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# When Flamingos Came to the Chesapeake - The Sunday Long Read

ON WHAT must have been one of the first mornings the flamingos flew over Virginia, I was standing outside with a friend, and I would have missed the whole thing entirely had her husband not come running off my parents’ dock.

“Look up, look up,” he shouted. High above the field, he pointed to long slices of pink against a gunmetal sky. The morning was overcast and muggy, and rain threatened to spoil our plans for the day, so I felt a little shiver of relief that something exciting might be happening after all. But as I stood there, gazing up, my wonder turned to confusion: How did flamingos end up in the Chesapeake Bay?

That morning in 2023 was toward the end of the summer, a season that’s full of my favorite moments in these coastal marshes: hot and cloudless days, when a thin line on the far horizon illuminates where blue starts being water and stops being sky; late afternoons when sunlight turns marsh grass to a yellowed green that smells like salt and mud and sunburn. This place is home to white egrets and great blue herons, red drum and silver perch—but not pink flamingos. “They were probably just herons,” I said when I recounted the story to other friends later that week, eager for them to agree. I couldn’t think about the flamingos without feeling like the landscape had shifted; I didn’t even know the colors anymore.  

I could only hold out for a few days, though. Almost as soon as they flew over the house, everyone started spotting flamingos in the Chesapeake Bay.

> “They were beautiful, but it was a little eerie. They weren’t supposed to be here.”

According to experts, [the birds were migrating](https://www.npr.org/2023/09/07/1197943623/hurricane-idalia-flamingos-ohio-florida-texas-carolina) between the Yucatan Peninsula and Cuba when they were blown off course [by Hurricane Idalia](https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2024/06/09/hurricane-idalia-pink-flamingos-seen-along-east-coast/74004828007/). The flamingos were simply caught up in the storm, and instead of fighting the winds, they went with them, which resulted in sightings of the birds from [Texas to Ohio to New York to Wisconsin](https://www.jsonline.com/story/travel/wisconsin/outdoors/2023/09/25/flamingos-in-wisconsin-came-on-winds-of-hurricane-idalia-experts-say/70959926007/). 

To my mind, it’s hard to conjure a more unnatural-seeming animal than the flamingo. Even the stripes on a zebra or spots on a giraffe offer an evolutionary nudge toward survival, but the bright color of the American Flamingo is merely a byproduct of the carotenoids in their tropical diet. With their long, thin legs holding up all that gorgeous plumage, they exude the kind of confidence that’s usually reserved for good dancers or women who tuck shirts into high-waisted pants.

*Go ahead*, they seem to say. *Look at me.* Their distinctive beaks imparting, as Jay Gould would famously write in his book, *The Flamingo’s Smile*, “an inappropriate (but unshakable) impression of haughtiness.”

Perhaps it’s because of this assured and bizarre appearance that flamingos have worked themselves into the iconography of American tarnish: trailer parks, 50th birthday [lawn decorations, John Waters and the city of Baltimore](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/business/don-featherstone-inventor-of-the-pink-flamingo-in-plastic-dies-at-79.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare). So much impractical beauty could only beget an incoming terror, or at least, suggest it: How else could our brains possibly balance the scales?

And yet, the early media coverage of the birds in Virginia suggested that no one shared my unease. Every mention of a sighting chronicled nothing but collective glee. A pair of the birds had settled in Chincoteague, an island off Virginia’s Eastern Shore famous for its wild pony swim every fall. A *Washington Post* article called the birds a “cheery diversion for residents.” Virginians offered boat tours to catch a glimpse of the flamingos while also selling t-shirts and putting pink plastic figurines out on their lawns. 

Maybe I just needed to lighten up.

“THE FIRST time I saw them, I thought I’d shown up for the wrong job,” the gate attendant at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge told me as she counted out my change. It had been almost a year since the birds had come and gone from Chincoteague, but she smiled and made her eyes wide with surprise as she recalled her encounter with the flamingos. “I’ve lived here my whole life–my parents and grandparents, too–and we’ve never seen flamingos.”  

