Days after Hurricane Idalia blew by way of Florida in August, individuals started sighting flamingos in uncommon spots. The birds had been noticed as far north as Lake Michigan seashore, Wisconsin. One of these fly-ins was “Peaches” who was found in deep water off Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Now the bring-pink bird is being tracked by a pair of researchers searching to see if wild, breeding populations may return to the state since they went locally extinct in the early 1900s.
The adult bird, whose sex researchers have yet to determine, was floating in deep water, likely exhausted from flying a long distance with feathers that were getting waterlogged. Peaches was then scooped up in a net and brought to the Seaside Seabird Sanctuary for rehabilitation, said Frank Ridgley, Zoo Miami’s head of conservation and research.
“If a flamingo was strong and healthy, you would never be able to do that,” Ridgley mentioned.
READ MORE: “State Wildlife Managers Find Flamingos In Florida Are Just Visiting And Don’t Recommend Protecting Them”
After exceeding everybody’s expectations, Peaches made a full restoration and was launched simply days later. That’s when Ridgley at Zoo Miami partnered with Audubon Florida’s Dr. Jerry Lorenz to trace the chook.
Lorenz, a grasp bander who makes a speciality of spoonbills, and Ridgley, who works at a Zoo the place the whole lot from hummingbirds to ostriches are banded, mixed their experience. Lorenz was capable of have the paperwork so as to add American Flamingos to his license expedited by the United States Geological Survey’s chook banding laboratory.
“A bunch of people worked really hard and very fast to make this happen because we realized the importance,” Ridgley mentioned.
After the Seabird Sanctuary agreed, Ridgley and Lorenz flew to Tampa and fitted Peaches with a satellite tv for pc geo-locator and identification band on Sept. 8.
Tracking Peaches
Peaches holds the excellence of being solely the second American Flamingo ever to be tagged by the United States.
The alphanumerical code and colour mixture given to Peaches was created by Ridgley and his crew in 2015 once they banded the first-ever American Flamingo, “Conchy,” within the United States. At first, Ridgley turned to different bird-banding consultants for recommendation on what sort of bands to order.
“Everyone said, ‘Well, there is no standard because no one’s banded flamingos in the United States,’” he mentioned. “And they said right now Mexico and Cuba were having a disagreement about some of their banding colors and conditions… But I wasn’t that confident about international relations and resolving conflict between Cuba and Mexico.”
So, Ridgley selected one thing fully distinctive and recognizable. The chook is now simply acknowledged by a vibrant blue band and white lettering that spells “US02.”
Peaches is at present exploring the areas round St. Petersburg and all the way down to Sarasota, based on Ridgley. Researchers don’t count on the flamingo to enterprise additional for a pair weeks.
Tracking this chook will inform researchers a number of issues. It may present extra data to the pool of proof on the tie between flamingos throughout the Yucatan Peninsula and the Caribbean and people coming to Florida in growing numbers through the winter.
But if Peaches decides to remain, and occurs to search out different birds of their type alongside the best way, will Florida have a wild, breeding inhabitants of flamingos for the primary time since they disappeared from the state?
“There’s more questions than answers at the moment,” Julie Wraithmell, the manager director of Audubon Florida mentioned. “That makes it a really exciting time to be a bird scientist.”
The case of the disappearing chook
These putting birds on stilt legs used to roam the Florida peninsula in flocks of hundreds. But after the millinery commerce’s plume hunters largely wiped them out by the flip of the 18th century, sightings have develop into exceedingly uncommon.
“As a result of that practice, it decimated most of our wading birds and some of them still haven’t recovered fully, like the little blue heron and wood storks,” Ridgley mentioned. “Flamingos were, like, forgotten as a wading bird for the United States.”
Conventional knowledge from the final 50 years was that flamingos noticed in Florida had been possible escapees from non-public flocks, just like the one on the Hialeah Park racetrack. For years, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission marked the American Flamingo as a non-native species on their web site.
“The status determination was not regarding whether the species was ever native to Florida or not, but whether the birds present in the state occurred naturally or were the result of human-introduced and captive populations,” Lisa Thompson, FWC’s Habitat and Species Conservation spokesperson mentioned. “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.”
