Dear Tweeters,

Whenever I hear about vagrant flamingoes showing up on the west coast, it calls to mind an article I read, I think it was in the late 1980's, in a San Francisco paper (probably the Chronicle).

I wish I had clipped that article.The reporter had talked to a biologist who was trying to figure out where a flock of flamingoes was hiding. A goodly flock of these birds had apparently been showing up for years in various locations in the upper San Francisco Bay-Sacramento River area, but no one knew their origin. As I recall, the biologist had surmised that the birds had a secluded home base somewhere in the wetlands upriver from the bay.

Since reading that, I have always chosen to hope that there was a little flock of flamingoes happily reproducing in a lost salt flat somewhere in central California, unknown to birders, biologists, hunters, and theme-park proprietors, and that these birds would send off the odd vagrant to parts far-flung.

Yours truly,
Gary Bletsch



Yours truly,

Gary Bletsch

near Lyman (Skagit County), Washington

garybletsch at yahoo.com


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