin almost. Whatever the reason is, the flamingoes are very easily frightened and they're particularly suspicious of human beings. Yet we've simply got to meet them and have them in this chapter, for they are among the most interesting of the feathered workers of the soil. They just live in mud; build those tower-like nests out of it, walk about in it, and get their meals by scooping up mud and muddy water from the marshes where they live, on the borders of lakes and seas. They strain out the little creatures wiggling about in these scooped-up mouthfuls. [21] Observers find that flamingoes can be successfully approached by putting on the skin of a cow or a horse. I. FEATHERED FARMERS WITH QUEER NOSES "What a funny nose! What happened to it?" I knew you'd say that. Everybody does. But just watch now and see. That flamingo over there, stalking about on his stilt-like legs, sticks his long neck down to the muddy water, turns that funny nose upside down and---- "Why, of all things, is he going to stand on his head?" WHY FLAMINGOES HAVE SUCH FUNNY NOSES No, not that. Don't you see, he's getting his dinner? After that crooked scoop bill--for that's what it really is, a scoop--is filled, the water strains out through ridges along the edge of the bill and what's left is his food. That picture looks as if it had a tremendous lot of flamingoes in it, doesn't it? It has. It's quite a town, Flamingoburg is. Although flamingoes are so wary about meeting two-legged people without feathers--that is, human beings--they're very sociable among themselves and there may be a thousand, even two thousand, pair in a single flamingo city, such as Doctor Chapman studied in the Bahama Islands some years ago. Their nests are cupped-out hollows in little towers of dried mud raised a foot or so to keep high tides from swamping them. They scrape up the mud with that shovel-like bill. After the conical-tower nest is made, the mud piled up and patted into shape with her bill and feet, Mother Flamingo lays one or two eggs--and then she goes to setting. You notice there's just one little chick in the nest in the lower left-hand corner of the picture, and just one egg in the nest near by.