Pink Flamingos – The New State Bird (Not Really)

Did you ever hear about frogs raining from the sky? Or fish falling out of a tornado? Acts of God? I guess it depends on your philosophical bent. But weird stuff happens. And along those lines, I present to you this: pink flamingos on your neighbor’s yard, standing next to garden gnomes and cutsie wooden women bent over and showing their bloomers (you’ve seen them.) And one flamingo starts walks walking toward you. And you’re in Ohio.

So what happened is that a sizeable number of flamingos got caught up in Hurricane Idalia when it came across the Yucatan peninsula, where there are a ton of flamingos. And rather than fight the wind to get from the cantina to the beach, they took the wind.

Now American pink flamingos were nearly wiped out in the early 1900s. They’re coming back, but not in the U.S. – Yucatan peninsula, between the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. And they’re strong birds, despite their stick-legs. They can fly with the best of them. So who knows? Maybe they were listening to “Born to Be Wild,” and said “what the hell? Let’s see where the wind takes us?”

It took them as far as Ohio (said before) and Southern Pennsylvania. Sadly, it did not take them to upstate New York, which would’ve been hella cool. Can you imagine just being drunk as hell or otherwise mind-altered and seeing a pin flamingo walk up to you in downtown Albany? Knowing our luck, first person to see it would be an adventurous foodie, and there would be one solitary Google search for “how to cook flamingo.”

So most likely, by now, they’ve gone back home. Which is cool, because we can only take so much of tourists, am I right? Like I said, they’re big, strong birds. But there’s no guarantee they’ve all left yet, and there’s also no guarantee one didn’t thumb it (leg it, rather) to our lovely Hudson Valley. We can hope.

So go out, but a fake plastic flamingo, and set it up in your front yard. You might just attract the real thing.