Two months ago, in the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, Anna Yu, a park ranger in western Florida, heard a rumor from a local birder: for the first time in years, somebody had spotted a flamingo near Fort De Soto Park, where she works. When Yu returned to the park, which encompasses more than a thousand acres of islands, she cleared debris and took stock of what did and didn’t flood. In her three years as a park ranger, she’d seen storms collect weird things in their wake, but she’d never seen a flamingo. Then her radio crackled with the voice of another ranger. “A flamingo just flew over North Beach,” he said.
Yu drove her truck down a service road and walked out onto North Beach. There, in the distance, she saw a pink spray of feathers against the backdrop of a blue lagoon. Five flamingos were standing by the water. A few seconds later, they spread their wings. “They flew right over my head,” she told me. “That moment was so enchanting.” Later, in a stand of mangroves, she found another three, scanning the mud for food. She called it “the rarest encounter that I’ll probably ever have out there.” What she couldn’t figure out was where they had come from.
That week, reports of flamingos lit up the state. A flock appeared along the causeway that leads to Sanibel Island. More than a dozen dipped into a tide pool on Treasure Island. Another five landed near the mouth of Tampa Bay. By the time Fort De Soto Park reopened to the public, word had spread. Cars lined up before sunrise at North Beach, filled with Floridians who wanted a glimpse.
Florida’s flamingos are a paradox. They’re practically synonymous with the Sunshine State; more than twenty-three hundred Florida businesses have had the word “flamingo” in their name (and that’s not even including Flamoongo L.L.C.). But the birds are rare enough that few Floridians have ever seen one in the wild. In my thirty-two years in Florida, I had only seen captives in zoos. When I saw the news reports, I promised myself that, as soon as I was done dragging waterlogged furniture out of my parents’ house, I’d find my own wild flamingo.
That evening, near my home, in Sarasota, I slipped into the woods and hiked out to a spit of sand that divides a bayou from the Gulf of Mexico. I knew that black skimmers, bald eagles, and oystercatchers all nest there, and I thought a flamingo might turn up. I sweated through my clothes a few times before the sun set, but the only wildlife I could find were a few men in Speedos.
Back home, I sat on my porch and scrolled through forums, Facebook groups, and Instagram, trying to triangulate this elusive bird. I wanted to see the creature that was so central to the idea of Florida that it lent its name to Flamingo Auto Salvage, Flamingo Condo 69, and Flamingo Ham Shoppe. I read that one flamingo, spotted in the Florida Keys, was wearing bands on its legs, apparently from a scientific study in Mexico. Flamingos are not typically considered migratory birds. Could they have flown five hundred miles across the Yucatán Channel during a hurricane?
After clicking through a series of birder accounts, I saw an image of a flamingo, wading in a shallow pool with a radio tower in the frame. The location read “Pinellas County,” about fifty miles north of my house. I knew the area well enough to guess where the tower might be, so I called two friends and asked them if they wanted to go. We planned to leave before first light.
For much of the past century, flamingos turned up in Florida now and then, but in tiny numbers. The scientific community tended to assume that these birds had escaped from captive populations, and were not native. But, in 2015, a pink bird landed on Boca Chica Key, at Naval Air Station Key West, and helped to rewrite the history of the American flamingo.
Initially, the Navy tried to scare its wayward flamingo away from a salt marsh between two airstrips. When that didn’t work, someone called Frank Ridgley, Zoo Miami’s head of conservation and research, and said that, unless someone captured the bird, they were going to kill it.
Ridgley drove down to the base, taking with him a new hire, Steven Whitfield. They met with a team of wildlife specialists, caught the bird, and named him Conchy. They planned to band Conchy with a satellite transmitter, release him in Florida Bay, and see where he went. But, when they asked the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission for permission, the agency initially said no. Because “flamingos are not considered native,” the response said, “a permit would be needed” to release Conchy. (Curiously, a page on the agency’s Web site also said that a species of flamingo “occurs naturally” and “was formerly abundant” in South Florida.)
