GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Florida's House voted late Wednesday to establish the American flamingo as the new state bird, a step toward knocking the mockingbird off its perch after nearly a century. It wasn't immediately clear whether the Senate will go along with the plan.
The House voted 112-1 to approve the bill. The Legislature has considered changing the state bird for at least five years. Some lawmakers wore pink clothing during the vote, including Rep. Lindsay Cross, D-St. Petersburg, who called it a "very Florida bill."
Lawmakers couldn't help themselves from slinging puns, asking about the bill's pecking order and noting that supporters had been "wading" for the vote.
"Florida is one of the most unique places in the country," said Rep. James 'Jim' Mooney, R-Key Largo. "Our ecosystems are extremely diverse. All of a sudden we have flamingos back."
The bill in the Senate has to pass through two more committees before it faces a full Senate vote. Those hearings haven't yet been scheduled.
Standing 5 feet tall and weighing in at around-the-same in pounds, the American flamingo made its great return almost three years ago, when Hurricane Idalia blew hundreds of them to the one of the only places that could handle their oddity: Florida, already home to swamp puppies and "the Florida man."
In the past two sessions, a bill by Mooney ruffled the feathers of those who argued the mockingbird should remain Florida's icon. This time around, he said, there wasn't as strong opposition. It's the furthest Mooney's attempt has flown in the House. If it lands, the Florida scrub jay will be the state songbird alongside it.
Some legislators have raised concerns about the flamingo only representing a small part of the state because its range doesn't extend much beyond South Florida.
Rep. Robert Alexander 'Alex' Andrade, R-Pensacola posted on X that Florida's state bird should be the pelican. He asked Mooney at a House hearing in December if he would consider making the pelican a co-official state bird and later mentioned a possible amendment to make the pelican the fishing bird. Andrade was the sole House member to vote no.
Though flamingos don't flock to the Panhandle, their plume is in every grocery store and Publix in the state. The mascot of the Florida Lottery, smirking and blush pink, watches ticket-buyers like a hawk with each scratch-off.
Retro postcards feature flamingos sunbathing alongside tourists and preening like Miami influencers. They stand one-legged and plasticky in lawns statewide, and one 21-footer in polyester named Phoebe greets visitors at the central terminal in the Tampa International Airport.
Across the three committees who have heard the bill in the House and the Senate so far, there has only been one vote against. Rep. Monique Miller, R-Brevard, voiced concerns that elevating the status of the scrub jay alongside the flamingo would slow development across the state due to protections. She said she would have supported the flamingo alone. Mooney said he was more concerned about environmental degradation.
"I'm not trying to stop building," he said. "I'm trying to make people hear we have precious items in front of us that are bigger than just a bird."
Legislators have also questioned whether the big pink birds were native to the state. A new study from the University of Central Florida used genetics to show they are.
Over 10 years, scientists analyzed specimens across the bird's range in Florida, the Caribbean and northern South America. The results supported the idea that flamingos are native to Florida.
The flamingo was once all over South Florida, with flocks, called flamboyances, in the hundreds to thousands from the Everglades to the Keys, said Steffanie Munguía, who manages conservation efforts related to birds at Zoo Miami. They were heavily hunted for their meat and feathers in the early 1900s and went locally extinct as a result.
At that time, one flamingo feather cost $32, double the price of an ounce of gold.
Then, in the 1930s, businessman Joseph Widener imported a couple dozen flamingos to his new Hialeah Park Race Track right outside of Miami. Wings unclipped, escapees flew away. On Widener's second attempt, he made sure to trim their feathers, said Steven Whitfield, a director at the Audubon Nature Institute and formerly Zoo Miami.
That's why the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission listed flamingos as invasive: They were imported and escaped to other places across the state. The same happened with the Burmese python, feral hogs and lionfish, all of which compete with, and often outcompete, Florida native animals for food and space.
Whitfield, who also worked on the UCF study, also led a study in 2018 that reviewed 65 years of documents and specimens connected with the flamingo in Florida, making the first step toward establishing it as a native species.
What makes a species native?
A native species is one that occurs in a region naturally, historically or currently, Munguía said. Imported birds don't count.
There's no certain evidence now that flamingos naturally nested in the state, but thanks to recent Everglades restoration efforts, they're coming back on their own, Munguía said. The ones in Florida now likely flew from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico.
"Florida is the only U.S. state likely to support a large population of flamingos," she said. "They're pretty unique to us."
Flamingos are particular when it comes to reproduction, and it's difficult to figure out where they might even attempt to nest again.
The salinity has to be just right: the aquatic invertebrates they eat can only live in salty water. Their food is what gives flamingos their bright pink color after a light-gray adolescence. The water levels have to be up to code: below the knee. There has to be the right number of them: flamingos won't breed unless they're in a group of at least 40, Munguía said.
To nest, they make little volcanoes out of mud and awkwardly perch on the eggs cradled at the base. They form bond pairs that can last for many breeding seasons.
Despite recent conservation efforts, the conditions in Florida aren't quite right for breeding yet. Peaches, a flamingo who went viral after being found by Tampa Bay after Hurricane Idalia in September 2023, flew home to Mexico to breed, Munguía said.
Rachel Michelle Groves was 40 when she moved to Florida from Kentucky. Seven years later, she started a campaign to make the flamingo the state bird. That was in 2018, the same year as Whitfield's first flamingo study and when FWC re-classified the bird as native to Florida.
Groves makes her living painting, and she loves to paint the flamingo.
The flamingo isn't just a cultural icon; it's a symbol of conservation in the Sunshine State, Groves said.
The situation reminds her of the brown pelican in Louisiana. When their population was critically low in 1966 due to DDT, a toxic pesticide banned in the United States in 1972, the Pelican State designated it the state bird. The brown pelican was removed from the federal list of endangered animals in 2009.
"Even when there's just a sighting, people flock to those areas just to see the flamingos come in," Groves said.
She joined the Florida Flamingo Working Group when she started the campaign to make the flamingo the state bird, and Whitfield's 2018 study was her main backing. The first bill, in 2024, died without much fight.
"We didn't have the scrub jay listed as the songbird on that bill, and we have a lot of people who are partial to the scrub jay," Groves said. "We had those people who were kind of against us… Now it's a joint effort."
Scrub jays are the only bird species endemic to Florida, meaning they don't live anywhere else in the world.
This story was produced by Fresh Take Florida, a news service of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications. The reporter can be reached at zherukhamarta@ufl.edu.
Copyright 2026 WGCU