Pink Floyd shares his nickname with another flamingo who escaped from a Utah zoo in 1988.
Texas Parks and Wildlife
A flamingo who escaped from a Kansas zoo 17 years ago just turned up on the Texas coast and appears to be enjoying beach life, according to Smithsonian Magazine.
Tanzanian flamingo No. 492, alias Pink Floyd, flew the coop in 2005 shortly after he arrived in Kansas as part of a shipment of 30 flamingos from Tanzania. Typically, zookeepers trim adult flamingos’ feathers annually to make it more difficult for the birds to fly away. But in June 2005, before Pink Floyd could get his annual trim, he made a break for it – along with an accomplice.
The runaway flamingos stuck around the Wichita area for a few weeks, but amid a summer storm in early July, the vagabond pair split up. One headed north, and zookeepers say he probably died during the cold Michigan winter – although if you were an escaped flamingo, that’s exactly the sort of thing you might want everyone to believe.
While his erstwhile accomplice fled north, Pink Floyd went south. In 2007, he was spotted along a Louisiana ship channel – and he’d recruited a new partner in crime, a Caribbean flamingo which probably blew ashore on the Gulf Coast with Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Rita in 2005. Wildlife officials have spotted Pink Floyd a few more times over the years since, but he’s been off the radar and lying low for the last two years.
Late in March, witnesses spotted Pink Floyd loitering on the beach near Port Lavaca, Texas, in the company of a flock of seagulls.
Texas Park and Wildlife and the Sedgwick County Zoo say they plan to let Pink Floyd continue living on the lam. Escaped zoo animals sometimes risk turning into the next invasive species – consider the bizarre case of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar’s escaped hippos in Colombia – but one flamingo isn’t much of a threat. And Texas Parks and Wildlife has even gone so far as to dub Pink Floyd “a local Texas flamingo.”
And with any luck, Pink Floyd will have many more years to enjoy his hard-won freedom; flamingos can live up to 70 years.
