Storm Idalia blew a flamboyance, or flock, of 300-400 flamingos that was once most likely migrating between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba off direction in August 2023 and unceremoniously deposited the birds throughout a large swath of the japanese United States, from Florida’s Gulf Coast the entire method as much as Wisconsin and east to Pennsylvania.
After Storm Idalia, greater than 300 credible sightings of flamingos around the japanese U.S. have been reported.
Audubon Florida
I’m an estuarine scientist. That suggests I learn about ecosystems the place contemporary water flows into the sea. I’ve spent 35 years with Audubon Florida finding out the ecology of American flamingos and different wading birds in Florida Bay, Everglades Nationwide Park. So naturally, I used to be overjoyed and intrigued by way of the surprising arrival of those flamingos.
One of the most birds was once rescued within the Tampa space after just about drowning within the Gulf of Mexico. His rescuers named him Peaches.
A colleague and I have been in a position to position a GPS monitoring tool and a shiny blue band round his spindly leg, with the code “US02” engraved in white letters.
Melissa Edwards, Avian Sanatorium Director at Beach Seabird Sanctuary, holds Peaches nonetheless whilst Dr. Frank Ridgley of Zoo Miami and the writer, Dr. Jerome Lorenz, position a band and GPS tracker on his leg. Dr. Lorenz has banded or supervised the banding of just about 3,000 roseate spoonbills, however Peaches was once his first and best flamingo thus far.
Linda Lorenz
We have been hoping to trace his actions and spot whether or not he ended up settling in Florida. Sadly, a couple of days after Peaches was once launched again into the wilds of Tampa Bay, the monitoring tool failed. His ultimate reported sighting was once on a seashore close to Marco Island on Oct. 5, 2023.
Peaches’ tale is the most recent piece within the ancient puzzle of flamingos in Florida. Despite the fact that the local inhabitants disappeared greater than 100 years in the past, fresh occasions lead me to consider that flamingos is also coming again to the Sunshine State, and that their go back has been facilitated by way of the concerted effort to revive the Everglades and coastal ecosystems.
Decimation of a inhabitants
In 1956, ornithologist and founding father of the Nationwide Audubon’s Everglades Science Heart Robert Porter Allen wrote “The Flamingos: Their Life History and Survival,” which continues to be regarded as a seminal file at the historical past of flamingos in Florida.
In his ebook, Allen cites a number of ancient and clinical manuscripts from the 1800s that point out flamboyances of loads to hundreds have been observed within the Everglades, Florida Bay and the Florida Keys.
Allen paperwork the death of flamingos within the past due 1800s, in Florida and during their Caribbean and Bahamian vary. Like several wading birds in Florida, they fell sufferer to the ladies’s type development of decorating hats with fowl feathers. Wading fowl feathers have been actually value their weight in gold.
Led by way of the Nationwide Affiliation of Audubon Societies’ vocal opposition, the grassroots environmental motion that adopted led to regulations prohibiting the searching and sale of fowl feathers. However enforcement of the ones regulations in moderately populated Florida was once tough, and on two events deputized Audubon wardens have been murdered protective wading fowl nesting colonies.
Thankfully, inside a couple of years, societal drive grew to become the tide in opposition to the observe of dressed in feathers. The passage of the Migratory Chicken Treaty Act in 1918 formally ended the feather business.
Given criminal coverage, maximum species controlled to reestablish massive nesting populations within the Everglades by way of the Thirties-Forties, probably migrating from faraway populations in Central The us and the Caribbean.
Flamingos, alternatively, didn’t.
An extended highway to restoration
In 1956, 40 years after searching had ended, Allen estimated flamingo populations have been best about 25% of what they’d been within the earlier century, with numbers plummeting from 168,000 to 43,000 breeding adults. They nested in vital numbers at best 4 places, in comparison to 29 traditionally.
Flamingos’ distinctive breeding behaviors and their longevity – they are able to reside as much as 50 years within the wild – might account for his or her battle to dance again. Different Florida wading birds can nest more than one occasions a yr at other places, laying 3 to 5 eggs at a time.
Flamingos, alternatively, nest best yearly, in most cases returning to the similar location yr after yr, and lay just one egg. Moreover, they like forming massive nesting colonies, with hundreds of nests, partly because of their elaborate staff courtship rituals.
