Florida has a tetchy relationship with flamingos. A number of centuries in the past, earlier than the state had been developed, they had been frequent in South Florida and the Keys, as evidenced by a letter written by Gustavus Würdemann, an worker of the U.S. Coast Survey. He labored within the Keys for a number of months in 1857, putting in gear to observe and file the tides, however he had a passion of gathering fowl and fish specimens and sending them off to the newly burgeoning Smithsonian Institution, in addition to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard.
In his letter, which was printed posthumously in 1860, he recounts seeing a flock of 500 American flamingos on the flats round Indian Key and Islamorada. (John James Audubon wrote of similar-sized flocks a quarter-century earlier than.) Würdemann additionally wrote about going out with a neighborhood hunter, who captured no less than 100 of them and stored them, with their legs tied collectively, in a single canoe. (Many of the birds didn’t survive, which was how Würdemann collected the skins he despatched to the Smithsonian.)
Hunting practices like this, in addition to the plume hunters who decimated wading fowl populations all through South Florida on the finish of the 1800s and early 1900s, largely worn out the Florida inhabitants of American flamingos. For a very long time it was believed that any flamingos seen in South Florida had been escapees from Hialeah Race Track, although that was disproved within the early Nineties when a fowl that had been banded in Mexico was seen within the Everglades.
Also, there was the lesson of Conchy, a flamingo trapped in 2015 for its personal safety by Tom Sweets of the Key West Wildlife Center at Naval Air Station Key West. Before it was launched close to Everglades National Park it was outfitted with a satellite tv for pc transmitter, which tracked its actions every day. The information confirmed the fowl shifting throughout Florida Bay for the subsequent few years, but it was reported very not often by birders. Despite being four-foot-tall pink birds, flamingos are apparently able to shifting round with hardly anybody noticing them.
Back within the 2010s a number of massive flocks of flamingos, almost certainly birds that had come over from the Bahamas, had been seen at a stormwater therapy space in Palm Beach County generally known as STA-2. Almost 150 had been seen on the peak in 2014, however these numbers slowly dwindled again to nothing.
Generally in Florida we solely get the occasional flamingo sighting; as a rule, lone birds. (I’ve seen three of them since 2020, and eight or 10 within the time I’ve lived within the Keys.) Florida Bay tends to be the almost certainly place to see them. At least this was the case till tropical storm-turned-hurricane Idalia got here alongside.
In the week for the reason that storm handed, American flamingos have been popping up all over the place – six had been noticed at St. Marks Wildlife Refuge simply south of Tallahassee, one in a lake in Gainesville, one in Palm Coast, three in Clearwater, 16 at Treasure Island Beach, three in Fort De Soto, two on Anna Maria Island, 5 at Boca Grande in Charlotte County, 14 in Factory Bay close to Marco Island, and a whopping 51(!) at Estero Bay Preserve State Park close to Sanibel.
They’ve additionally been seen in Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Ohio.
The flamingos have been a mixture of grownup and immature birds. (You can inform by how pink they’re.) Since Idalia shaped off the coast of the Yucatan, and lingered there for a while, it’s thought the Yucatan is the place most of those birds got here from.
It appeared solely a matter of time till some had been noticed within the Keys, which turned out to be the case.
Last Friday a ranger at Curry Hammock State Park noticed three flamingos flying southwest over the park. Late within the afternoon, as Mariah Hryniewich and Gianna Arcuri had been ending their day on the Florida Keys Hawkwatch, they noticed a report that mentioned Amy Grimm had simply noticed eight American flamingos in one of many salt ponds of Grassy Key, only a few miles north. When they arrived there the flamingos had been all unfold out in a line, principally loafing. They arrange their scopes to get higher appears on the birds, which was when Mariah seen a large, yellow, plastic band on one of many birds’ legs. It had the letters DXCL on it.
Through a couple of of her birding connections, Mariah rapidly came upon that the band was from a venture at Ría Lagartos Biosphere Reserve situated close to the jap tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. The fowl was banded in 2000, making it 23 years old. (American flamingos are inclined to breed between 2 and 6 years old.) It was banded throughout a time when the American flamingo inhabitants was being closely preyed on by jaguars, and a group of veterinarians and scientists had labored collectively to incubate and hatch 200 eggs.
Mariah and Gianna went out to dinner, however stopped by the Grassy Key salt ponds on the best way home to see the birds once more, as a result of you possibly can by no means see sufficient flamingos. But the birds had moved on. Where they’d gone continues to be unclear, although three had been noticed Tuesday off close to Munson Island off Big Pine, and one was noticed by Colleen Fuller on Big Pine on Tuesday night.
Whether the birds will keep in Florida, attempt to return to Mexico, or presumably transfer on to someplace like Cuba is unknown. The ones which were seen across the state are already getting laborious to seek out. Though, as Conchy taught us, flamingos being laborious to seek out doesn’t imply they don’t seem to be right here.
