As mentioned on the overnight thread, I’m off on a bird-spotting adventure today — heading up to the Big Bend and Panhandle areas of Florida in hopes of seeing (from a respectful distance) some of the flamingos that Hurricane Idalia distributed around the Gulf Coast.
An eBirder spotted a flamboyance off Cedar Key earlier this week, and Pinky, the famous winter resident who lives due south of Tallahassee, has allegedly been joined by some new pink friends.
The Cedar Key flamingos linked above are in a squad, but Tampa Bay’s Peaches (remember them?), now rehabbed and released, remains a solitary figure. That’s making some area residents sad. People are also up in arms about Peaches’ bulky tracking device:
It does look irritating, but in the linked Tampa Bay Times column, Jerry Lorenz, Audubon Florida’s state research director, explains that it “weighs almost nothing” and that researchers need the data birds like Peaches can provide to support efforts to repopulate Florida with wild flamingos. (Under a Democratic governor. He didn’t say that, but it’s true.)
Peaches is healthy, Lorenz said, eating, flying, preening and taking baths. Tracking animals “is backed up by literally thousands of years of research,” he said. “There is nothing wrong with that bird, but we do appreciate people being concerned. It’s good that people are out there keeping an eye on Peaches.”
Peaches is such a celebrity that they have their own Do Not Disturb sign courtesy of the DOT:
Anyhoo, I hope to see some of Peaches’ kin this weekend. I’ll be travelling solo but meeting up with some kin of my own at various points on my journey. I’m looking forward to discovering awful diners and drinking terrible coffee. Will try to post updates from the road.
Open thread!
![On The Road - way2blue - Valparaiso, Chile [2 of 2]](https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/24-March-23-9-80x80.jpg)
On The Road – way2blue – Valparaiso, Chile [2 of 2]
Baud
I nominate “Do Not Disturb Flamingo” for the rotating tag.
rikyrah
Good Morning Everyone 😊😊😊
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
OzarkHillbilly
Have fun, Betty.
@rikyrah: Blech.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Have a good time, Betty. I like women who take off on solo trips.
JCJ
There was big news last week when five flamingos were seen in Lake Michigan a few miles north of Milwaukee. They must have read their map wrong because they were in South Beach Park in Port Washington. They probably saw “South Beach” and assumed it was Miami.
swiftfox
Research guideline is that a radio tag not weight more than 3%-5% of an animal’s weight. Maybe that tag meets the standard but I think a motus tag would have been better, and the west coast of Florida has at least a half-dozen motus receiving stations. The motus system is an international system where stationary radio receivers collect data from birds with tags at frequencies that the stations can pick up.
Yarrow
That is so fun! Have a wonderful time. Look forward to your pictures.
MomSense
Have fun, BC! I’m going to have the house to myself for a few days and I’m looking forward to it.
Anne Laurie
Since we lived a shortish bus ride from the Bronx Zoo, which has been justifiably proud of its flamingo flock since before I was born, I realized much later in life that I’m kinda blase about them.
Yes, I know now that birds in the wild are not the same as their relatives in even the most scrupulously ‘open’ controlled environments. But I’ll always subconsciously associate the Big Pink Birbs with (a) the eye-watering smell of shrimp-eating waterfowl effluvia, and (b) the volume of honkery a large flock can achieve at feeding time / during mating season, especially when cold weather kept them indoors…
Yarrow
@swiftfox: Since it’s Florida, maybe this tag also reports back if Peaches has a look at books with LGBTQ+ characters or helps anyone get an abortion.
Low Key Swagger
Seeing reports that Diane Feinstein has died.
Marcopolo
Reports out that Diane Feinstein just passed away.
RIP
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: It’s right up there with “The dog has a gun and refuses to take his meds!”
Low Key Swagger
Also on Twitter.
lowtechcyclist
I’d just buy some decent coffee at Trader Joe’s or Publix to take along and brew in the hotel room’s coffeepot, and pour it into a thermos to take with me for the day. A decent cup of coffee or three is a necessity in the mornings.
Getting in what may be one last day of work before the government shutdown. I can’t see the House Republicans agreeing to even a temporary CR when they can’t even make sense to themselves about why they’re shutting down the government anyway.
If there was some negotiation going on between the two parties, that would be one thing, but the negotiations (if one can call them that) are between loony and loonier Rethugs. Maybe Spineless Kevin will find his missing backbone and put the sort of CR on the floor that the Dems and five vulnerable Rethugs can sign onto, but I wouldn’t want to place a bet on that.
Erin
So with Feinstein dead, does that mean that there are going to be no new judicial appointments?
Jeffro
Betty, have a blast! We’ll heckle Kraven Kevin (on his way out as Speaker) for you. ;)
lowtechcyclist
@Erin:
Good question, I assume Newsom gets to appoint her replacement in the Senate, but I also assume that the Rethugs won’t allow Schumer to replace her on the Judiciary Committee even under these circumstances.
