Fugitive flamingo lives on

Years after escaping Kansas zoo, bird turns up in Texas

Ben Shepard, in the first week of his summer internship with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, thought he must have seen something else.

The Texas A&M-Corpus Christi student was in a boat on May 23, surveying the birds on the islands of Lavaca Bay, about halfway between Houston and Corpus Christi, when he saw the pink, 5-foottall bird about 100 yards away among a flock of sea gulls.

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 to his colleague on the boat.

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 — and when you read on you may agree that it should be — it would begin its flashback sequence in the summer of 2003, when a flock of 40 flamingos from Tanzania was imported to the Sedgwick County Zoo in Wichita, Kansas. Less than a year later, in May 2004, the flamingo exhibit opened to the public.

Scott Newland, the curator of birds at the zoo, said if the birds had arrived as newborns, they would have been kept flightless by essentially Flamingo No. 492, a zoo escapee from almost 13 years ago, was spotted in south Texas in late May amid a flock of sea gulls. amputating a part of the wing in which they had not yet developed sensation, before the bone was formed. Instead, adult birds are kept grounded by feather clipping.

In June 2005, on a very windy day in Wichita, a guest reported seeing two flamingos out of their enclosure. Nos. 492 and 347 had flown out; the staff had missed the signs that their feathers

needed to be clipped again.

Each attempt to approach the flamingos spooked them. Soon they flew away to a drainage canal on the western side of Wichita, where they remained under observation of park officials for a week, Newland said.

July 3 brought a terrible thunderstorm. And on July 4 — Independence Day, a detail maybe a little too on the nose for the Pixar movie — the birds were gone.

For unknown reasons, the flamingos went their separate ways. No. 347 flew north and was spotted in Michigan’s AuTrain Lake 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.

“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.

Soon after No. 492 arrived in Texas, it found an unlikely companion: a Caribbean flamingo that, Newland speculates, may have been blown into the Gulf during a tropical storm. They were seen together as early as 2006 and as recently as 2013.

They were not together when Shepard spotted No. 492 in May. It raised the question: Could the Caribbean flamingo have died? Is No. 492 alone again?

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.

Either way, Newland said, No. 492 could live another 10-20 years. Predators include foxes and bobcats, but since flamingos pose little threat to humans and are not considered game birds, No. 492 likely does not have to worry about hunters.