Florida’s Flamingos

If the biblical character Lazarus were an American flamingo, Floridians might soon be able to claim this winged creature has risen from the dead, at least here in the nation’s unique subtropical peninsula where the bygone bird once thrived among millions of wading birds — a lightweight avian confection of long legs and long neck, resplendent in luminous pink feathers, standing tall enough to look some adult humans in the eye.

Blown in by a hurricane, for the last six months the birds have appeared in previously unheard of contemporary numbers, as many as 250 to 500, estimates Jerry Lorenz, an expert in roseate spoonbills who holds a doctorate in marine biology and serves as state research director for Audubon Florida.

He’s never seen anything like it, here. Even better: some appear to be staying. So far.

To establish a base number, therefore, in a seven-day period late last month, the National Audubon Society’s Audubon Florida, with the Florida Flamingo Working Group and the Caribbean Conservation Group organized a census by land, sea and air, a count of all American flamingos throughout their range. It was the first formal count of “Phoenicopterus Ruber” ever, not only in Florida but across other populations in the Bahamas and Cuba, and in Mexico where there may be 100,000 of them, researchers say. They also aimed to count the American flamingo in native habitats along the northern coast of South America.

“Pan Caribbean flamingos had been decimated — probably there were 5 to 10 million once and we were down to 25,000 to 50,000 globally, most nesting in the Bahamas,” recalls Lorenz of the 1980s and ’90s, when he began working in Florida.

“Sandy Sprunt (the late, longtime research director for the Audubon Society who also helped save the American bald eagle) worked hard with the Bahamian National Trust — he was a board member — to protect those, and get their nesting area preserved. My best guess is a couple million might live in the world now, but we don’t know. Nobody has done this.”

After the storm, the birds were spotted throughout Florida. Now, flocks have settled in Lee County and Florida Bay. JEFF LIECHTY / COURTESY PHOTO

For the researchers, an almost religious passion drives their hope to see the birds recover in Florida. If they don’t think of the American flamingo as Lazarus, they may think of it as the canary in the coal mine. If it’s doing well — if it can rise from the vanquished and return like the native son it is, to nest here — the Everglades are likely doing well.

If not, we may all be in deeper trouble than we recognize.

“I see this as a remarkable shot at redemption,” says Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida.

“We used to have flamingos and we blew it. We hunted them to extirpation in Florida around 1900. For food or for plumes, regardless, we took those gorgeous birds and we saw them out.”

What might happen

To be certain of the rising, however, we’ll have to wait until summer, the mating, nesting and hatching season. Few or none have nested here in roughly 120 years, but when they do, the process is both delicate and extraordinary: Females customarily lay a single egg, once a year at roughly the same time together, in a synchronous rebirth of an entire colony that can number up to 1,000 birds in healthy conditions, as happened long ago in the Sunshine State.

Audubon Florida is conducting a flamingo count, hoping to get a better idea of how many birds have stayed in the United States after Hurricane Idalia. HOLLEY SHORT / COURTESY PHOTO

“I have some optimism, because when I started working here in 1989 (based in Tavernier in the Keys) and in the 1990s,” says Lorenz, “the total number of wading birds in the Everglades was probably in the 5,000 to 10,000 range.” That number included no flamingos, but “about a dozen other species, among them spoonbills, white ibis, all heron species, and all egrets.”

Florida Bay itself was filthy then, he adds, the habitat likely a challenge, at least, to any wading birds.

But the slow progress of Everglades restoration projects coming on line in the last 20 years, and cleaner waters filtering south into Florida Bay have helped alter that. As a result, “in two out of the last five years we’ve had over 100,000 pairs of nesting birds,” Lorenz says.

Capt. Jon-Paul Haydocy, field biologist and researcher at the Everglades Science Center, a back-country fishing guide, spotted about 50 American flamingos during the February count. JP HAYDOCY / COURTESY PHOTO

Still, flamingos have not numbered among them. Yet. And even if they decide to nest here, they could face challenges not seen in what may be a 5,000-year history of adaptation by wading birds to Everglades conditions: the highly invasive Burmese python, for example. That predator, introduced to the Everglades by accident only about three decades ago, has already done away with most fur-bearing mammals in the ’Glades.