State officers pushed again in opposition to flamingo monitoring efforts as a result of they prohibit the discharge of non-native species. That’s when Ridgley and his analysis crew at Zoo Miami launched a historic document deep-dive.
Dr. Steven Whitfield, the Zoo Miami researcher who spearheaded the trouble, dug up a number of first-hand accounts of settlers, explorers and naturalists sighting flocks of flamingos numbering lots of to hundreds of people, together with one description of a nesting web site and 4 egg specimens marked as collected from Florida.
National Gallery of Art
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National Gallery of Art
A protracted historical past
Settlers realized Flamingo-hunting strategies from Indigenous Floridians.
“There were accounts of people harvesting flamingos up in the Upper Florida Keys and then taking them down to Key West, where they would sell them,” Ridgley mentioned. “There was a story of some influential people in Key West where they talked about having flamingo at dinner and that young flamingo tasted the best.”
These accounts, together with findings about flamingo sightings growing in recent years, had been compiled in a scientific article revealed in The Condor, the top-ranked journal within the discipline of Ornithology, based on JSTOR.
One of probably the most notable documentations of flamingos in Florida comes from John James Audubon, the well-known — and controversial — naturalist and ornithologist. His legacy is being reexamined in recent years as a result of he enslaved Black individuals and wrote critically about emancipation. Audubon’s seminal work The Birds of America contains 435 life-sized chook renderings, together with the American Flamingo.
“When he went to make his now famous drawing of a flamingo, he wrote in his notes leading up to it,” Ridgley mentioned. “He didn’t say ‘oh, I have to go to Cuba, I have to go to the Bahamas, I have to go to Mexico.’ He’s like ‘oh, I’m just going to go down to the Florida Keys where flamingos live and I’ll draw one there.”
It wasn’t till 2018 that FWC revealed a public webpage acknowledging flamingos’ native standing, which cites Whitfield’s findings. Despite that thought, FWC rejected a proposal in 2021 that might have granted American Flamingos protecting standing. They are federally protected by the Federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
That historic investigation was a part of a much wider have a look at Flamingos in Florida.
“It actually started, of all places, in an invasive species meeting,” Ridgley mentioned.
While he and a bunch of biologists, National Park Service officers, indigenous group leaders, and main land stakeholders had been having lunch throughout an Everglades Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area (ECISMA) assembly, somebody pulled up a photograph of some flamingos within the Florida Bay with young feathering. The birds didn’t appear old sufficient to have simply flown in and nobody knew the place they got here from.
So, Ridgley’s crew at Zoo Miami partnered with the National Park Service to launch a analysis incentive that developed into what’s now referred to as the Florida Flamingos Working Group. The group now consists of consultants from Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas and Florida who’re all attempting to handle the analysis gaps in Flamingo conservation and restoration work.
Scientific cooperation
They’re wanting into flamingos journey patterns throughout breeding populations discovered within the Caribbean and Yucatan Peninsula with banding efforts but in addition conducting a genetic research. The genetic research contains DNA samples from the museum egg specimens Whitfield discovered and genetic samples from modern-day populations. With these comparisons, the Working Group hopes to see if there was ever a genetically-distinct Florida flamingo and if that flamingo may be traced again to trendy Caribbean and Yucatan flocks.
“We don’t want to just put all our eggs in one basket,” Ridgley mentioned. “We want to look at multiple things, answer those research gaps, fill in the blanks so that we can come up with a multifaceted plan, a practical plan, one that we think has benefits for the species, for people, for even the economy.”
If the birds had been to return again and inhabit the state completely once more, Ridgley says a often noticed flock may have large implications for ecotourism within the state.
“The good thing is we think most of the areas that flamingos would use as habitat are already protected,” he mentioned. “You know, Everglades National Park, Biscayne Bay, some areas along the coastlines of preserves and refuges.”
As researchers work diligently to uncover details about a species that’s not solely iconic to Florida, but in addition an necessary a part of the state’s historical past, they’re hopeful Floridians will get to see them return.
“I think everybody’s surfing the pink wave and, gosh, hopefully they’ll find a happy home here and we’ll be able to enjoy them for years to come,” Wraithmell mentioned.
