Saving Florida’s Flamingoes

The majestic flamingo, painted pink like a Caribbean sunset, was not always welcome in Florida. It was almost  hunted to extinction in the early twentieth century , a fate it shared with most of Florida’s wading birds. Flamingoes’ habitat spans across the Caribbean Sea from Venezuela north to Cuba and the Bahamas, with some outlying populations in South America and as far flung as the Galapagos Islands. Until recently, the State of Florida assumed that Flamingoes seen in the state were non-native escapees from captive populations and therefore not a native species. The distinction of non-native means they were not warranted the same protections issued by Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission as other wading bird species found naturally in the state. When found in the wild, these harmless birds could legally be hunted, but were protected under the federal Migratory Bird Treaty Act, passed in the early 1900s in response to over-hunting of birds, particularly those in the Everglades. They were generally left alone, and if an individual flamingo became a problem or was observed injured or otherwise impaired, they could be captured and rehabilitated, but they could not be released back into the wild—dooming them to a life in captivity. 

Thanks in part to the power of libraries, the future for flamingoes is changing. Science and natural history, far from being static fields, are constantly evolving as our understanding of the natural world deepens. Old assumptions and new discoveries often lead to debates within the scientific community where resolutions depend on evidence. As time goes by, the role of repositories such as the USF Libraries becomes all the more important in disseminating that new knowledge. A recent story about the flamingo serves as an ideal showcase of this partnership.    

In 2015, flamingoes were too close to the airstrip at the U.S. Navy Air Base on Boca Chica Key. The presence of the birds endangered the Navy’s costly aircrafts, their pilots, and the birds themselves. To avoid having to dispose of the birds, the Navy enlisted the services of Zoo Miami, who sent Dr. Frank Ridgley, a wildlife veterinarian, and Dr. Steven Whitfield, a wildlife ecologist, to trap and retrieve the birds. 

“It’s very hard to catch an adult flamingo in shallow water,” Frank Ridgley, DVM, who leads the Conservation and Research Department at Zoo Miami, shared. “They can see anything coming and will fly away quickly.” With the help of a local wildlife rehabber, Dr. Ridgley and Dr. Whitfield had success retrieving one young bird, a juvenile male that was likely abandoned by his parents during a big storm. “He probably didn’t know where to go, and was exhausted from his first big flight,” Frank shared. The Zoo team went on to name the young bird Conchy, after the “Conch Republic” of Key West, and brought him back to the Zoo to recover from a parasite infection. After his recovery, the Zoo released him back into the wild. When the state learned of Conchy’s release, officials warned the Zoo to cease releasing non-native species into the wild. Conchy was officially a fugitive, quietly being tracked by the scientific community through a transmitter. That’s when the Zoo consulted Dr. Jerry Lorenz, State Director of Research at Audubon Florida, looking for help in clarifying the status of flamingoes in Florida. The team has written two important studies of the species,  one in 2018  and another recently  published in 2021 .    

The episode with the Navy and Conchy called for a reassessment of the flamingo’s presence in Florida. Some of Florida’s top scientists convened to discuss if flamingoes are indeed a non-native population in Florida or if they should be reclassified to native species. According to the conventional wisdom in the Audubon Society and the flamingo’s greatest champion in the mid-1900s,  Robert Porter Allen , the species had not called Florida home for many years, if at all. The published record, which was written by ornithological legends such as Allen, is always subject to revision with the right evidence. Jerry needed to find such evidence if the flamingo could ever truly call Florida home.

Coinciding with this scientific conundrum, the USF Libraries had been acquiring Audubon Florida’s materials to archive in Special Collections and make digitally available for researchers. Associate Librarian Andy Huse worked closely with ecologist and former Audubon employee Dr. Ann Hodgson to approach directors such as Jerry around the state about archiving their materials. As the Director of the Everglades Science Center in the Florida Keys, Jerry was one of the first donors in what is now known as the Florida Environment and Natural History ( FLENH ) collections initiative. When Andy heard of Jerry’s latest research effort around the flamingo, he sent Jerry a link to the USF Libraries  Digital Collections  to look at the newly-digitized Audubon archives. Such a comprehensive search of the fragile paper records, which are now being preserved in Special Collections, would have taken weeks for Jerry to conduct. 

