It’s 2016. Eary Warren is on his way to work when he gets a ping: a flamingo sighting on Bunche Beach. “I dropped everything,” he recalls. The Cape Coral resident pulls up to the road’s edge, flings his car door open, and grabs his binoculars and Canon. Rain pours as he pulls up and joins about a dozen anxious spectators.
Eary navigates toward an opening in the group—and there it is: a lone flamingo, poised at the shoreline. “Nearly ruined my camera. But I got the picture,” he says. It was the first time the lifelong Floridian had seen the bird in the wild.
If there’s one animal that speaks to Florida’s tangled relationship with nature—its abundance, its ruin, its restoration—it’s the American flamingo. The native species’ candy-pink plumage and twiggy silhouette decorate everything from mailbox posts to motel signs. Spotting the elusive icon triggers frantic text chains. Yet, the bird hasn’t nested in the Sunshine State for a century.
Now, for the first time in 100 years, their sinuous silhouettes are reappearing in South Florida—sparking awe, avid research and cautious optimism.
For decades, any pink wader spotted was presumed to be an escapee from captive flocks. But in 2018, researchers from Zoo Miami and Audubon Florida published a landmark study proving that the birds showing up today are likely free-flying exiles reappearing in a historic habitat. Eary’s sighting was one of the first modern, well-documented appearances in Southwest Florida.
Native populations were effectively wiped out in the late 1800s during the plume trade. Keith Laakkonen, director of Audubon’s Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary in Naples, says conditions worsened with the subsequent draining of the Everglades. “These estuaries are incredibly productive places for wildlife,” Keith says. “For the flamingo, a species that feeds on small things like plankton, you need clean water.” The severed freshwater flow and altered salinity robbed flamingos of the clean, briny shallows they rely on to feed. By the 1950s, there was nothing left to return to.
Flamingos are nomadic dispersers, traveling between core breeding areas in the Yucatán Peninsula and Cuba and other wetlands across the Caribbean and Gulf. In Florida, that migratory loop had long been broken. But now, conditions are shifting.
As the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan works to restore historic water flow, some estuarine habitats are starting to rebound. At the same time, major storms, and ecological pressures in the Caribbean, are nudging birds back this way. After Hurricane Idalia in 2023, an estimated 400 to 600 flamingos landed in the U.S.—and more than 100 of them in Florida.
Danielle Green, grounds director at Naples Zoo at Caribbean Gardens, spent more than three hours after Idalia circling Estero Bay for a glimpse. No luck—sometimes, it’s up to fate. Around the same time, Eary spotted 51 birds, clustered in groups and flying overhead, throughout his 4-mile trek in knee-deep water.
A few days later, artist Rachel Pierce spotted a flamboyance along the Sanibel Causeway. “I was the one who sent the video to the news,” she says proudly.
Findings are increasingly less isolated. Anecdotal and scientific evidence reveals the animals are arriving in flocks, staying longer and increasing in numbers. Last year, an Audubon census counted nearly 100 flamingos lingering in Florida, still thriving here a year after Idalia. A few months ago, in July, a South Florida Water Management District scientist saw 125 flamingos in Florida Bay—the largest flock spotted here in over a decade.
There are no signs of breeding or nesting colonies yet. But the bird’s growing presence shows tangible results from restoration efforts: a native species drawn back by change. “If we bring back the flamingo, we are really doing well,” Keith says. For now, we watch the horizon, hoping our emblems come home for good.