Whitfield, who had originally trained as a tropical-frog biologist, suspected that the scientific consensus about Floridian flamingos was wrong. “It’s often not clear what actually belongs here and what doesn’t,” he told me. He and his colleagues started looking for scientific evidence. “We found accounts of naturalists in the eighteen-hundreds that would describe flamingos,” he said. “But these were isolated things.”
One early American record of a flamingo appeared in “Letters from the Frontiers,” an 1827 account by a military officer named George A. McCall. He spotted the bird near Anclote Key, about thirty-five miles north of where Yu works. He wrote of the “brilliant hues my eyes dwelt upon in an ecstasy of delight.” But, after the glow of discovery dimmed, he put a bullet in the bird, carried it back to camp, and cut out its tongue to eat. Apparently, flamingo tongue was a delicacy in ancient Rome.
Five years later, John James Audubon, who had been looking for the birds, went sailing west of Islamorada, in the Upper Keys. “The ocean around glittered in its quiet beauty, and the light fleecy clouds that here and there spotted the heavens, seemed flakes of snow margined with gold,” Audubon wrote. Then he saw a flock of flamingos cutting a line across the sky. “I thought I had now reached the height of all my expectations, for my voyage to the Floridas was undertaken in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands.” When Audubon completed his “Birds of America” portfolio, in 1838, it included a painting called “American Flamingo.” A peculiar bird, so pink that it borders on neon, cranes its neck toward the ground. That image haunted me as a kid, and I never forgot it.
In other nineteenth-century accounts, Whitfield found references to a brisk trade in bird plumes—and pink feathers were especially prized. One tiny town in the southern Everglades, where residents made their living fishing and plume hunting, even adopted the name Flamingo. But the sightings seemed to end there. “Around 1900, the reports of flamingos just stopped,” Whitfield told me. He wondered whether the frenzy for feathers had driven the bird nearly to extinction.
Strangely, the disappearance of Floridian flamingos coincided with their ascension to cultural ubiquity. On New Year’s Eve, 1920, the Flamingo Hotel, a pink behemoth on Biscayne Bay, opened its doors. A few years later, the hotel imported six flamingos from Africa to attract guests. And, in the thirties, twenty to thirty flamingos were captured in Cuba and released in the center of the Hialeah racetrack, north of Miami. They quickly vanished—a biologist soon reported a sighting not far south, along Card Sound Road—but a second group of captives stayed put, and their descendants still live in Hialeah today.
Around the time that Elizabeth Bishop described Florida as the “state full of long S-shaped birds,” in 1946, flamingo designs started to appear on homes, cocktail menus, and monogrammed shirts. Some residents even released flamingos outside their homes, as living ornaments. In 1984, the Hialeah captives appeared in the opening credits for “Miami Vice”; in 1988, the state lottery chose the flamingo as its mascot. But, throughout those decades, flamingo sightings were incredibly rare, and the birds were usually assumed to be fugitives from the racetrack.
When it came to releasing Conchy the flamingo, the Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission relented after internal discussions and exchanges with Zoo Miami. Some flamingos, the commission said, were “vagrant native” birds that did not require a permit to be released. In December, 2015, with the agency’s blessing, Ridgley placed a satellite band on Conchy’s leg. The bird bounced around the Everglades for a couple of years, confirming that Florida could sustain flamingos year-round. Then, soon after Hurricane Irma passed, in 2017, the signal went dead.
Ridgley, Whitfield, and their collaborators eventually published a study of flamingos in Florida. Two scientists at Audubon Florida, Jerry Lorenz and Pete Frezza, gave Whitfield a modern time line of sightings going back to 1999. He also searched natural-history-museum collections. If flamingos weren’t native to Florida, he wouldn’t expect to find early records of their nests. “What was really weird is that a flamingo egg popped up,” Whitfield told me. Written on a shell in the American Museum of Natural History, in red ink, was the word “Florida.” He found four more eggs, along with twenty-nine flamingo specimens from Florida, in other collections. He and his collaborators sent all of their findings to the commission.
