On Monday morning, M. J. Foti was in shorebirding mode. The retired local teacher and Cape Cod Bird Club board member was out on the vast flats of Chapin Beach in Dennis volunteering to count sandpipers, plovers, and their ilk for Manomet’s International Shorebird Survey project. As she sorted through the little, brown, notoriously difficult sandpipers on the flats, a somewhat more distinctive, 4-foot-tall pink bird suddenly materialized on the flats. As she described it, her heart skipped a beat – the famous Dennis flamingo of last month had returned!
M. J. quickly got the word out, and further solidified her birding hero status by offering to shuttle hopeful birders to the beach – this was a prime beach day in mid-summer, and the lots were all full. Soon local birders, who never got the chance to see the bird at Chapin in early June, were reveling in this second chance at a once-in a lifetime bird. This is the first wild flamingo ever reported in Massachusetts.
I’m sure you are wondering if I saw it, and you’ll be relieved to know that I did. My whole family actually got to see this bird. Luckily I had taken the day off. By some random chance, I had pulled on a t-shirt that morning with little flamingos on the pocket. A prophetic wardrobe choice, some might say, manifesting the bird into existence – I don’t own as much flamingo-wear as you might think. We saw it on the Chapin flats, then again later from the Gray’s Beach boardwalk after picking my son up from his camp nearby.
I can’t think of a lot of birds that would be visible from three towns simultaneously, but this one was. In addition to Chapin in Dennis and Gray’s Beach in Yarmouth, others conjured the flamingo through high-powered spotting scopes from Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture sanctuary in Barnstable – the bird was over two miles from there, line of sight. It’s for just this sort of emergency that us birders carry spotting scopes, which magnify up to 6 times more than binoculars.
To recap this bird’s backstory, this and dozens of other flamingoes were displaced from the Caribbean by Hurricane Idalia last August. Flocks were seen as far north as Wisconsin and two spent several days in a farm pond in Pennsylvania. This bird’s first appearance in the northeast was on May 31 in East Hampton, NY, where it was seen by many happy birders over two days. The day it went missing from Long Island, June 2, the flamingo was photographed at Chapin Beach in Dennis by some non-birder beachgoers. It was not seen again, and few days later it turned up back on Long Island, in a different spot, before it settled back into the original spot in East Hampton, where it has been ever since. Until Monday.
Why Chapin Beach, you may ask? The huge, shallow flats there are full of food for fish and birds. When I was there with my wife and daughter on Monday, Semipalmated Sandpipers, Semipalmated Plovers, and other shorebirds were scattered across the flats in all directions. At one point I reached down and picked up a tiny juvenile flounder in ankle deep water to show my daughter. Almost every step in the tide pools brought critters out of the sand to bounce off my feet, maybe grass shrimp but I never actually figured out what they were. It may not hurt that the sand itself is pink on those big bayside flats, courtesy of purple sulfur bacteria and other microbes.
Sadly, as of my press time, no one had seen the flamingo since Monday evening. Will we see this flamingo yet again? I suspect so – as we all know, once a New Yorker gets a taste of Cape Cod, they always come back.