And a news story from Audubon five years ago offered this discouraging information: “Scientists worry that South Florida’s long-legged wading birds — a group whose population has plunged nearly 90% in the region over the past century or so — may be emerging as their new dietary (source).”

That’s because the pythons have eaten everything else.

Meanwhile, even seeing flamingos has been rare. They’ve been spotted regularly but infrequently through the last 11 or so decades, and only in single- or low double-digit numbers in a given year, often around the aptly named fishing village of Flamingo almost 40 miles south of Homestead, at the southern tip of Florida.

Numbers from Audubon’s flamingo count are expected by late March. HOLLEY SHORT / COURTESY PHOTO

Those birds were probably vagrants from breeding populations in the Bahamas, Cuba or Mexico, drifting in on one storm or another, the experts say. Or they may have been gypsy emigrants escaped from a small flock of American flamingos established at the Hialeah racetrack.

But things have suddenly changed.

Since September they’ve been turning up all over, parading their plumage past observers more than at any time since just after 1900, the height of the disastrous, fashion-driven plume trade that had started 25 years earlier in America and Europe.

“On Feb. 1, I saw a dozen flamingos on Skimmer Island in Pine Island Sound (the southern part of Charlotte Harbor),” reports Dr. Jose Padilla-Lopez, a pediatrician and one of the most respected birders and photographers in the region.

A small flock of flamingos waded at Black Skimmer Island in Pine Island Sound near the mouth of the Caloosahatchee. DR. JOSE V. PADILLA-LOPEZ / COURTESY PHOTO

“They’ve been there for months. Every year we see them in South Florida, generally in the tip of the state in the town of Flamingo. And it’s not uncommon to see them in Lee County after a hurricane.”

This time, though, there were a lot more.

And even on the late February count, about two weeks after observers like Dr. Padilla-Lopez and Jerry Lorenz pointed out that some seem to have departed, there were still significant numbers by any previous comparison. But precise estimates in or out of Florida won’t be available until later in March, Audubon officials said.

Here’s how that happened.

Past and future

Hurricane Idalia formed off the Yucatán in southeastern Mexico, catching up a number of flamingos and driving them north as it swept across Florida’s Big Bend region in the last two days of August.

After that, they began to appear in various locations where previously, the only pink flamingo outside of a zoo was plastic. A few individuals were seen as far north as the Carolinas, Pennsylvania and even Wisconsin but they’ve disappeared, except as the prolific and widely ranged plastic yard art. Some people have even called the plastic pink flamingo the state bird of New Jersey.

Florida, meanwhile, has long sought favorable associations with flamingos, which can irritate those trying to resurrect the bird.

“It’s an additional burr under my saddle that Florida has been associated with them as an emblem,” admits Wraithmell.

“Every time I saw them (as emblematic), it was a reminder that we screwed up. There was a time when you were far more likely to see a plastic lawn flamingo than anything (else).”

And now comes the count, all in a single week with a few volunteers. Counting just in those seven days gives researchers a base number they can compare against future numbers, six months after the storm that blew in birds, but three months before nesting season, says Lorenz.

The number of likely observations may seem small or even minute given what once lived here — except that it’s a lot greater than it has been for more than a century.

“I saw about 50 flamingos altogether in Florida Bay, in the Flamingo region of Florida Bay, right outside the Florida Visitor’s Center of Everglades National Park last week,” reports Capt. Jon-Paul Haydocy, a field biologist at the Everglades Science Center and back-country fishing guide, one of the counters.

“Since Idalia pushed those birds about the country, we’ve had quite a large flock people have been seeing from the western side, the Cape Sable area, to the northeast bay.”

An Audubon-organized count is fitting: It was the National Audubon Society, then only a couple decades old and carrying a variation on that name, that joined the American Ornithologists Union and an energetic women’s group — they couldn’t yet vote but they could organize and lobby — to help save what was left of Florida wading bird populations at the beginning of the 20th century.