In its 2018 paper, the team argued that plume hunting had driven the American flamingo out of America; in the Caribbean basin as a whole, hunting and development cut fifty nesting sites to fewer than ten. Around that time, a spokeswoman for the commission told the Miami Herald that the agency had changed the bird’s designation to native, though she didn’t say when. Recently, when I reached out to the commission, a spokesperson wrote to me that “a growing body of evidence over the years suggests that at least some American flamingos living in Florida have arrived on their own from outside of the state.” It’s now clear that the American flamingo was, and still is, native to Florida.
Many of the scientists who have studied flamingos over the years have noticed the curious association between sightings and storms. After Hurricane Michael lashed the Florida Panhandle, in 2018, a lone flamingo was spotted in the St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge; locals named it Pinky. After Hurricane Idalia made landfall, in late August, there were more reported sightings of flamingos in Florida than there were in the entire twentieth century. A flock joined Pinky in the Panhandle, ending a five-year stretch of solitude. Others turned up as far north as Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. “It’s not clear why now,” Whitfield told me.
Andrew Farnsworth, a senior research associate at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, helped to explain the hurricane-flamingo connection. As a five-year-old, Farnsworth became fascinated by the movements of birds; when he started work as a researcher, he discovered historical records of epic avian journeys. In the late eighteen-hundreds, trade winds carried the cattle egret nearly two thousand miles from Africa to South America. Later, egrets expanded their territory and migrated to Florida, where they nest to this day. Sometimes, sudden rain or headwinds force migrating birds to settle in the closest available habitat. Mid-century biologists even had a term for this: the birds were said to “fall out.” “They drop into the nearest habitat they can find,” Farnsworth told me. “The combination of hurricane alley plus the trades can be a conveyor belt.”
To figure out why recent hurricanes seem to have carried so many flamingos into Florida, Farnsworth said, scientists might consider what made them take flight in the first place. Perhaps stormwater flooded their habitat, or high water temperatures threatened their source of food. “Thinking about the potential stress and then the vehicle to get them moving—that starts to tell the story of what’s going on,” he told me.
A flamingo named Peaches, who was found swimming near St. Pete Beach, could help solve the mystery. Last month, Lorenz and Ridgley banded Peaches, who was released along the eastern rim of Fort De Soto Park. “Whatever Peaches does, we’re going to learn so much,” Ridgley said. Perhaps the bird will fly back to a breeding population in Mexico or Cuba, where scientists can study the reasons that flamingos are in flux. Lately, he’s been wondering, Could hurricanes be the event that helps reintroduce the flamingo back to Florida permanently?
The morning after my fruitless visit to Speedo Beach, my friends and I drove to Pinellas County and stopped near a lagoon. In the blue light of dawn, high on adrenaline, we spotted the radio tower that I had seen on Instagram. We ran down to the water’s edge and took stock of the birds: a few egrets, some pelicans, but no flamingos. We pulled up an aerial view of the islands and decided to drive north, toward a little thumb of sand.
A mile down the road, we parked, climbed out, and ran through the dunes to another beach. This time, the rising sun lit up a pink blur on the white sand. A lone flamingo was walking along the edge of the lagoon. The adrenaline faded, and a calm washed over me. Here was the mythical creature I’d looked at countless times, but never actually seen.
A moment later, a stranger with a camera crossed the flamingo’s line of sight. The bird flared the black tips of its wings, flew over the dunes, and slipped into a gap in the mangroves. As quietly as we could, we followed.
Encircled by trees, we found another three flamingos wading, talking to one another with a hoarse honking noise. For a few moments, we watched them and whispered among ourselves. Then we turned to go, leaving them to what we hoped would become their home. ♦
