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Flamingos in Washington State (1 Viewer)

davidandkaren

Unpaid Blogger
A debate broke out on a non-birding forum over the claim by someone of seeing a California Condor in the Columbia River Gorge.

This morphed into a debate about rare bird sightings - and someone claiming that a Flamingo used to live in Stehekin Washington (A small town in the North Cascades, far away from the ocean)

No photos or evidence of course, but someone did find this: an article in a respected birding publication, the Murrelet, that describes two Flamingos being spotted in Grays Harbour in 1975

The first thing I did was check the refuge website and there is no mention of these birds ever being seen there.

Looking at eBird - I can find no record of a Flamingo north of the Galapagos or outside the Gulf coast.

So what do the experts say?
 
Well, I can't comment on your question, directly - I have no idea what they'd say. |:p|

However, I do have a suspicion about these birds, and why they are not recorded in the Grays Harbour checklist. It was probably just automatically assumed that they were escapees from some private collection or zoo, and therefore not a legitimate record. (I note that the preview of the page in the Murrelet (the one on JSTOR) ends just at the top of the Flamingo story - perhaps there was some speculation about their origin further on.)

I remember seeing a photo (years ago), in a Toronto newspaper, of a flamingo standing in a pond in eastern Canada somewhere - I can't remember where, now. Didn't really cause much excitement in the birding community, since, not only was it far beyond the range of expected vagrancy of American Flamingo ... it turned out to be, not P. ruber, but one of the South American species! No idea if anyone ever figured out which zoo it came from...

P.C.
 
Probably just escapes from somebody's aviary. Flamingos are fairly widely kept in captivity and escapes are not infrequent. There was one in Reno some years ago and another in southern Nevada last summer.
 
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Both Chilean and Lesser Flamingos occur in the Salton Sea area (Or did when I lived in Sand Diego 6 years ago). No doubt they the Washington birds, like the Salton Sea birds, are of captive origin.
 
As has been said Flamingos are widely kept in captivity and occasionally escape. A few years ago a Lesser and a Greater / Chilean overwintered on the River Mersey in Northwest England and they are slowly increasing as a breeding bird in Germany.

Chris
 
Anything is possible...any bird could almost show up anyplace as they get lost, blown out to sea and land wherever...so the flamingo wouldn't be far off.

A condor? .... okay, same argument but the fact that it is has such a large wing span would make it stand out big time. .....more than one person would have noticed that.... Probably an American Golden Eagle on the Columbia...
 
Anything is possible...any bird could almost show up anyplace as they get lost, blown out to sea and land wherever...so the flamingo wouldn't be far off.
...

Well, not any bird exactly ... I think you'll find ratites mostly tend to stay put. :stuck:

P.C.
 
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