Not a Lawn Ornament

By BILL CHAISSON
Of a Feather
After it crossed the Central American isthmus from the Pacific as a low-pressure system, on August 26 Hurricane Idalia became a named weather event in the western Caribbean. It passed between the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico and Cuba and then made a beeline for northern Florida, gathering ferocity as it went. It hit peak strength as a Category 4 but was a Category 3 storm on August 30 when it struck the Gulf Coast between Tampa and Tallahassee.

The winds, which reached 130 mph, swept a large number of American flamingos (Phoenicopterus ruber) from the Yucatán up into the southeastern United States and beyond. One of the more northern sightings was in Caesar Creek State Park near Dayton, Ohio, where Jacob Roalef of Birding Ecotours snapped photographs of two birds, one a pink adult and the other a gray juvenile. They were spotted in the first week of September by local birdwatcher George Keller, who then posted about them on Facebook.

The northernmost sighting was at Port Washington, Wisconsin on Lake Michigan, and the American Birding Association (ABA) posted reports from Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Florida. A couple of birds, too exhausted to reach the shore, were fished out of the ocean.

Amy Davis, in a write-up posted on the ABA site, speculated that the birds had already dispersed from their breeding grounds in Mexico to Cuba when the counterclockwise winds of the hurricane swept them there northward to Florida and across the United States. Sighting of flamingos in the United States during the 20th century have been found to correspond with the aftermath of storms of tropical origin.

According to Davis, the “American flamingo’s present-day Caribbean range encompasses coastal fringes of the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico, as well as Cuba, Hispaniola, The Bahamas, and the northern coast of South America. (An isolated population also exists in the Galápagos). Early naturalists described American flamingos as regularly occurring in southern Florida, and the species may have nested in the Florida Keys. Prior to 1904, flamingos dispersed to southern Florida from a breeding colony on Andros Island in The Bahamas, but after the destruction of this breeding site, flamingos all but disappeared from Florida.”

Davis does not mention why flamingoes disappeared from Florida. In short, it was due to the fashion industry, which hunted them to regional extinction between the 1880s and 1900 for their bright pink feathers. Local residents also ate them.

Ornithologist Frank M. Chapman journeyed to Andros Island in 1904 to photograph the birds on their nests. The colony included about 2,000 birds. Chapman was one of the first to document the details of their nesting behavior. The nests themselves are made of mud dragged into a mound about a foot high. One egg is laid and incubated by a bird that perches carefully on the nest’s rim and then crouches down, doubling up its long legs until its skin is in contact with the egg.

M. Gilbert Pearson, writing in Birds of America (1917), tells of seeing a single bird at Palm Beach, Fla. in 1908 “and there was undoubtedly a time, many years ago, when they bred in that region.” The colony at Andros Island no longer exists, but P. ruber breeds in the southern Bahamas and in Turks and Caicos. This population plus the Cuban one is estimated at 129,000 to 217,000 birds. Colonies numbering tens of thousands exist in Mexico and Venezuela and the isolated Galapágos colony, where they build nests of stones instead of mud, numbers 400-500. This represents a strong recovery from only about 80,000 birds in four colonies in the 1980s.

In the 19th century John James Audubon, Gustavas Wurdemann and others saw large flocks of the birds in the Florida Keys and up the west coast of Florida. A 2018 paper in The Condor by Steven Whitfield and others summarized what was known about the historical distribution of flamingos in the Sunshine State. Wurdemann, who worked for the U.S. Coast Survey from 1837 to 1849, returned in 1857 “to a site northwest of Indian Key and saw a group of ≥500 flamingos. The hunter [who was with Wurdemann] captured >100 flamingos and sold them for food in Key West. Apparently, capture by hand was possible because the birds were molting. Wurdemann also stated that flamingos were restricted to far southern Florida and that they were present year-round.”

By 1885 they were reported to be rare, with a single skin worth $25, compared to $10 for a great white heron. In 1902 R.H. Howe reported seeing 500-1,000 birds east of Cape Sable, the southwestern tip of the state, on Florida Bay. This was the last U.S. sighting of a large flock; they were subsequently sighted only in groups fewer than 20, usually 1-2 birds.

This species is described as “partially migratory and highly dispersive.” Evidence for flamingo breeding in Florida is scarce and based, according to Whitfield et al., on sketchy records accompanying eggs in museum collections collected in the 19th century. The general sense of the ornithological community is that most Florida flamingos were dispersing there from the Caribbean colonies after breeding, but that there may have been some breeding birds around Florida Bay.

Will the American flamingo return to Florida? In 2012 scientists spotted a small flock in central Florida at a location identified by the Audubon Society only as “Stormwater Treatment Area 2.” In 2014 there were 147 flamingos at STA2. The birds returned in varying numbers year after year and were resident during the months associated with breeding. Where the birds came from is unknown. They could have dispersed from the natural populations in the Caribbean, or they could be escapees from the Hialeah Racetrack, where there has been a captive population for 73 years. Whatever their origin, Audubon is reporting that it appears the birds at STA2 “are back for good.”

— Bill Chaisson has been a birdwatcher for over 50 years. He lives and works in Wilmot.