One fine evening, just about sunset, a lot of handsome young birds came flying over the wetlands where a party of flamingos were sitting. They circled several times, came nearer and nearer down toward the flamingos, and then all at once together wheeled round in a circle, and in a broken voice began to sing their party song. The new comers could not sing in tune, and still worse, a horrible habit that they had was to leave off singing in the middle of a word, just when the word was at its longest syllable.
The flamingos, of course, wished to imitate them, so they threw back their heads and began to sing in their odd quavering way, but they always got their heads round backwards once too often; so they drew their long necks far out, and tossed their heads about, and bent them, and creaked and squealed, but always at the very end and best of the song their heads fell forward on their ugly duck breasts, and they looked quite stupid.
“Look at those blatant birds pecking the ground dumb,” said the newcomers. “Why don’t they do as we do? They haven’t got the sense of a wader. Let’s just tap their beaks with a little pebble, and see if it will have any effect on them.”
So they dropped to the ground, and by chance tap, tap, tap went upon each flamingo’s bill, and it gave him quite a nasty blow.
Then the flamingos awoke, and rose up to the water’s edge, and they all flung their heads up towards the newcomers because once under them, and then with their bodies once more firmly planted and wobbling their heads on their crooked necks sang, in agreeably languid accents, the verse which commences:
Then the strange birds made a bounce, and a large pelican perched on a mud bank near.
“Who told you to knock those flamingos order!” he shouted out. “Those who know best, and who asked me which were worse?”
“Now,” it was presently announced to all the other birds, “that pelican was a very well-educated bird, and he only looked at the flamingos long trotters, and waited a minute till he thought they were ready to go to sleep again, and then put them on their legs; but in order to teach them common sense he turned up in his proper native dress when it was even later than such matter required, which was just half an hour before ten o’clock supper.”
The flamingos deserved all that had been done to them when told of it, but when any respectable pelican adapter has lost respectful practice, and shown don a fresh dress, and become the socratic teacher of a batch of flouted birds concerning their duty to themselves, as flamingos did, they always did very well at last in whatever school they have been placed.
That is the reason why every one since, until the present day, flamingos and pelicans are always friends, and immigrate into India together.