In the year since the flamingos first flew over the house, I had grown increasingly fascinated with their time in the Chesapeake. I hadn’t lost my need to make sense of our reception of them, and I was curious about what their brief tenure might mean for the landscape that holds so many of my memories.  I don’t know what happens to a recollection of a place when that place changes, or if it matters what we pause to admire on the shoreline and through our binoculars. What I did know was that for a little while, the flamingos made a home here, and that felt like it might tether us together in the larger questions shaping these shifting waters. 

In settling near Chincoteague, the birds picked one of the most tourist-friendly spots on the Bay, a town with ice cream stores and mini golf courses and more than one road-side waterslide. The flamingos flew over plenty of isolated marsh, and past rural counties containing not a single stoplight, only to settle in a protected seashore that’s just down the road from t-shirt stores and souvenir shops. As far as come-heres— a local term for newcomers to the area—go, the birds seemed to know exactly where they’d be welcomed, and noticed, and might also help juice the state tourism trade. 

The two rangers working the desk at the Toms Cove Visitor Center laughed as they recalled the flock of visitors who came in hopes of seeing the flamingos. They shook their heads as they told me stories of people who would drive from neighboring states with the expectation of seeing the birds from their cars. 

Those who did have success in spotting the birds were folks who set out on one of Chincoteague’s many boat tours, which normally cater to dolphin spotting or the annual pony swim. “It was a crazy time,” a captain from Daisey’s Island Cruises told me. “All the calls were exclusively about flamingos. They’d hire a whole boat just to see one bird. It amazed me the excitement people had about going to see a bird they could see at the zoo.”

I asked him how he felt seeing something new in waters that he knows so well.  “I thought it was interesting, but not a big deal,” he said. “But I still think we should get a couple of flamingos and put them out there and make some more money.”  

There was only one person in town who showed any trepidation when I brought up the flamingos. At Sundial Books, I asked the woman behind the register if she had seen the birds last fall. “They were beautiful, but it was a little eerie,” she said. “They weren’t supposed to be here.”  

IN HIS journals written in May 1832, John James Audubon [recounts his first encounter](https://www.audubon.org/birds-of-america/american-flamingo) with flamingos on his voyage through the Florida Keys: “It was on the afternoon of one of those sultry days which, in that portion of the country, exhibit towards evening the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived. The sun, now far advanced toward the horizon, still shone with full splendor, the ocean glittered in its quiet beauty, and the light fleecy clouds that here and there spotted the heavens, seemed flakes of snow margined with gold…”  

Then, Audubon sees the birds flying across the sky, wings spread wide and legs stretched behind them. “Ah! Reader, could you but know the emotions that then agitated my breast! I thought I had now reached the height of all my expectations, for my voyage to the Floridas was undertaken in a great measure for the purpose of studying these lovely birds in their own beautiful islands.”

I first read this passage after the flamingos came to the Chesapeake, with hopes of understanding more about the history of the birds. I felt so disappointed that this had been their storied debut, especially the way Audubon checks them off his list with all the short-lived interest of a sightseer. Here was our best historical glimpse of flamingos, and it was just another guy who couldn’t be bothered to get out of the car.  

What Audubon’s depiction did capture was the flamingo’s magnetic appeal, along with the way the birds’ presence seems to light up the beauty of their surroundings. Every scientist I spoke to about the flamingos was quick to note that they are *charismatic megafauna*, animals that are popular and attractive, and thus able to generate support for conservation efforts. 

“In the UK, the majority of our wildlife is brown and boring and lives under a stone, so you never see it,” said Dr. Paul Rose, senior lecturer at the University of Exeter and member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature flamingo specialist group. “I think native species can be a hard sell. If you have something like a flamingo, which yes, isn’t native, but it’s a living thing, which you can then say that we have species that do something similar in our wetlands, it draws people in.”

