With their conspicuous pink feathers and long legs, flamingos are standout birds, but they especially stand out in a place like south central Tennessee’s Wayne County, near the Alabama border.
In an uncommon turn of events, a group of five of these birds – two adults and three juveniles – were spotted a week ago feeding in a small pond on a cattle farm in this rural area.
“You just don’t get flamingos inland like that,” says Rob Harbin, a pastor and birdwatcher from Collierville.
He drove more than two hours to catch a rare glimpse of the single juvenile bird that remained on Monday.
In recent days, wild flamingos have been observed in 10 states ranging from Texas and Virginia, all the way up to Ohio and Pennsylvania. They wound up in these unfamiliar places because of powerful winds driving them inland from Hurricane Idalia, which hit Florida on Aug. 30.
Harbin says only a small number of flamingos are typically spotted in the U.S., and that’s usually restricted to southern coastal Florida. The birds, like the ones in Wayne County displaced by the storm, are believed to be from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico or the Caribbean.
Harbin says he, and dozens of other bird enthusiasts, jumped at the chance to photograph the vagrant species in Tennessee.
“You really have to take advantage of that opportunity to go and see it,” he says. “You just can’t not go.”
As of Thursday, the single bird he saw was still at the pond.
Tennessee’s first record of a wild flamingo spotting was in 2019 — likely blown in by Hurricane Barry.
