This Amazing Automaton Showcases the Dance of Flamingos

Oliver Pett is an old-school artisan who builds things that almost nobody else does anymore: mechanical automatons. Without the aid of fancy electronics, his automatons come to life through complex mechanical motion and they’re mesmerizing to watch. His most recent creation, inspired by wildlife documentaries, features a flock of flamingos all dancing in unison.

Like many strange animal behaviors, this one is related to mating. The male flamingos shimmy around shallow pools of water as a unit, each individual looking around for a partner. It is beautiful, in a really silly sort of way.

Pett wanted to recreate that, including the two key elements: the synced leg shimmying and the out-of-sync head movement. That all happens through a system of gears and linkages, with a single hand crank as the only input.

As an accomplished polymath, Pett employed several different techniques and skills to construct this masterpiece. He designed the entire automaton in CAD, which gave him a reference to work from. That also let him fabricate some of the parts, including the gears and the flamingo heads, on a CNC router. But he also did a lot by hand, such as turning shafts on a lathe and finishing the birds.

The resulting clockwork flock is somehow both impressively complex and elegantly simple. Each flamingo has the same basic underlying set of gears, causing the legs to move up and down on linkages. They also have the same heads, but they’re all rotated to different positions. The legs move as one, but the heads seem to rotate of their own accord — an illusion created by the small positional differences.

That was a great success and the automaton dance troupe perfectly mimics its natural counterpart, sans potential mates.