Out on Florida Bay, just some miles from the Florida Keys, Jerry Lorenz powers down his boat’s motor to analyze a pinkish, far-off smudge. Simply as he suspected: “Yep, these are flamingos,” says the Audubon Florida analysis director as he friends by means of binoculars. Whereas he research the flock, extra birds fly over from behind a stand of mangroves, doubling the group’s measurement.
It’s like a scene from a bygone period—and hopefully a glimpse of the longer term. Two centuries in the past, American Flamingos routinely congregated on Florida’s shallow flats and will have bred there. Within the late 1800s, although, their vibrant feathers turned prized for adorning girls’s hats. Plume hunters almost depleted whole populations of flamingos and different showy waders like Reddish Egrets and Roseate Spoonbills. Within the many years since, flamingos have been extra like vacationers, visiting Florida often earlier than flying elsewhere.
Then, in August 2023, got here Hurricane Idalia. Earlier storms had blown in flamingos, however Idalia’s Class 3 winds carried unprecedented lots of, seemingly from the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba. Not like prior to now, some by no means left. A statewide census organized by Audubon Florida in February 2024, the primary of its variety, discovered at the very least 101 flamingos—sufficient to persuade scientists that it’s not only a handful of tourists, however maybe the start of a everlasting inhabitants.
It’s additionally an indication of progress in a decades-long effort to revive the Everglades, specialists say. Traditionally, freshwater flowed slowly southward by means of the area to Florida Bay. The water’s seasonal patterns formed the ecosystem and helped create the best situations for wading birds to breed and forage. However starting within the early 1900s, land builders and authorities engineers drained and diverted wetlands to make approach for South Florida’s cities and suburbs. The disruption of pure hydrologic cycles degraded habitat and meals sources for wading fowl populations that have been already diminished, and by the Nineteen Eighties their numbers dropped by almost 90 %.
In response, Congress enacted a plan in 2000 that has pumped greater than $23 billion into restoring the ecosystem’s freshwater stream. That work is ongoing, however situations within the Everglades have already improved. Surveys in recent years discovered upwards of 100,000 wading-bird nests—almost an order of magnitude larger than what early counts tallied within the ’90s. If flamingos stick round, they’ll characterize “one of many jewels within the crown of Everglades restoration,” says Frank Ridgley, a wildlife veterinarian at Zoo Miami.
That the birds arrived in Florida in any respect factors to the restoration of the American Flamingo throughout its breeding vary, which spans the Caribbean from the Bahamas to the northern coast of South America. The overall inhabitants hit a report low of round 21,500 birds in 1955, however since then, protections in Latin America and the Caribbean have contributed to a tenfold enhance. Florida’s new flocks are seemingly “spillover” ensuing from these successes, says conservation biologist Steven Whitfield. Nonetheless, poaching, coastal growth, and lack of wetlands are persistent threats range-wide, says Xiomara Gálvez Aguilera, director of the Caribbean Coast Conservancy. If Florida’s flamingos set up a everlasting nesting colony, it’s going to give the species one other foothold for restoration, she says.
Local weather change, too, could also be pushing the birds from their Caribbean strongholds again to Florida. Since Idalia, there have been remoted flamingo sightings in unlikely places, together with websites as far-off as Cape Cod and Lake Michigan. These wanderers sign a bigger pattern: Wading birds and different animals are pulling up stakes and heading north as native situations change. “We hardly have any spoonbills left nesting in Florida Bay due to sea-level rise,” Lorenz says of the state’s different famously pink waders, which want shallow waters to successfully forage. “However we’ve acquired spoonbills nesting way north of their historic vary, they usually simply maintain marching north.”
It’s bittersweet to observe these modifications unfold, however Lorenz is glad to reliably see extra flamingos lately on a wholesome Florida Bay. “You get type of giddy whenever you see this stuff,” he says. As engineering tasks proceed restoring the freshwater flows central to Everglades ecology, he holds out hope that he could quickly come throughout an much more thrilling sight: the distinctive volcano-shaped mud mound of a flamingo’s nest. “That,” he says, “goes to be actually thrilling.”
This piece initially ran within the Fall 2024 subject as “Fairly in Pink.” To obtain our print journal, develop into a member by making a donation today.