Florida’s flamingo count is complete

The Audubon Society of Florida officially counted 101 flamingos in Florida back in February. JEFF LIECHTY / COURTESY PHOTO

If a hundred honeybees suddenly arrive in a field of wildflowers where they haven’t been seen in 125 years, the event might be significant of a larger evolving reality.

That’s how it is with the now-official results of the American flamingo count in the Sunshine State, recently announced by the Audubon Society of Florida.

In a seven-day period in February, Audubon volunteers joined the Florida Flamingo Working Group and the Caribbean Conservation Group to count all American flamingos throughout their range — not only in the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela, where resident or breeding populations have long existed — but in Florida, where flamingos have been gone for almost 125 years.

It was the first-ever formal count of “Phoenicopterus ruber” after as many as several hundred were blown into Florida and north by Hurricane Idalia in late August. The formal tally in February was 101 — at first glance, it seems far from impressive in a place where they once probably numbered in the tens of thousands or more.

Last summer, Hurricane Idalia blew hundreds of flamingos off their typical migratory path from Cuba to Mexico. The flamingos were spotted as far north as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. HOLLEY SHORT / COURTESY PHOTO

American flamingos, as tall as some humans at about 5 feet, and dressed in feathers so pink from elements in their diets they look nearly neon, were extirpated from Florida — completely eradicated or pushed out — around 1900, after a 5,000-year-old or older relationship with the peninsula, scientists say. They exist in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million, elsewhere, although the official counts from those places were not yet available last week.

“The largest group (50 plus) was spotted in Florida Bay; 18 were counted in the Pine Island area, with another 14 at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (near Cape Canaveral),” an Audubon press release announced.

It doesn’t sound or look like many, perhaps, 100 birds in that week, about six months after Hurricane Idalia appeared to blow hundreds of them off their typical migratory course from Cuba to the Yucatan, sending them not only into Florida but as far north as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in tiny numbers.

Flamingos used to live in large numbers in Florida. Around 1900, they disappeared when many wading birds were hunted for their feathers. HOLLEY SHORT / COURTESY PHOTO

But few or none have seen even that many here since William McKinley or Theodore Roosevelt were presidents. The European and American plume trade at that time, when feathers could sometimes carry the same value as gold, devastated wading birds such as spoonbills, white ibis, egrets and various herons, along with the American flamingo.

The evidence shows that flamingos by the tens of thousands or more regularly visited the state before that and likely nested here.

But times changed.

By the 1980s or ’90s, the Everglades were filthy. The wading bird population of all species was probably reduced to 5,000 or 10,000 birds, where once millions had lived and reproduced, says Jerry Lorenz, an expert in roseate spoonbills who holds a doctorate in marine biology and serves as state research director of Audubon Florida.

Then, things began to change again, slowly and almost out of sight.

Florida Bay and the Everglades to its north became cleaner as years of effort began to pay off, in spite of “a population growth that just seems off the charts,” Lorenz says.

“But people moving here and living here do want a wild Florida, and we’ve been trying to rebuild and restore. That’s why these birds have a better chance. The habitat has improved much over what it was in the 1990s.

A better chance for what, though? That’s the winning-number question in the big lottery of life.

And the answer for scientists and bird lovers everywhere is simple: a better chance for a resident-nesting population that can reproduce American flamingos in Florida. That, in itself, would be proof in the pudding: the Everglades are coming back.

It’s the beginning of nesting season now. Can 100 birds that seem to want to be residents of the Sunshine State do it?

“The bottom line is: I am guardedly optimistic, but I don’t think they’re going to nest this year,” Lorenz says. “It seems to me those birds were under stress for multiple months after that hurricane. Now they’re hanging out here. We’d love to see them stay, to become a resident population like they were prior to extirpation.”

A lot of people are just flat-out excited.

“It’s good news for those of us who long to have that species back in our Florida landscape, where it was once sadly extirpated,” says Dr. Jose Padilla Lopez, a pediatrician, photographer and widely traveled amateur ornithologist.

“How long will it stay? No one knows. The dozen or so I saw on Skimmer Island (in Pine Island Sound) are gone due to human pressure, perhaps?”

Maybe. But other species have returned before.

“I have seen snail kites and limpkin return to places they had long disappeared from. And that was due to the chance appearance of the exotic island apple snail, which is unfortunate for other native species, according to environmentalists. So, you never know. Nature is surprising. I truly hope they remain, and we have a healthy population of Florida flamingos in the future!”

Julie Wraithmell, executive director of Audubon Florida, put it this way in a March conversation with Florida Weekly: “I see this as a remarkable shot at redemption. 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 out.”

And if we can restore the River of Grass, we may be able to see them back in. ¦

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