[Tweeters] Flamingos

[Michael Price]

Hi Tweets,

Some years back, on a very brisk, clear January day, I was birding Blackie
Spit, which is at the eastern end of Boundary Bay, BC. The tide was low, so
extensive mudflats. I was scoping along the opposite shore when I spotted a
pink dot among what looked like a flock of Canada Geese. Cranked up the
zoom: it's a flamingo. Jeez, I thought, some silly knothead has planted a
lawn flamingo at the water's edge. Then it began feeding.

Its provenance was no mystery. There'd been a Great Escape of flamingos at
Vancouver's Stanley Park zoo (now closed). Well, they'd all been pinioned,
so the next day the workers simply had to collect all the flamingos
aimlessly wandering around the zoo grounds wondering what to do next. But
when they did a head-count, they were one short. A few days later, the
missing flamingo showed up on the shores of Boundary Bay. The explanation?
When the zoo techs were pinioning the birds, they had somehow missed this
guy and it had simply cashed in its 'Get out of Jail' card and flown off.

It had attached itself to the Canada Geese flock (they were Pacific Flyway
migrant geese, not the local '*canadensis*' layabouts imported from Back
East in the Fifties). And for the next several years, it apparently
trundled up and down the Pacific coast, earning double-takes from Alaska to
Oregon.

best
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