Reason why to wish
Because of their rarity from the Nineteen Fifties to Eighties, scientists – together with myself – believed that any flamingos sighted intermittently round Florida weren’t wild birds however somewhat escapees from captive populations.
The most important flock seen within the state between 1930 and 1976 was once 14 birds noticed in Biscayne Bay in 1934, at the day after Hialeah Race Monitor in Miami imported a bunch of about 30 flamingos. The observe’s house owners had did not pinion the birds, and so they merely flew away upon liberate.
However my opinion started to modify in 2002, when a flamingo that was once banded as a chick at Rio Lagartos was once photographed in Florida Bay. In 2012, a 2nd fowl from Rio Lagartos was once photographed.
Via that point, I had seen flamingos in Florida Bay on a number of events, together with higher flamboyances of 24 and 64 people. Despite the fact that I nonetheless concept nearly all of those flocks have been escapees, the banded birds supplied some proof that a minimum of a couple of wild flamingos have been beginning to spend time in Florida.
Then in 2015, my colleagues put a monitoring tool on a flamingo they’d captured on the Key West Naval Air Station. Conchy, as we known as him, was once given the blue band US01 and launched in Florida Bay in December 2015.
He lived in Florida Bay for 2 years, and the truth that he stayed for that lengthy was once evidence to me that it was once conceivable for flamingos to make a extra everlasting house in Florida.
Conchy was once banded and given a GPS tracker by way of Dr. Frank Ridgley of Zoo Miami sooner than being re-released into Florida Bay in 2015.
In 2018, a number of colleagues and I revealed a paper laying out each proof from ancient accounts and in addition in the past overpassed proof from museums that flamingos have been local to Florida. We additionally introduced new knowledge from researchers and citizen science portals that strongly indicated that wild flamingo numbers have been expanding in Florida. This steered that the inhabitants may well be in spite of everything getting better.
Name it a comeback
Speedy-forward to these days, and it seems that that this gradual comeback might in spite of everything have legs. Six months after Storm Idalia, my colleagues at Audubon Florida and I carried out a weeklong on-line survey of flamingo sightings in Florida.
We won greater than 50 respected observations. After sorting thru those observations to take away duplicates, we concluded that a minimum of 100 flamingos have been left within the state.
Then in July 2025, a flock of 125 people was once photographed in Florida Bay. In accordance with our observations, my colleagues and I consider that the flamingos that arrived with Idalia is also reestablishing a house in Florida.
Development towards recovery
The query is, why now? The 24 flamingos I noticed in 1992 and the 64 I noticed in 2004 didn’t absorb everlasting place of dwelling within the state. So what’s modified?
To me, the solution is apparent: Efforts to revive the Everglades and Florida’s coastal ecosystems are starting to display development.
After I arrived within the Keys in 1989, Florida Bay was once present process an ecological cave in. A 1993 interagency record by way of the government discovered {that a} hundred years of draining, diking and rerouting the flows of the Everglades to create city and agricultural lands had raised the salt content material of the water, making it uninhabitable for lots of estuarine animals.
The record famous that the bay’s well-known seagrass beds have been present process a large die-off, accompanied by way of algal blooms that depleted oxygen ranges, thereby killing fish in huge numbers. Mangrove bushes have been demise on its myriad islands, and birds that for many years had nested in them had disappeared.
Those occasions kick-started Everglades recovery efforts, and in 2000 the U.S. Congress handed the Complete Everglades Recovery Plan with just about unanimous bipartisan make stronger. With a price within the tens of billions of greenbacks, it was once to be the biggest and most costly ecological recovery mission the sector has ever observed.
Lately, the bay’s well being is massively stepped forward from the situation I practice within the Eighties. Water go with the flow has gotten higher, and the salinity is again to acceptable ranges to make stronger flora and fauna.
In 2018 and 2021, greater than 100,000 pairs of wading birds equivalent to white ibis, picket storks and roseate spoonbills nested within the Everglades. Those numbers hadn’t been observed because the Forties. Within the Eighties and Nineties, 20,000 nesting pairs was once considered a banner yr.
Whilst the Everglades and Florida Bay are nonetheless far from complete recovery, I consider that the go back of flamingos equivalent to Conchy and Peaches is proof that those efforts are on course.