Rose continued, “It’s harder to get a group of school kids interested in daphnia, rather than, this is the big pink \[bird\] that eats the daphnia, and then you build your ecology and your story around it.”

But could these birds change the story of the Chesapeake? 

“Any sightings that get folks interested in wildlife are certainly good for the conservation community,” said Kevin Holcomb, supervisory wildlife biologist at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. When I pushed him to remark on how exceptional it must have been to see the flamingos in the marsh, he calmly responded, “all of the natural wildlife we’re protecting and monitoring are charismatic.”

But to have actual charismatic megafauna show up, unannounced and unfamiliar, in your ecosystem? To fly in on the breeze? I still couldn’t decide if I should be celebrating its beauty or taking it as a sign that the end was near.

A FEW months after the flamingos came to the Chesapeake Bay, residents across Virginia’s middle peninsula, including my family, got a letter alerting them that their homeowner’s insurance was going to be canceled. “Due to its proximity to the coast,” the letter stated, “your dwelling’s exposure to hurricanes and/or additional coastal exposure, your dwelling is ineligible for coverage in the Homeowner’s program.” We’ve been living with a rising bay as a kind of background beat, a reality like gravity or the passage of time. We’ve set up our lives to live within its constraints, and yet it always comes as a surprise when we have to face it. 

For the last century, this part of the world has been reshaped by rising tides. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation reports that coastal Virginia has seen the highest rate of relative sea-level rise on the whole Atlantic coast, more than 14 inches since 1930; the Bay is projected to rise another 1.3 to 5.2 feet over the next 100 years.  

About three miles from the house, at the end of my favorite bike ride, there’s a wooden walkway that offers a glimpse of a lighthouse, and a sign at the end of the short boardwalk details how quickly this spot on the coastline has changed: as late as the 1920s, cars were driven to the lighthouse at low tide, a fact that seems unimaginable now. The lighthouse is far enough away to look small, and certainly too far to swim and almost too far to paddle. An image on the last portion of the sign has three maps of this area all under the title “Future Scenarios,” an estimation of this landscape with a two-foot, four-foot, or six-foot sea-level rise. In all three instances, the majority, if not all of this part of the peninsula, is underwater.

![](https://dotcompatterns.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/star1-1.png?w=100)

![](https://dotcompatterns.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/star2-1.png?w=100)

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It’s hard not to feel numbed by a familiar inevitability. Among the unfortunate things humans must share is impermanence, and it’s so easy not to face it. But a landscape is not a lifetime, and that means learning new ways to mourn. When we’re brave enough we’re solastalgic, meaning missing home while we’re still at home, as we watch water erase solid ground. We didn’t need a tropical bird standing in the marsh to envision the world we are losing, but the flamingos made it almost impossible for me not to see the loss. 

When it comes to rising sea levels, flamingos are not the first wading birds to raise the alarm. According to Jerry Lorenz, state research director for Audubon’s Everglades Science Center, the new nesting patterns of roseate spoonbills are in direct response to the changing environment on the Eastern Seaboard. 

“We can’t expect spoonbills to nest in a habitat that’s two feet deeper than it was historically,” Lorenz said. 

Spoonbills are a coastal bird, and historically they have never nested farther north than Florida. Since 2020, they have been nesting in North Carolina. 

“They are taking advantage of this nice, hot weather,” Lorenz said. “And that’s what we expect to see with flamingos, too.”

Dr. Rose agrees: “Just like we’ve seen in Hawaii \[with the\] honeyeaters, little birds that gradually get higher and higher up mountains as the temperature has climbed, so I think with rising sea levels we’ll see the flamingo pushed into new areas of existing island groups because lower lying areas that they might use for foraging and nesting will become submerged.”

If wading birds are to survive in a world of rising sea levels, they will have to seek out new places to make a home, and it’s not as simple as picking up and moving a little north and inland. While flamingos need an abundant food source and appropriately warm temperatures, they also need a lot of flat ground, something that becomes increasingly limited farther inland. A hotter Virginia is still Virginia, even if the weather tilts toward the tropical.