“It was a total shot in the dark,” Jerry recalled, as he typed “flamingo” into the Digital Collections search bar. As he scoured the search results for some kind of evidence, he found it:  a 1937 letter and first-hand account of nesting flamingoes on Sugar Loaf Key in 1903 . Many of the details in the correspondence had not made it into the ornithological record and upended the belief that flamingoes didn’t belong in Florida. 

“Most people would label this as unbelievable,” Jerry said of his eureka moment. But the information came from a most credible source: the records of the Audubon Society in Florida at the University of South Florida Libraries. “What it basically proved was that what we’re seeing now are not escapees but a recovering population. Flamingoes are wild native fauna in Florida, not because of captive places, like  Hialeah Park Race Track  or  Zoo Miami , but because they are recovering. And that is what convinced the state to reconsider.” 

Jerry and Dr. Whitfield incorporated their research into a paper. The day it was released and  published online in 2018 , the state took down its flamingoes’ page listing them as non-native.

As one of a few scientists who study the flamingo closely, Jerry was asked to give input on the petition to make the flamingo a native species, and possibly designate it endangered, in Florida. Jerry and Audubon’s leadership felt conflicted about the endangered designation. While they ultimately believed that the flamingo was threatened in Florida, they felt that their current efforts in conjunction with the state were already addressing the problem and asking for more resources would be redundant. “All we can do,” Jerry said, “is protect habitat and restore the Everglades,” which are both centerpieces of current conservation and mitigation efforts. Jerry declined joining a team of colleagues to submit a petition to list the birds as a native species being submitted to the Florida Wildlife Services Conservation Commission although he participated in some of the drafting of the submission.  

In 2018, the state called Jerry to evaluate the petition as a leading flamingo expert. “They didn’t realize I had already seen the petition,” Jerry shared. But luckily, they wanted him to be on the team even more when he divulged this information. After internal and external reviews of the petition, which were delayed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in 2021 the commission declined to list the flamingo on its protected species list for Florida, however, this had the desired outcome of the state officially recognizing them as a native species. Jerry confirmed that the letter he found in the USF Libraries Digital Collections was one of more convincing pieces of evidence, and helped showcase how powerful it is to have these materials available, but also, how crucial digitization efforts are—not only for research, but to potentially saving what is considered to the general public a beloved Florida bird.

The state did not declare the bird a protected species due to several factors. Of all the criteria that defines an endangered species, only one applied to the flamingo: their low population numbers in Florida. Due to Florida being an outer border of their habitat, their low numbers are not alarming. In fact, the flamingo population across the Gulf has rebounded in the last century.  

The flamingo clearly deserves further study in Florida, and Jerry is at the forefront of that effort. He is circumspect when assessing recent progress, and shared, “I’m disappointed, but respect their decision to not list the bird as endangered. Maybe we’ll go back with more information and try to petition them again.” But ultimately, he admits, “We got what we wanted. The State of Florida is adamantly stating that this is a native species that deserves protection under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. So we can take a victory lap for that.” USF Libraries proudly joins Jerry and his colleagues in that lap, and will continue to archive and preserve these materials that might one-day go on to help save another valuable species in our environment. 

•  Audubon Collections on Digital Commons @ USF 
•  Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program Collection 
•  Environmental Lands Acquisition and Protection Program Oral History Project 
•  Environment and Natural History  on Digital Commons @ USF
•  Florida Environment and Natural History (FLENH) Collections 
•  The Pink Wave: Flamingos and Florida Webinar with Jerry Lorenz, September 14, 2023, by Audubon Florida