Out on Florida Bay, just a few miles from the Florida Keys, Jerry Lorenz powers down his boat’s motor to investigate a pinkish, far-off smudge. Just as he suspected: “Yep, those are flamingos,” says the Audubon Florida research director as he peers through binoculars. While he studies the flock, more birds fly over from behind a stand of mangroves, doubling the group’s size.
It’s like a scene from a bygone era—and hopefully a glimpse of the future. Two centuries ago, American Flamingos routinely congregated on Florida’s shallow flats and may have bred there. In the late 1800s, though, their vibrant feathers became prized for decorating women’s hats. Plume hunters nearly depleted entire populations of flamingos and other showy waders like Reddish Egrets and Roseate Spoonbills. In the decades since, flamingos have been more like tourists, visiting Florida occasionally before flying elsewhere.
Then, in August 2023, came Hurricane Idalia. Previous storms had blown in flamingos, but Idalia’s Category 3 winds carried unprecedented hundreds, likely from the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba. Unlike in the past, some never left. A statewide census organized by Audubon Florida in February 2024, the first of its kind, found at least 101 flamingos—enough to convince scientists that it’s not just a handful of visitors, but perhaps the beginning of a permanent population.
It’s also a sign of progress in a decades-long effort to restore the Everglades, experts say. Historically, freshwater flowed slowly southward through the region to Florida Bay. The water’s seasonal patterns shaped the ecosystem and helped create the right conditions for wading birds to breed and forage. But beginning in the early 1900s, land developers and government engineers drained and diverted wetlands to make way for South Florida’s cities and suburbs. The disruption of natural hydrologic cycles degraded habitat and food sources for wading bird populations that were already diminished, and by the 1980s their numbers dropped by nearly 90 percent.
In response, Congress enacted a plan in 2000 that has pumped more than $23 billion into restoring the ecosystem’s freshwater flow. That work is ongoing, but conditions in the Everglades have already improved. Surveys in recent years found upwards of 100,000 wading-bird nests—nearly an order of magnitude greater than what early counts tallied in the ’90s. If flamingos stick around, they’ll represent “one of the jewels in the crown of Everglades restoration,” says Frank Ridgley, a wildlife veterinarian at Zoo Miami.
That the birds arrived in Florida at all points to the recovery of the American Flamingo across its breeding range, which spans the Caribbean from the Bahamas to the northern coast of South America. The total population hit a record low of around 21,500 birds in 1955, but since then, protections in Latin America and the Caribbean have contributed to a tenfold increase. Florida’s new flocks are likely “spillover” resulting from those successes, says conservation biologist Steven Whitfield. Still, poaching, coastal development, and loss of wetlands are persistent threats range-wide, says Xiomara Gálvez Aguilera, director of the Caribbean Coast Conservancy. If Florida’s flamingos establish a permanent nesting colony, it will give the species another foothold for recovery, she says.
Climate change, too, may be pushing the birds from their Caribbean strongholds back to Florida. Since Idalia, there have been isolated flamingo sightings in unlikely places, including sites as far away as Cape Cod and Lake Michigan. These wanderers signal a larger trend: Wading birds and other animals are pulling up stakes and heading north as local conditions change. “We hardly have any spoonbills left nesting in Florida Bay because of sea-level rise,” Lorenz says of the state’s other famously pink waders, which need shallow waters to effectively forage. “But we’ve got spoonbills nesting way north of their historic range, and they just keep marching north.”
It’s bittersweet to watch these changes unfold, but Lorenz is glad to reliably see more flamingos these days on a healthy Florida Bay. “You get kind of giddy when you see these things,” he says. As engineering projects continue restoring the freshwater flows central to Everglades ecology, he holds out hope that he may soon come across an even more thrilling sight: the distinctive volcano-shaped mud mound of a flamingo’s nest. “That,” he says, “is going to be really exciting.”
This piece originally ran in the Fall 2024 issue as “Pretty in Pink.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.