In those days, the feathers of a wide variety of Florida wading birds and a few others, including pelicans, could run the same price per ounce as gold on the open market. Hunters seeking wealth invaded the tidal mud flats and islands where nesting patterns for wading birds may not have changed in thousands of years, shot the adult birds often in their nests, and left the young, or the eggs, to predators and mortality.

For the first time in American history, a determined movement of conservationists arose in Florida — led, in part, by what is now the National Audubon Society — and helped put a stop to it. They did that by convincing the Florida Legislature to pass a law outlawing the hunting of non-game migratory birds. That law soon became the model for the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, good to this day.

But the protection came too late to resurrect the American flamingo as a breeding population of Florida natives in the 20th and first two decades of the 21st century.

The world they once inhabited is not now fully ours, a place unique on the planet, described by Michael Grunwald in his book, “The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics of Paradise”:

“The Everglades was the only place on earth where alligators (broad snout, fresh water, darker skin) and crocodiles (pointy snout, salt water, toothy grin) lived side by side. It was the only home of the Everglades mink, Okeechobee gourd, and Big Cypress fox squirrel. It had carnivorous plants, amphibious birds, oysters that grew on trees, cacti that grew in water, lizards that changed colors, and fish that changed genders. It had 1,100 species of trees and plants, 350 birds, and 52 varieties of porcelain-smooth, candy striped tree snails. It had bottlenose dolphins, marsh rabbits, ghost orchids, moray eels, bald eagles, and countless other species that didn’t seem to belong on the same continent, much less in the same ecosystem.”

And those Everglades also had the 5-foot-tall featherweight contender for the world avian beauty title, the ribaldly pink American flamingo, native to the West Indies, northern South America, the Yucatan and the Caribbean region including south Florida —as well as the Galapagos Islands, 605 miles off the west coast of South America, in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

How in the world did they get there?

“Well, they got there somehow and I guarantee they didn’t walk,” says Lorenz.

With a wingspan as wide as they are tall — 5 feet — they can fly a long, long, long way if they have to, which is why one fell out of the sky once in Siberia, landing in poor shape but alive near a man who cared for it then transported it to a zoo, Lorenz reports.

That’s the hope of every interested ornithologist and a lot of bird lovers, not to mention those who champion Everglades restoration: not that one will fall out of the sky, but that a million will descend on South Florida someday again, and find supportive homes.

“We have this hope of seeing it return to a breeding population because of the restoration, and that’s part of the good news story of seeing the big pink birds here again,” says Brad Cornell, Southwest Florida policy director for Audubon Florida.

“This is not a one-off. We’re seeing a trend, one we hope will bloom and blossom in years to come.”

He pauses. “If you want to see Flamingos, Floridians, then you need to see Everglades restoration.”

It has to start with a few.

“It’s fairly accepted that substantial flocks of several dozen stumble around to the stormwater treatment areas (the STAs) and other places, usually on a walkabout, or a fly-about, after breeding season,” says Wraithmell.

“We’ve long hoped maybe one of those flocks will decide to make a go of it in Florida on a wild hair. Or on a wild feather.”

Like Lazarus — like a canary in a coal mine that expires but then begins breathing again — the American flamingo would then be a bellwether beacon of measureable progress, a thing seemingly in short supply in recent years.

Which may be why a comment once made by Theodore Roosevelt remains so resonant today.

The first conservationist president, he insisted on protections, creating 51 bird preservation areas that later became National Wildlife Refuges, including the first in Florida or the United States: Pelican Island, in the Indian River Lagoon.

Here’s what he said near the beginning of the 20th century, when large hats with feathers, for women, were all the rage in places like New York and Paris:

“The Audubon Society, which has done far more than any other single agency in creating and fostering an enlightened public sentiment for the preservation of our useful and attractive birds, (consists of) men and women who in these matters look further ahead than their fellows, and who have the precious gift of sympathetic imagination, so that they are able to see, and wish to preserve for their children’s children, the beauty and wonder of nature.”

That, at least, may not have changed much. ¦

The post Florida’s Flamingos first appeared on Charlotte County Florida Weekly .