The Dems really need to stand up and say, ‘fuck this rule, we’re voting a replacement onto the committee by majority vote, deal with it.’
ETA: Yeah, I know, they’d need one of Manchin or Sinema to go along with that. Lotsa luck.
J.
@Baud: I second that.
Happy flamingo spotting, Betty! (There was a flamboyance spotted near Sanibel after the storm too. Crazy.)
Chief Oshkosh
@lowtechcyclist:
It’s the spinelessness, but also just the plain lack of intelligence. The smart move here is to do as you say – put forth a CR that gets at least 5 R votes and all the Ds, get it passed and use that as the first PR salvo in isolating the 10 worst fuckups from the MAGA House moron club.
At some point Kevin McLickspittle is going to have to make examples of at least 5, if not 10, of the fuckups. Today is his best opportunity to start that. I doubt that he has the brains to comprehend it, and I KNOW he doesn’t have the courage-in-the-moment to do it.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: That’s disturbing.
RandomMonster
RIP DiFi
frosty
BC: I missed the flamingo that was hanging around in a pond near Chambersburg PA the last few weeks. I hope you have better luck!
ETA: I also hope Peaches is still around when we’re at Fort De Soto for a few days in February.
Ken
Though only the last hundred or so years involved any scientific, vs. culinary, purposes.
Albatrossity
One of these tourists showed up in Kansas a couple of days ago. I got pics yesterday, and apparently it is still there (about 70 mi south of me) this morning.
frosty
@Dorothy A. Winsor: In 2015 after Ms F had been retired and I was still working she told me she was going to hitch up the trailer and do a cross-country trip. Her words to me? “You’re welcome to come along.”
I took a flight to Birmingham, traveled for a couple of weeks to New Mexico and flew back. She went up the California and Oregon coasts and back east without me.
steppy
@Betty Cracker: Do you have any Cletus Safaris lined up for those Panhandle diners?
Sure Lurkalot
Lucky enough to have traveled to Bonaire a couple of times and saw many flamingos as well as their takeoff to Venezuela around sunset. Beautiful experience!
Steeplejack
Re coffee: I have become something of an instant-coffee researcher, because I don’t drink much coffee—never more than one cup a day, and not every day—and I don’t want a coffee machine taking up counter space in my small kitchen. Current favorites are Mount Hagen and Café Altura from Amazon or, in a pinch (like Betty Cracker’s road trip), Starbucks Via Instant Italian Roast in the single-serving tubes, available in most grocery stores.
Mobile
I recently moved to Safety Harbor, a truly lovely Florida town. Last night as I began my evening walk down to the town pier, a neighbor, returning from her walk, excitedly told me to be on the lookout for some flamingos down by the shore. She said they were part of a group blown up from Yucatan during the storm. As I was searching along the water’s edge, a flamboyance of eight birds flew over my head heading into the mangroves to settle in for the night. All the locals I encountered were excited, hoping this meant the birds might decide to make our part of Tampa Bay their new home.
Rob
Good luck, Betty!
Earlier this month I drove two hours from my DC suburb to a pond west of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to see the two flamingos that had landed there. They were close enough to the road, nobody trespassed for better photographs, I ended up talking to the owner, his daughter, and a friend. A couple of days after I was there, one of them was attacked by a snapping turtle and was taken to a wildlife rehabilitator. Unfortunately it died a week or two later. After a week of being alone, the other one flew off.
Rob
@frosty: It flew off over a week ago (the remaining Chambersburg flamingo). I was fortunate to see both.
Geminid
@Steeplejack: I like the small, one-coffee packets. I just bought four 7-packet boxes of Maxwell House for a dollar each. But I get Cafe Bustello packets when I can.
Regine Touchon
Two weeks ago we rented a house with friends in Indian Pass which is sandwiched between Port St. Joe and Apilachicola on 30 A. Right past PSJ wading in the shallows of the bay was a now famous flamingo. He was fittingly christened Jimmy Buffet 😀
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: At the New Orleans Zoo in Audubon Park (several years ago), the flamingo enclosure had no top on it and a zoo worker said the flamingos in there were a mixture of zoo animals and wild flamingos. I asked him how they knew which ones were which and he said: ‘The ones that fly out of here are the wild ones.’
HinTN
@Betty C – There’s a very serviceable place for lunch (or supper) in Valparaiso, just outside the east gate of Eglin AFB. It’s Doc’s Oyster Bar and it’s got outdoor seating overlooking the water.
Steeplejack
@Geminid:
I’ll check out Café Bustelo. Didn’t know it came in packets. I previously rejected Maxwell House (the mix, not the packets) for some reason I don’t remember. Maybe just that I found better alternatives.
Mount Hagen is available in packets; that’s what I have. I do use two packets for one cup, because I find it a little mild. The Café Altura is a mix.