Spend some time watching flamingos and you might think that not much goes on in their tiny heads. But these elegant avians actually lead complex social lives. Each bird has certain other individuals it prefers to spend time with, and others it avoids. In other words, flamingos have friends. The Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust, the WWT, manages a number of wetlands in the UK, some of which have communities of captive aquatic birds, including flamingos. 'They didn't quite know whether they could just take a flamingo out of the environment and stick it in a new flock and it would be fine? Or should they care a bit more about the social choices that the birds were making.' Paul Rose, a psychologist at the University of Exeter's Centre for Research in Animal Behaviour. For five years, Rose and his team observed the daily goings-on of five of the world's six different flamingo species housed at the WWT Slimbridge Wetland Centre in Gloucestershire: the five species are the Chilean, Andean, American, James', and lesser flamingos. 'The partnerships that we see between birds are non-random. The birds are choosing who to associate with' Male-female pairs spend time together, but so do same-sex pairs and even groups of three or four. And those relationships can last for many years.