@Jana Agree, although it looks better in the photo than it really is. It is still beautiful and a big improvement over the past, but the aviary has very few (tall) plants, a great asset of the enclosure when it was not covered.
@Tiger Plants might look nice to visitors but are contraproductive to flamingos. Flamingos need maximum of sunlight during whole day and minimum of hard obstacles that could cause them broken leg or wing. Their most preffered wild habitat is open shalow hyper-saline waterbodies in a desert or near seashore, devoid of vegetation.
@Jana Well... the plants I mean are reeds, which therefore take away little or no sunlight for the flamingos. I have seen this species of flamingo (greater flamingo) in the wild and they did live among or near some medium-high vegetation like grasses and reeds. In the Camargue around the lake you find lots of reeds, tall grasses and dunes and they fish among the reeds (in the water) for food. At my last visit to the Rotterdam Zoo, the flamingos seemed more stressed than before. The reeds were a great asset in the previous enclosure, but the flamingos didn't breed very well due to the relationships in the group. But I repeat, the enclosure is still an improvement, but just not in terms of privacy and natural elements.