“Yes, I would be thrilled if these birds just moved to new locations,” Lorenz said, “but I don’t know that there will be a climate refuge for them. To be honest with you, it scares the hell out of me. I’m terrified of ecosystem collapse.”  

“I’m not saying that flamingos are ever going to be a common sight in the Chesapeake Bay. But if I had a crystal ball and a hundred years from now I did see them there, it wouldn’t surprise me,” Lorenz said.  

I asked him if that’s because the environment of the Chesapeake Bay could feel more and more like the Everglades? 

“Yes,” he replied, “that’s correct.”

I have found comfort in the idea that the land we love will outlive us. However a place changes, if we can point to the spot where something happened, our lives become more real in some way. But on the day the flamingos flew over the house, they forced me to pause and really look around, the way a slightly higher tide or a little warmer summer never has.  I knew, right then, that the ground beneath me was sinking. 

It’s hard to ignore a giant pink bird. 

EVENTUALLY, the flamingos left the bay. The last recorded sighting on the citizen birding tracker eBird was in December of 2023, almost four months after the morning they flew over the house. Experts had told me that as soon as it got cold enough, they would pick up and go, maybe even joining back up with their original flamboyance (yes, a group of flamingos is called “a flamboyance”). There was comfort in imagining that outcome, and I wanted to believe that there might be some hope in the thing with feathers.  

“I think everyone was relieved that they left when it got cold,” one of the rangers at Chincoteague said. “They can always come back— as long as they don’t bring the alligators.”

A few months after the flamingos departed, I went to the Eastern Shore to stay with my friends who spotted the birds flying over the house. We drove to Assateague to walk the three miles of the birdwatching loop, stopping to admire the swans we could see across the water. It was another gray afternoon, and we met only one other person on the trail, but as she passed us, we saw a flamingo keychain attached to her backpack.

Beauty has often seemed like the greatest comfort in the face of change. Within my lifetime, it’s estimated that sections of the East Coast will become uninhabitable, as sea levels in the Southeast are rising at triple the global average. Across the world, there are more frequent and deadly flash floods, rampant wildfires, and each year is recorded to be hotter than the last. Like the American Flamingo, many of us will be blown off course by the impacts of a changing climate. Having the birds in the bay seemed to forecast a dismal future, one where a tropical species could arrive and survive in a habitat that should have felt so foreign to them.  

But for a little while, there were pink flamingos in the Chesapeake Bay, and my unease at their residence didn’t make their existence, or that of the osprey, herons, egrets, and bald eagles, seem any less spectacular. 

Now, when I return to Audubon’s journals, I see the sentences before he sees the birds, the ones where he delights in the landscape, as the most hopeful way to understand the flamingos in the bay. By standing out in our marshes, the flamingos reminded us of what has always been right there: “the most glorious effulgence that can be conceived.” At least on our late summer evenings, that’s how it’s always seemed to me.

For so long I had believed that beauty was what was at stake in a changing climate, as if it was something we earned and thus stood to lose. As if the birds arriving from their warm islands might mean that we were the ones being punished. As if we were at the center of it all. 

What the flamingos showed me is that whatever the future, there will be beauty in it. Beauty will stand alongside our fear and destruction, sometimes on one leg, feeding upside down in rising waters that must taste, increasingly, of home.

![A brunette woman smiles while looking to the right and leaning against a wall. She is wearing a brown turtleneck and a blue vest.](https://i0.wp.com/sundaylongread.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/IMG_0905.jpeg?resize=747%2C1024&ssl=1)

## Elizabeth Johnson

Elizabeth Johnson is a writer and educator based in Richmond, Virginia.

*This story was made possible by the support of **Sunday Long Read subscribers** and publishing partner **Ruth Ann Harnisch**. Artwork by [Emily Joynton](https://www.emilyjoynton.com/portfolio/editorialillustrations)**.** Designed by **Anagha Srikanth**. Edited by **Kiley Bense***.

 
 

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