Among the slideshows of Hurricane Ian’s destruction across Florida—levelled city blocks, wrecked neighborhoods and flooded streets—a photo of flamingos in a sad huddle made the rounds late last week.
The image, captured by staff at St. Petersburg’s Sunken Gardens, showed pale pink Chilean flamingos in a public bathroom, tightly bunched outside the restroom stalls. A large basin of drinking water sat in the foreground of the make-shift habitat. One bird was dipping its bill into a trough of food pellets. “The flamingos are having quite the hurricane party; eating, drinking, and dancing,” a post on the botanical gardens’ Instagram page read. A second photo in the post showed a garden employee grinning as she carried a flamingo along a path flanked by tall green fronds.
Thousands of people liked the post, which was even memorialized in a cartoon by an artist named Chad Mize. One commenter likened them to “a bunch of ballerinas hanging around in the bathroom.” Many people wished the birds well. One poster proclaimed, simply, “AESTHETIC.”
For many people, the image apparently offered a bright spot in an otherwise bleak sea of imagery: destroyed boats, roofless homes, flooded everything. Or maybe for some, divorced from their catastrophic context, the flamingos just looked beautiful—strange birds in a strange situation.
But the photo of flamingos seeking shelter was neither especially cute nor funny, despite the Instagram comments and media coverage billing it as such.
Moreover, it’s wrong to latch on to the flamingos as a distraction from an otherwise terrible situation. They are the terrible situation. Their plight is part of the disaster, not apart from it. Making light of it is the opposite of what we should be doing.
The link between climate change and extreme hurricanes is not always direct. But what’s clear is that disasters like Hurricane Ian, which killed at least 103 people, will become more common and more severe in the very near future. More people will die, more animals will die, and more infrastructure will be destroyed, every June through October on this continent. And that’s saying nothing of the uncounted millions living in less wealthy but equally vulnerable coastal areas around the world.
Beyond hurricanes, living things of all sorts are threatened by wildfire, floods, drought, pestilence, and encroaching development. We usually don’t consider those retro-chic. The horrific Australian wildfire season of 2020, which may have killed a billion animals, is memorable in part because of so many scorched-koala photos flooding the internet. Some 2,800 human homes were lost, and air quality reached dangerous levels in Canberra, Australia’s capital. Those facts are harder to digest than heartwarming accounts of rescued koalas.
The St. Pete flamingos were not the first birds to use a bathroom as shelter from a storm. In August 1992, Ron Magill, assistant curator at Zoo Miami (formerly Miami Metrozoo), and others decided to put the zoo’s flamingo flock indoors to protect them from Hurricane Andrew. The birds did not go quietly, Magill recalled later to Atlas Obscura: “These flamingos are flapping everywhere, we’re grabbing them, we’re getting full of flamingo water and stuff,” he said. Putting them in the bathroom was a good idea—tiled floors are easy to clean up, the thick walls can withstand hurricane winds, and the toilet bowls offered a supply of fresh water. But it still seemed weird, so Magill snapped a photo of the huddled birds on his way out.
Hurricane Andrew devastated Florida, costing 65 human lives and $27 billion in damage. It is still one of the worst natural disasters in American history. Newspaper editors covering the aftermath were looking for something besides the typical hurricane destruction photos, and Magill’s photo went out over newswires. The potty flamingos became one face of the storm.
Residents who survived the storm still speak in awed tones about the destruction it wrought. Hundreds of thousands of people lost their homes. People in Homestead, Fla., which was ground zero for Andrew’s landfall, still speak of the era “before Andrew” and “after Andrew.” After three decades, the original bathroom flamingos photo has softened into irony, however. Magill told Atlas Obscura that he still receives requests to use the image, especially from bars in South Beach. They frame the image and hang it up in the bathroom, over the urinals, he said.
In a way, this revised meaning reflects the journey of the flamingos’ plastic avatar, which is perhaps another reason why the Sunken Gardens photo struck such a chord. Yard flamingos are a uniquely American form of kitsch, a poster child for tackiness and excess. They started, in 1957, as aspirational symbols of vacation that dotted suburban lawns. By the 1970s, they were seen as disgraceful and trashy. But by the 80s, well-to-do people had claimed them as a mode of mocking less fortunate Americans. In the early 21st century, they represented any taste someone would want to imbue into them. When I lived in St. Louis, in my old neighborhood, waking up to a horde of plastic flamingos on one’s lawn was a cute sign of community — you’d been “flocked,” and that means you’re liked. Today, illustrations of flamingos grace the walls of Instagram-worthy restrooms in chic New York city hangouts. Flamingos are loaded objects, in other words, and the creatures themselves are too.
For some commenters on the recent photo of the flesh and feather Florida flamingos taking shelter from the storm, the birds might have simply looked cute. Witnessing the fallout of a terrible disaster briefly becomes about cuteness instead of fear. That is not the fault of the gardens’ social media team; staff members were trying to batten down to protect the animals in their care before fleeing with their own families. It’s understandable that they’d be looking for anything offering a moment of security or comfort or even humor. Flamingoes arrayed against a tile bathroom is, at the very least, a bizarre image.
Flamingos are bizarre-looking creatures, after all, all limbs and bills and a non-serious color typically reserved for little kids of one specific gender. Their name is fun to say. They are so tall and alien, so beautiful and weird, with their crustacean-tinted feathers making them more visually arresting than almost any other bird you might encounter in a zoo or in the wild. Beyond their rare tint, they look physically impossible; they are fluffy long-necked ovals balancing atop comically thin spider’s legs. Their visual oddity is already the total package. Transpose them onto a mundane, even profane human setting—a public restroom—and it’s too weird and incongruent not to be funny.
Except, of course, it isn’t.
The birds in Sunken Gardens, just like the ones in Miami, are real animals that were quite possibly terrified. “No animal, when it enters upon life, is free from the fear of death,” the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote. Decades of research on avian brains and behavior suggests birds do experience fear. And even if the birds weren’t necessarily afraid, the humans surrounding them surely were. Why make light of that?
It’s hard right now, I know; there is this hurricane, and there is so much else wrong with the world. We all need a break and a moment of levity. But please don’t cutesify the apocalypse. Chronicling how flamingos rode out a terrible natural disaster shouldn’t become a postcard, postmodern winky aesthetic, or a photo framed above a urinal. It should be a call to arms.
If the flamingos make you smile, that’s probably natural. But I hope they can make you feel something darker too: We should see the flamingos as gigantic, spindly, coral-colored versions of canaries, awkwardly and pinkly calling out a warning—a grave warning for themselves, and for us all.
