Flamingo fled, living best life
That cannot be right. A flamingo? In South Texas?
Ben Shepard, in the first week of his summer internship with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, thought it must have been something else.
The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi student was in a boat on May 23 when he saw the pink, five-foot-tall bird about 90 metres away among a flock of seagulls.
He peered through his binoculars to get a better look, and his eyes were not failing him — yep, that was a flamingo with an unmistakable tag just above one of its knees. “I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure flamingos aren’t native to Texas,” he said.
They are not. They generally cannot be found in the United States except for a few sightings in South Florida. Shepard had the rare pleasure of spotting No. 492, an African flamingo that, for more than a decade, has shown you can still survive when no one gets around to clipping your wings.
If this were a Pixar movie, it would begin its flashback sequence in the summer of 2003, when a flock of 40 flamingos from Tanzania were imported to the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas.
Adult birds are kept grounded by feather clipping, which Scott Newland, the curator of birds at the zoo, called “no different than you or I getting a haircut.” It must be repeated each year.
In June 2005, a guest reported seeing two flamingos out of their enclosure. No. 492 and No. 347 had flown out. July 3 brought a terrible thunderstorm. And on July 4 the birds were gone.
The flamingos went their separate ways. No. 347 flew north, and was spotted in Michigan in August 2005. The bird was never seen again and Newland said it probably did not survive the winter.
But No. 492 flew south to Texas, where it found an environment that would suit it well. “As long as they have these shallow, salty types of wetlands, they can be pretty resilient,” said Felicity Arengo, a flamingo expert at the American Museum of Natural History.
The ingredients were there to survive, but to thrive? Flamingos are a social species that love each other’s company, and No. 492 went off on its own.
But great fortune was ahead for No. 492. Soon after it arrived in Texas, it found an unlikely companion: a Caribbean flamingo. They were seen together as early as 2006 and as recently as 2013.
Though they are often referred to as mates, no one knows the sex of either bird. Whether they are best friends or mates, they were not together when Shepard spotted No. 492 in May. It raised the question: Could the Caribbean flamingo have died?
Maybe, but Arengo said there were other explanations. They could have naturally gone their separate ways — a breakup similar to the one with No. 347. Or the other flamingo could have been nearby but out of sight, set to reunite with No. 492 later.
“It’s possible they’re separated and will show up back together again,” she said.
Either way, Newland said No. 492 could live another 10-20 years.