Rare Flamingo Sighting on Cape Cod Has People Extremely Concerned

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Though Cape Cod is an iconic beach vacation hotspot, it's not a tropical locale. The Massachusetts summer resort destination frosts over in the winter like the rest of New England, and its vast beaches and marshlands are inhabited by deer, mice, foxes, and other animals native to the region- not so much the kinds of critters you'd find in Florida or further south.

That's why a lot of people were concerned when Cape Cod locals spotted a tropical bird very far from home on June 2. Against all odds, the New England beach was visited by none other than a rare pink flamingo, and that has some folks worried.

Though the footage shared here (which @masslivenews credits to one Sam Roth) was taken from a distance, the bird on the beach looks unmistakably like a pink flamingo. Sure enough, Mark Faherty, a science coordinator for Mass Audubon, confirmed that this was indeed an American Flamingo. MassLive News reports that on Sunday, at least two residents spotted the tropical bird on Chapin Beach in the Mid-Cape region of Cape Cod .

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According to ABC News , this may be the first case of a wild flamingo in Massachusetts (if they can confirm that this wasn't an escaped bird). If it is indeed a wild flamingo, Mark Faherty acknowledges that the sighting is "unprecedented." This unlikely visitation set off alarm bells for a lot of people online, who feared that the tropical bird's presence in New England was a grim omen of our ever-worsening climate crisis.

"Are we supposed to have those..." worried @s_918_.

"Wow, I guess it's getting pretty tropical up in Mass," said @cindy2lou2.

"Actually frightening thinking about climate change and what this bird knows," fretted @meoldlady.

This isn't the first time that a flamingo has been sighted far north (relatively speaking) this season. According to GreaterLongIsland.com, a flamingo was spotted in the Hamptons only a couple of days before the sighting in Cape Cod. Whether or not these are two different flamingos hasn't officially been confirmed, but odds are it's the same one. So is this bird an escapee, an early climate refugee, or what?

Why Is There a Flamingo in Cape Cod?

First off, I want to be clear that I don't intend to minimize the real, immediate menace climate change poses to life on earth, at least as it exists now. However, I think it's important to keep discussions around it grounded in reality, so let's set the record straight: yes, New England is getting hotter, but the flamingo probably isn't merely mistaking Massachusetts for the tropics.

Let's assume for now that this is most likely a true wild flamingo, as Mass Audubon's Mark Faherty suspects (he also believes that the Cape Cod and Long Island birds are likely the same, according to ABC News ). Faherty has a theory: what if this flamingo is one of the ones driven up north last year?

Last summer, flocks of wayward flamingoes were spotted all over the East Coast and even as far as Ohio! Experts believed that the birds may have been carried up from the Yucatan Peninsula by strong winds from Hurricane Idalia , which struck Florida's Big Bend days before the sightings started. This was nearly a year ago now, but Faherty thinks the bird may have simply stuck around.

"We know from one bird tracked back in the early 2000s, that when they get displaced like this, they don't go back home," Faherty told ABC News . "They tend to turn into permanent hurricane refugees and just sort of wander around wherever they end up."

Florida Audubon researcher Jerry Lorenz reportedly agreed with this theory, speculating that the bird was likely "confused" after being pushed so far off course by last year's storm. Still, there's a possibility the bird is just "exploring" for fun- flamingos are "weird birds," according to Lorenz.

In summation, warmer climes alone probably aren't the primary reason for this unlikely sighting. But with storms and abnormal weather patterns growing more severe as global temps rise, climate change may very well influence a growing trend in abnormal "migrations" like this.

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