Rare flock of 147 flamingos spotted in Palm Beach County

A flock of flamingos the size of which hasn’t been seen in Florida since the late 1800s moved into a remote stretch of Palm Beach County last week.

While the mob of 147 pink birds was caught on camera, attempts by Audubon Society experts to tag them failed and by Wednesday, authorities were stealthily searching swamplands in hopes the birds hadn’t fled the coop, so to speak.

“We think a lot of people scared them off. One of our guys is out looking now,” said Randy Smith, spokesman for the South Florida Water Management district.

The flock apparently took a liking to water management land in the far western reaches of the county south of Lake Okeechobee. Smith and other wildlife authorities aren’t saying where exactly the birds were spotted in hopes of keeping flocks of people from trampling the scene.

They were first spotted, in much fewer numbers, by district employees who then alerted Audubon authorities in Miami. Audubon authorities had been looking for flamingos in Everglades National Park, said Dustin Smith, a conservation and research specialist at Zoo Miami. By last week, the number of flamingos had grown from 20-something to 147.

By the water district’s accounts, the flamingos were last seen Friday. But Smith isn’t giving up yet. “The area is so vast we just might not have seen them.”

Last week, Zoo Miami, the Tropical Audubon Society of Miami and the National Park Service sought to attach some satellite locators to the flamingos, but the flock was spooked by more than one passing helicopter, including one that belongs to another rare South Florida bird: Donald Trump.

“The first scared them up into the air. A little bit later Trump’s helicopter came by and it’s a little bigger and they flew even higher,” said Dustin Smith, who learned of the fly-by from his boss. “But they came back.”

No one knows where the flock came from. Flamingos and Florida are inseparable images, but the plastic lawn versions are probably more common than the real deal in the Sunshine State.

While there are records of flamingos by the hundreds or even thousands in some flocks in the late 1800s, those numbers dramatically declined, Dustin Smith said.

Audubon Florida’s website notes that when the Europeans first arrived in Florida, only a small breeding population of flamingos was in residence in extreme South Florida. Wild flamingos are known to reproduce in the Bahamas, Cuba, Mexico and Ecuador.

Occasional flamingo sightings in the southern reaches of Everglades National Park are thought to be “vagrants” from the Yucatan. Twice such vagrants have been spotted by local Audubon authorities. The banding on their legs alerted birders to their birth place.

“In Mexico, they have a big effort to band the babies in the Yucatan,” Dustin Smith said. One was spotted in the early 2000s and another visited years before that, he said.

That’s why a flock of 147 caught someone’s attention.

A smaller, but certainly more permanent population of 14 lives at the Palm Beach Zoo off Summit Boulevard in West Palm Beach.

The bright pink birds more commonly seen in Palm Beach County are Roseate spoonbills, same hue, but different bill. The spoonbill has, predictably, a spatula or spoon-shaped bill.

Flamingos in Florida